Dear Friend and Reader:
At the end of the Vietnam War, the American left fractured into numerous movements. One of them is what we think of today as the traditional left: the Progressive movement. Another was the New Age.
The thing about the Progressive movement is that, tending toward an intellectual orientation, it had an atheist flavor. Things of a spiritual or esoteric nature were all lumped together as being about religion. Enlightened politics believed in the separation of church and state. Religion was viewed as the opiate of the masses. Public policy requires sound empirical approach, not merely ‘belief’.
At the same time, the New Age movement, a kind of eclectic grassroots spiritualism, didn’t want to get its hands dirty with politics. They suspected that politics contradicted everything they were working for — an internal orientation, devotion to growth and evolution, forgiveness, and evolving away from an us-and-them approach to life and toward unity.
Meanwhile, in the early 1980s, a new political movement was born when conservatives saw the benefit of using churches as political clubhouses, fundraising bases and a place to ferment their agenda. Out of that dangerous cocktail of religion and politics was born what some people now describe as the American Taliban: an evangelical movement with the power to make government policy and war; to make your personal decisions for you, such as trying to set the terms of our relationships; and to define the idea of your family as something proprietary. In a sense, this development proved both the Progressives and the New Agers correct. Matters of faith and matters of public policy need to be blended carefully.
What a difference 30 years can make. There are now countless people whose political views are informed by self-awareness and their deeper spiritual beliefs, and people who are on spiritual paths who understand that action is the fruit of knowledge — meaning that some issues need to be seen in political context, and worked out in a political forum. This is less about an agenda and more about a process: of awareness, of participation, of contributing to the world as a means of creating a better world — and developing yourself in the process.