Transcript of journalist and senior media executive Richard Sergay’s interview with Reverend Sue Phillips for the “Stories of Impact” series.
Watch the video version of the interview.
Find the transcript from the interview with Casper ter Kuile, who is also featured in this video, here.
Richard Sergay (interviewer)
Reverend Sue Phillips (interviewee)
Intro: I’m Reverend Sue Phillips, co-founder of Sacred Design Lab. I am ordained in the Unitarian Universalist Tradition.
Q. What does that mean?
Unitarian Universalism is a, is a denomination and a faith that emerged out of a couple of separate family trees of Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Unitarianism has sort of theological roots, um as early Christianity does in conversations about the nature of Jesus and his relationship to God. Unitarian suggests that we see a primacy, especially early in our theology, of a single, of a single god, not a triune god, in opposition to Trinity. And universalism, emerged out, really in response to the orthodoxies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in the United States, around believing that sort of God is too good to damn anyone and hence universalism, and universal salvation. So, unitarian universalism came together in the 1960’s denominationally, and that is my beloved tradition, the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau and Margaret Fuller and a host of others.
Q. Sacred Design Lab and its genesis?
Sure, Sacred Design Lab is a research and development consultancy that emerged out of the work of my two co-founders, Angie Thurston and Casper ter Kuile, who when they were students at Harvard Divinity School, asked themselves the question of where are millennials like us going, who are not going to church anymore. And they began to talk to their friends and their friend’s friends, and began to do interview after interview, where they attempted to map something of the spiritual lives of millennials, and they gave shape to a real question, especially at the time, which was where are people going who aren’t going to church and synagogue anymore. And they, they gave that enough shape that um, gave us an opportunity to pursue a lot of, more bespoke work around that question of emerging spirituality.
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Q. Sacred Design Lab and soul-centered design, what souls need to flourish?
Soul-centered design is an attempt to give voice to a version of human-centered design that’s popularized by IDEO and other, other designers, that really puts at the center, first of all, a real belief that humans have what we need to solve even the most intractable problems at hand, A, and that B, the, one of the best tools at our disposal to do that is empathy. So in learning about how people engage the problem, it can do wonders to help stimulate the kind of creativity we need. What soul-centered design does, is it adds a whole dimension of slowing down reflection, discernment, kind of a community orientation to the really rapid fire, intensive, really fast, typical human-centered design process. So when adding soul, we, we decelerate the process, we increase the community connections, we increase the sense of interdependence in terms of problems existing across time, and across people. So we, we try to, to seed that process with, with a little more, with a little more soul. But also, we shaped the questions differently, typically around what matters most, rather than developing products for marketplace, for example.
Q. Are there other virtues when you’re thinking about self-centered design, that are important?
So many, most of them are relational virtues, they have to do with listening carefully to self and community. It has to do with feeling oneself a part of a longer frame of time, not just in terms of the gifts that can be referenced and plumbed, but also in terms of our responsibility and accountability over a longer stretch of time. It has to do with, with compassion, for, for self and other, and trying to put oneself in in the place of the people one is designing for, thinking about the implications of the questions at hand. So countless of the kind of traditional religious and spiritual virtues are embedded in that process.
Q. How do you define religion, and what has religion historically been good at?
I’m not a sociologist or an anthropologist, I am more of a public theologian. So my answer will come out of that space. I like the traditional definition of religion, which returns to its Latin root of religare, which means to bind. So I think of religion as being that which binds communities of people across time around commitments and aspirations around to they want to be and become as people. Now in common parlance, most people use the word religion, especially when it’s put up against the word spirituality to mean a set of institutions and institutionally mediated leadership and dogmas and creeds and hierarchies, that transmit all of that. This is a definition that I try to push people away from, because I don’t think it does justice to the communal purposes of meaning-making at the heart of the religious idea.
Q. What religion historically has been good at?
I think religion has been good at sharing and shaping the spiritual technologies that make for flourishing lives. I think it has been where human families, human persons and communities have practiced, living fruitful, flourishing lives with their people, and learning how to build character, how to discern what matters most, how to sing and celebrate together, how to do rites of passage in that whole kind of quest for, for what matters most, that a lot of people encounter in their lives. So I think what religion has done is it’s the sort of birthright accumulated wisdom of what matters most in the human community’s transmission of how to do that.
Q. What do you think the elements of religious life fall under? (INAUDIBLE)
Well, they vary obviously, tremendously, because religion is so culturally rooted. And first, culture is a complex concept, but to my mind, it means the, the interplay of a lot of diverse elements within a particular community and culture, around language and methods of expression and idiom and story and ancestry. So I feel like that being embedded in, in community and culture is an essential, it’s sort of the, the water of the river of religious life. It’s the, it’s the current carrying along that human wisdom that I was talking about earlier.
Q. What value does religion and tradition bring to the 21st century?
So much grounding, transmission of traditional wisdom, stories and songs that have sustained humans for countless hundreds and thousands of years, stories of resilience and celebration, and mourning and suffering and survival. Those sound like abstract concepts or they can, but to my mind, what they are, they’re, they’re people’s ability to survive life that gets transmitted in religious life, and that is desperately needed now, at least more than ever. And I think that’s part of what is at risk in this moment of declining participation in the pathways that have defined religious life in the past that are so utterly in a moment of change.
Q. What do you think people in the contemporary world are hungry for that they’re turning to religion and tradition to find?
Well, it might be helpful to understand what people were talking about when we talk about what people, what people are searching for. What we know is there’s evidence of a real what I just describe as a bereavement around access to sources of wisdom and support and succor that folks have traditionally relied on. I mean, religion has been such a touchstone, and it has, it has done so many jobs well, and those jobs are different for different people at different times in different parts of the world. So I think there’s some aspects of that that are likely to be universal, but in general, they, religion has done so many jobs for people and those jobs are in flux. And what folks are lacking, I keep on imagining a sort of rock, an island in the sea. And people don’t know where to find that, that ballast anymore. Those wisdom sources, but also their people, things like identity formation are shifting and how people come to know who they are, is in such flux that folks are bereft of knowing some things about themselves that in past times, I think they would have turned to religion to shape and give voice to.
Q. How do you think religious traditions have innovated in the past?
Well, the stories that have survived history, in many cases, we, the way that, the ways that religious traditions have innovated have been through usually, either hierarchy or dogma, or relationship to how we know what we know which in the religious world we talked about is epistemology. But the fruits of a lot of that innovation has been schism. So anybody who has seen like the Christian family tree if you will, knows that it starts with a trunk and then it rapidly goes off into 50 different branches as we talk about, how do we think about baptism, how do we think about the nature of God, how do we think about when children become volitional participants in religious communities. So, that schism has been the typical innovative technology of religion, as people don’t necessarily try to reconcile, but they bring they branch off.
Q. What do you think the elements of religious life, in particular religious and spiritual disciplines that can contribute to human flourishing?
I think virtually all of them can contribute to human flourishing, but like anything else, so many of the elements can be misused, misinterpreted, people can be manipulated, either intentionally or unintentionally, to do things that are harmful to themselves or other people. So, I don’t know Richard, there’s such a range of practices, I would think most of them could be used to flourishing purposes.
Q. How would you define spirituality and how does it differ from religion?
Well, most people, yeah, most people, most people define spirituality in opposition to, to religiosity. They claim the title spiritual when they mean not religious. And when they say not religious, most people tend to mean, not a member or not an active participant in a traditional religious community. So I see people claiming the word and the identity of spiritual to be laying claim to something that exists in them, that they refuse to give up by throwing out the religious baby with that bathwater. So I honestly think in common usage, spirituality as a way of reclaiming that which wants to be a part of something larger than themselves and contend with questions that matter most for a lot of people.
Q. Either within or without religious setting, correct?
Yes, the Fetzer— yeah, the Fetzer Institute just did a very large study actually about trying to understand these distinctions between the practices and beliefs of people who call themselves religious, and people who call themselves spiritual. And one of the amazing findings is that people don’t know what they mean, when they say these words, in general. There is no common understanding shared across a wide range of people. And they’re, they can be used both interchangeably or as foils for each other. So there’s, this is just among the many things that are in flux in the religious and spiritual world. The words themselves are among them. And it’s very hard to, to pin any of that down in a way that helps those of us who study religion and spirituality, to universalize, from people’s experience, because it tends to be so all over the place. Yeah, tricky.
Q. The decline in membership and the relationship to people’s spiritual lives?
Well, what we’ve seen from the Pew numbers and many other sources over the last 10 or 15 years has been the truth that more and more people are less and less religious. Now, there are a few notable exceptions to that in terms of traditions that, in fact, are maintaining their own or even increasing a little bit. But frankly, I think that has as much to do with how those entities measure members as it does with actual flourishing and a lot of those traditions. So the fact that there’s decline both in membership and affiliation is it’s a fact at this point, just a demographic fact. And what we’re seeing are the cascading implications of that in terms of the decline in the number of congregations, the decline in the number of religious vocations, and all of the ancillary ent— entities and behaviors and forms of leadership that, that are around traditional religious life are also in decline. It’s really quite a prodigious and kind of system-wide decline.
Q. Is this a Western or US specific issue or global?
Well, I’m definitely not an expert in global trends. But Europe is, is ahead of the United States in terms of diminishing participation in religious life, they have been for, for I think, 25 or 30 years, at least before the United States. So I can really only speak to the United States.
Q. What do you attribute the decline in, and the transformation away from the traditional religion?
If it were any one source of decline, I think it would be easier for people to understand. I see it as really being almost across the board. So there’s decline in institutional mediation and people’s participation in cultural and civic life. So what does that mean? It just means that people are not looking to the institutions that they used to like academia, and government and religious institutions, for the kinds of wisdom and leadership that they used to. And that’s been a slow burn of degradation of trust in those institutions. But when you take away people’s trust in certain kinds of leadership, and certain kinds of communities, that bodes very ill for religious communities, because they are really kind of stuck, if you think about how a lot of congregations, and by that, I mean, you know, synagogues and the Protestant and Catholic congregations, to a lesser extent, I think, Islamic congregations in the United States, mosques. Folks are, so much of the experience of those places, is literally takes place in a single building on a single morning of the week. Now, I’m sure there are many people who are watching this whose eyes are rolling in the back of their head at the thought that that sort of church only happens on Sunday mornings. But for most Americans, that is, in fact the case. And so when you combine the decline in institutional mediation with the fact that the distribution mechanisms for traditional religious life, are really mono-dimensional, they’re just not fit for purpose anymore, when you consider how people receive their stories, their wisdom, their community, which simply doesn’t exist in a single place at a single hour in a single day of the week anymore. And most of the congregations that I have observed, worked with and studied, have been unbelievably slow to adapt to the realities of new distribution pathways, for the things that churches and synagogues are amazing at producing content. It’s just that that distribution is completely broken down.
Q. What’s driving that change and as a pandemic accelerated it?
I like to talk about the pandemic a little bit separately, because I think it’s so, such a unique accelerant and amplifier. But this change in institutional mediation is definitely a driver.
Q. When you say institutional mediation, explain that to me?
If you, if you think about a stereotypical white suburban family in the 50s and early 60s, the places that folks, which is a, you know, let me let me start over again, I don’t want to start with that example actually.
In the past, people often looked to the pathways that their parents gave them to understand who they were, who their people were, what’s important to them, what matters. And folks would look to their schools and their church communities and their elders and their neighborhood leaders in order to begin to put together a kind of cosmology of meaning and behavior that led to a flourishing life. But in the last 40 or 50 years, trends like, people move more often, people change jobs more often, there’s much more mobility in literal, literal geographic locations. So people are less, not only are they less place-dependent, they are less likely to make an investment in particular places. So if we’re talking about static synagogues, on static corners and static towns, that are not clearly connected to some larger web, and when folks leave that community, they’ve, they’ve left that place that was that that star in that sky for them around identity formation. So that’s part of the story, is that when people are more mobile, they have lost that, they’ve broken the thread to what in the past, they would have maintained a relationship to, because people just simply didn’t move as often. So those are just two examples, just mobility and not wanting— people increasingly not looking to institutions to help them understand who they are.
Q. And the pandemic’s impact?
I think COVID has been an accelerant of a lot of the trends that we’ve seen. It’s, I think it’s been, it’s been quite strange, really, because it’s done a couple of different things. On the one hand, it’s accelerated those trends of decline. But it’s also forced a lot of traditional religious communities to change the way that they distribute their content. Just simply by necessity. So the number of congregations and churches and synagogues that were not online before COVID, is, I don’t have an exact number, but it was very large, shockingly large. So poorly adept where a lot of those places at figuring out how to engage people off virtual, virtually and online. So COVID, I think, increased the sense of urgency for a lot of traditional religious communities to begin to actually extend their, their range, literally into people’s virtual homes. But at the same time, I think it’s underscoring the limitations of virtual engagement for what are fundamentally in real-life communities. Hybridization only gets you so far when the core community is a static, single place. And we are seeing some interesting crossover with folks attending services that they never would have gone to otherwise, because they’re virtual. So I, for example, can now go to church at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington DC, despite the fact that I live 3800 miles away from Washington, DC. So I think that’s not a, that’s not an unfamiliar trend. There’s been a lot of dabbling. There’s some very interesting research from places like Springtide, that show in fact that a lot of young adults are trying religious practices for the first time as a result of the kind of extremities of COVID. So there’s some, there are some interesting stimulations around folks engaging more, but I don’t think the fundamentals have changed, I think it’s probably just accelerating trends that were in place pre-COVID.
Q. Where you’re talking about this religious decline, what do we as a society lose? Or do we?
This is a, it’s a complicated question, what we lose, when we lose the power of religious institutions. On the one hand, we lose the birth right stories that have been transmitted over hundreds and hundreds of years of what makes for flourishing lives. On the other hand, we’re just in the presence of another kind of epochal change, which has always animated creativity in religious realms, whether that’s the reformation, the counter reformation, the civil rights movement, and countless other points of light in the religious story, it is a story of constant, constant change. So on the one hand, there’s this great emergence story, what will happen next, how will people continue to make meaning. I think what is not changing is the fundamental human need to, to reflect on what matters most and to share the journey of that reflection with other people. So in the midst of all that change, there is a kind of immutable human experience at the center that I think will not change and probably will never change.
Q. So these ancient traditions that have given people access to meaning and meaning making practices, they’re moving away from a context that is now not centered around a congregation or church. What does that mean?
Yeah, well, I mean, I think increasingly, what we’re seeing, especially if you think about yoga, or meditation, or even like psychedelic use, that have been firmly embedded in long ancient traditions of practice, and wisdom, and elders, and to some extent, dogma and creed and sacred text and a whole, enmeshed connection of elements. We tend to atomize, the functional elements of those traditions, so that meditation has become insight oriented for an individual. And we’ve stripped away a number of the core elements of Buddhist practice, in just supporting individuals, individuals sitting in an individual space. So that’s an example of, I think, the degradation of the power of a lot of these practices when they get plucked out of the traditions from which they arose. Now on the other hand, we can talk about the hundreds of millions of people who are now accessing the wisdom that has been transmitted through something like yoga. And of course, not everybody engages in yoga the same way there are folks who are more all in and others but by the same token, removing that practice and of course, there are, there are many different kinds of yoga practices as well. But removing that that particular series of body movements from a wider tradition, I think some of the, the power gets stripped, stripped away as well. And the groundedness and accountabilities that go along with it.
Q. What’s the dynamic there, do we fear we lose the sense of community by focusing so heavily on me?
I think it’s undeniable that a lot of the practices that we’re seeing people dabble with, they tend to be increasingly individually practiced. Partly, I think that’s because, the tolerance for negotiation and for sharing and for discovering together on a community’s pace, that isn’t just bespoke and entirely organized for our own needs and well-being is there, all those skills that are required to build a community practice, are eroding in terms of what people are good at, want to commit to and can sustain over time.
Q. Where are people going that are leaving traditional religion?
Well, I think in a lot of cases, they’re not going anywhere. And that’s part of what I believe the fuel is for increasing social isolation and deaths of despair, mental health crises, drug use, that folks, in fact, don’t know where to go. And it’s that kind of bereftness that I think is underneath a lot of what we’re seeing in terms of these deaths of despair, that and systemic oppressions of all kinds, where people cannot escape the limitations that are systemically enforced upon them. So I think that’s what the, what the stakes are, in a lot of cases, folks aren’t going anywhere. But what I think hasn’t changed, as I, as I’ve said, is, the human experience of longing to feel like they’re a part of something larger. So we’ve seen no research and no evidence at all, that there’s been a decline in what humans inherently need. What the soul needs to stay connected to themselves and to other people, and to feel that sense of something larger than themselves. So on the one hand, the needs haven’t changed, but the pathways to access those needs, I think, has changed fundamentally. And that’s part of what has so much disequilibrium in the religious world, is to try to remit that need and what’s out there available for people.
Q. So for those who are looking for their spiritual needs to be met elsewhere beyond religion, where do they go? What do they do?
Well, I think people go to a lot of different places. But categorically what how we might talk about this is, is about unbundling, and re-mixing, the folks are unbundling the jobs that traditional religion has done in the past, which if you think about it is incredibly wide-ranging, and no one person goes to one place to get all of them. But if I just list the things that traditional religious communities have done in people’s lives, it’s multi-general— generational connection and singing in groups and text study and contemplative practice and prayer and moral education for their children. And on and on and on. There are so many jobs that traditional religion has done. So I think what we’re seeing is an unbundling of those jobs, instead of people going to the more one stop shop of traditional religious communities, we’re seeing them kind of assemble almost like the home screen on a, on an iPhone, assembling their meditation place, their sources of community singing over here, and kind of choosing the practices and the people that are important to them and putting them together in a way that is, as I said, more atomized. The problem is there’s not a, tends not to be a cohesion quality around them, to knit them together in a way that makes it easier to digest or share. So in the personalization of unbundling, we, we lose a lot of the sharing of community and I think that’s part of what, what’s been shorn off.
Q. What is causing people to look elsewhere from the traditional concept of religion to meet their spiritual needs? The, the cost to them of—
Yeah, the, the cost to people of literally stepping over the threshold of traditional religious community and buildings and into those communities is simply too high, and people increasingly are not willing to walk down the street on a Friday night or Saturday or Sunday morning. And to engage a community in that traditional way. And I’m not sure it gets a lot more complicated than that, that fundamentally folks are, that’s not how they receive, especially younger generations, that’s not how they receive information and community. But also, there’s a lot of, a lot of those communities are out of sync, frankly, with the idiom and the values and the stories that are animating younger generations. There’s, there’s nothing recognizable in a lot of traditional religious communities, to folks who are used to getting their content from Tik Tok and Instagram and Facebook. And those of us who are older, can complain about that reality until the end of time. But that is still— (INTERRUPTION; FROZEN SCREEN)
So I often talk in terms of the difference between content of traditional religious communities and the distribution of that content, partly because it’s a way of understanding how social media works, and how a lot of ideas are influencing younger generations now. And I see traditional religious communities as having wonderful content, but very poor distribution. And I think in a lot of cases, younger generations, are not accessing those— that traditional content, that traditional leadership and stories and ancestry and songs, etc. Because they don’t want to engage with the building down the street where people gather, who tend to be, by the way, 30 or 40 years older than them, at a single time, in a single place, in the week. And that’s just not how younger generations engage what matters to them anymore. And the, the traditional religious communities are so inartful in a lot of cases and engaging people in ways that they, they do consume content nowadays, that there’s just a tremendous mismatch. Now there are, there are exceptions to this, for sure. There are a lot of religious communities that in fact, are doing this quite well, especially in the evangelical world, although there’s finally signs that membership in evangelical congregations is also beginning to decline, which I think is fascinating. So there are definitely exceptions to this rule, but I think they’re rare.
Q. Talk a little bit more about your iPhone analogy, of there’s an app for that. What are the implications of that?
Well, I think there are a lot of implications. For one, when we, when we design our own religious and spiritual experience, we, we can lose out for any number of reasons, not least of which is it tends to be highly functional. We tend to like hire apps, the, using that metaphor, we tend to hire certain practices to do certain jobs in our life, without appropriate concern for how they come together in us and how we might learn about what that could look like and how we might experience them if we shared that experience in community. Now, there are a lot of communities built into a lot of those experiences that people are assembling to create what looks something like a spiritual life. But there isn’t a cohesive, there isn’t a big tent under which those ideas kind of fit and click into place. So people are really left on their own in the absence of community and certain kinds of leadership to actually make great meaning from that, or to take time to reflect on what it all means, because of this atomization. So I think there’s real loss there. It may be personalized, but it’s lonely.
Q. You use CrossFit as the new secular church? Why that’s important?
I think, I think fitness communities are an especially compelling example of this, because on the one hand, fitness communities are about optimization. In a lot of cases, they’re about a person establishing goals that they go to that place to try to meet and a lot of them are about changing, changing the way they look and feel. So there’s this optimization quality. But what we find is that wherever people are assembled, especially if they’re doing something hard, like exercise, they need support in that place. And I’m sorry, I’m interrupting myself because Richard is frozen again.
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Q. Fitness in general has become a church of sorts?
I think fitness communities are an interesting example because they do some of the jobs that I think traditional religious communities have done. Now fit— a lot of fitness communities are about um, optimization. So they’re about improving, improving one’s body usually, although one’s sense of well-being alongside with it. And what we’re seeing is folks are going to fitness communities, and looking for some of what they would go to any community for, which is for connections to other humans, and for leaders they can count on and for a place to tell their story and for places to cry and just like— he’s completely gone again…
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Q. Are fitness and gyms the new church of the future?
I hope not. So, one of the reasons— so I think—
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Q. Are fitness communities the new religion?
Fitness communities are a really interesting place to examine the dynamic of what’s happening these days. On the one hand, fitness communities are places that people are going to improve their bodies and themselves. And they, they tend to go in to places looking for something that is uniquely usable, digestible, and applicable to themselves. On the other hand, they tend to go because there are other people there, and there are leaders and teachers who they come to respect. We see things like the soul cycle phenomenon, where there’s— or Oh, my God, I’m going to interrupt my own… my own answer with memory loss…
We see communities like Peloton, where there’s almost obsessive interest in valuation of individual leaders. So in some respects, these fitness communities begin to resemble traditional religious communities and the devotion that they inspire and adherence and the people who go there, and the fidelity that they have for certain leaders and certain elements of those practices. On the other hand, there’s some troubling diminishment from the experience that they might get in traditional religious communities around sharing that experience and that story with an unchanging group of people, having to adapt to other people’s needs, being around people with different abilities and getting to hear their stories and share them and themselves. Getting to be in an environment that really celebrates less skillfulness, than optimized physical performance. So I think it’s I think it’s an interesting story on both the strengths, but also the limitations of the kinds of communities that people are finding to meet some of the needs that traditional religion has fulfilled.
Q. Do the longings of the human heart or soul change because of this new dynamic?
That’s a really interesting question because it has to do with imagination and what people know to be possible. So I think on a lot of levels, our experience, human experience, has always been limited by what, by what we could imagine wouldn’t be possible for ourselves or other people. And that way, I think a lot of these new practices will begin to change what people long for, we’ve already seen that, just in the social media age and the impact of influencers, and the kind of consumer-oriented and learned needs that people seem to have for some things that matter. I don’t think that there’s going to be any change to the fundamental human questions. Who am I? What is this life about? What do I do with suffering? How do I understand my place in the order of things? On those levels, I don’t think those fundamentals are going to change. But once we move beyond the actual asking of those questions, I think they can be given shape and in fact, can be malformed by the kinds of environments in which we ask them and answer them. And I think that’s part of what is at stake in this current moment.
Q. Are people finding meaning and purpose in fresh new ways beyond religion?
I think people have always found meaning and purpose wherever they find themselves, inside and outside of religion, since the dawn of time. And I don’t need to be flip with that answer. I think there’s something, humans are meaning makers and purpose finders. And that’s just what we do. It’s how our brains and hearts work within ourselves and in community. And no changes in culture are likely to change that fundamental.
Q. Longing, becoming and beyond?
So, in this moment of adjustment and change to how people are engaging and encountering their religious and spiritual lives, it’s helpful to have a few words that can carry some of the heft of those traditional longings. And to our mind, what the soul needs can be wrapped up in three words; belonging, becoming and beyond. And what we mean by that is, belonging is an opportunity for people to feel that they are claiming and are claimed by a community, by something, and by people that matter to them, that are larger than just themselves. So becoming; a sense of claiming and being claimed. Becoming is the experience of encountering that which matters most, having a sense of purposefulness and mattering and in making progress towards becoming the people that we feel that we’re called to be. It’s a way of, it’s a, it’s a growth stance, never quite achieved, but always striven for, whether that’s in morals or character or just becoming, becoming more of who we think we are. Be— beyond is, recognizes the fact that all humans need to feel a part of something larger than themselves. So there’s an element of feeling a part of something big, but also what, what we call fully big and fully small, which is the experience of both feeling a part of something, but also a small part of something much larger, that feeds a sense of awe and wonder, that is at the heart of, of all things, and to know ourselves to be a part of that larger thing.
Q. Why are those three concepts so important?
Well, in our work at Sacred Design Lab, we have struggled to discover language that actually works across all these increasing dimensions of spiritual and religious life. I mean, there’s a reason that a lot of people don’t like to talk about religion and spirituality, and one of them is because the language has accreted such meaning over so long a period of time, so that there are certain words that if we use them can, people have massive projections on or they feel alienated from, they have experienced, hurt or trauma as a result of that. So there’s certain theological language and other language that simply is hard to use in the space. So one of the real benefits of these concepts of belonging, becoming, and beyond, is that they capture in what I think is a hefty but non-threatening way, what some of those longings are without having to encounter some of that deeper theological disagreement and historical discomforts of traditional religious debates. So we’re, that’s one of the things this moment calls for, is finding fresh language and an attempt to issue invitations that people know to recognize themselves in. Yes is that they know to say, in language that is open and that folks know that they’re included in.
Q. Living in polarized societies, do these concepts help us bridge that polarization.
That’s such an interesting question about whether these new concepts help us bridge polarization. I think it’s a mixed answer to that. I think on the one hand, there are certain epistemological assumptions that tend to differentiate conservative from less conservative religious traditions in the first place. And by epistemology, I simply mean, ways of knowing what we know and sources of authority for, for that knowing. So on the one hand, the ability to change language itself is almost an inherently more liberal concept in religious life. Because in more conservative traditions, there tends to be an emphasis on immutable, unchanging words, language and concepts and creeds, that are transmitted without change across time. So when we, when we flex on language, when we talk about something more and beyond and not God, essentially, we’re signaling a more liberal approach to how humans encounter what, what matters. So I think there is a middle ground that this kind of language can stimulate cross talk among folks who are willing to be in conversation, I’m not sure that it penetrates to the farthest reaches of either the atheist agnostic world, or the super conservative traditions. But I do think it captures a much wider swath of middle.
Q. What do spiritual exercises and rituals look like?
There’s a lot of ways to answer the question of what spiritual exercises are and look like. Some folks would say that they are practices that follow a specific set of elements that one does A, B, C, D, and then one is done. So there’s a way of analyzing what spiritual practices are that make them just activities, usually in a sequential order. And then when you’re done with those, that sequential order, you’re done with the, the spiritual exercise. I think it does a great disservice to spiritual exercises, to think of them that way, however, just in terms of their functional value, because a lot, most spiritual and religious exercises take place in a vast cosmology of ideas, concepts, practices, people, and traditions and lineage, that make it a part of something much, much larger than itself— than itself. And I think this is one of the challenges in the science of spiritual flourishing actually, is in how to study specific elements to understand the mechanics of why certain spiritual exercises work, without decontextualizing those practices so much that they become unrecognizable parts of that much larger thing.
Q. Some examples?
Well, here’s an example. Contemplative prayer is probably one of the more traditional practices of, of Christian communities, Catholic and Protestant communities. And contemplative prayer is a set of activities or actions or words, in, usually a particular time in place. But science is quite good at studying what— what’s observable, what people are doing, but not as good at measuring what people are feeling or thinking beyond self-report. And so, contemplative prayer studies have a hard time of integrating both those observable practices and the content. What is the theological content, what wider story is that content a part of, and understanding how a person’s fidelity and engagement with those wider set of things might impact the efficacy of those practices.
Q. When you talk about the science of spiritual exercises, when we use the word science, what does that mean?
Such an important question, what we mean by science, when we’re saying that word. We, we are in danger of using science when we mean empirical research. So one of the distinctions that an Islamic clinical psychologist has helped me to understand is that in a lot of traditions, there is no differentiation between revelation and science. Science is the kind of marriage of, of a certain set of practices embedded with an academic discipline. So in traditions in which there’s no difference between the revelation and empirical research in science, the answer to that definitional question is very different than in a lot of Western traditions, where theoretically that, that cosmological backdrop has been stripped away, and we can talk about something like pure science, I think, is a very Western, Western notion. Now I’m going to go off script a tiny bit and say, Richard, for your sake, that this is where it gets complicated, because I think in the Templeton world, what they mean is a kind of unadulterated, objective, repeatable, observable scientific fact. But I think it gets, that’s very queasy in its relationship to the religious world as a way of knowing things. And this is one of, this is part of why Templeton hired Sacred Design Lab, is actually to try to figure out how to better integrate the science they’re funding with the communities that are practicing the practices they're studying. Precisely around some of these epistemological and theological grounds, as being cut off from the science they’re funding. I don’t know if that’s helpful to you, but it’s helpful just to say.
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Q. Is there a science around spirituality in terms of being able to empirically understand the impact on the brain, on attitude, on emotion?
Yes. there’s, there’s extensive, extensive and growing empirical research on the mechanics of spiritual practice, especially in the world of neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and understanding the mechanisms of some of what makes what I might call spiritual technologies work.
Q. Explain that a little more?
This is where I get quickly into the, I am definitely not a scientist and I have not mastered this, the world of, of this science. I’ve almost said, I can’t speak in more detail than I just did.
Q. Can science help us understand religion?
Science has always helped us understand religion and religion has always helped us understand science. I think that’s just part of human stories. In so many religious traditions, science, and scientists, especially as defined in the age of the moment, have, have been mutually influential in the course of human history. It’s only been at certain times that they have been dualized and dichotomized in ways that clearly differentiate between the two and-or require scientists or religious people to disavow the other elements of themselves, the different ways of knowing different kinds of things. So I feel like science, what we know as science, what we know is religion, has been in constant dialogue, probably since the beginning of times in terms of understanding how the material world works and what its relationship is to the inanimate or transcendent world, that just feels like an essential part of the human curiosity about the world, their place in it, and how it all works.
Q. Do you think we can cultivate spirituality at any age?
You mean any age of human development like a toddler to uh, yeah. You’re curious if we can cultivate spirituality at any age? Hmm. Oh, I definitely think that these longings exist, congenitally. I think it’s an essential part of being human. I don’t think we’re taught it. I think it’s part of the way human brains and human hearts work in, in self but also in community and families in, across time. I feel like these questions are ones that naturally emerge in the course of human development, outside of organic pathologies, and the like, I think this is an essential part of what it means to be human. Yes. Isn’t that wonderful?
Q. Community, define it, and why community is so important?
Well, I think science and religion have taught us why community is so important. Humans need other humans literally, psychologically, socially, politically, economically, the story of humankind is the story of human community for good and for ill. So to my mind, you can’t talk about human experience without talking about community. It’s just that in late 21st century advanced capitalism, we’re increasingly taught that individuals exist, individual consumers exist, and that that atomization is in fact keeping us from a sense of belonging to other people and other people belonging to us. Is there anything like the COVID-fueled differences of opinion about vaccinations and masks to show us that some of what has traditionally brought people together in extremis and hardship, suffering, is beginning to fray a little bit when we see that we’re, and feel that we’re not responsible for one another. So yes, I think this, the relationship of individuals to the wider community as, is a question that’s at the heart of the human experience, but the fact of that connection, I think, is an undeniable part of human of human experience, and it’s part of why various religions emerged, is to address that that relationship between individuals and longer, wider story.
Q. Religious traditions have built up a rich repository of teachings, text, images, songs, that are full of meaning that can add to people’s religious and spiritual practices. When people leave that behind and take only the spiritual practices, where and how they find content that is rich in meaning, do they have to start from scratch?
Well, there, I mean, one of the things we’ve learned from religious communities is how many different ways there are to enrich and accelerate our, our engagement with what matters most. So, one of the elements of a lot of traditional religious practices are repetition, it’s repetition over time. And it’s the discipline of returning to a practice over and over again. So those elements of sort of amplifying the power of practices are available to anyone today who’s engaging those practices. So if you just repeat them over time, when you, sometimes we talk about the triptych of intention, attention and repetition. This is what makes a spiritual practice a spiritual practice. We’re doing it on purpose. We’re doing it repeatedly. And we’re committing to it over a period of time. That’s sort of the magic sauce that is available for people who are curious about spiritual practices to potentially have the impact of those practices work more robustly in their, in their lives.
Q. Examples?
Just returning to some very common ones, just simply meditation, meditation practice. It’s one thing to experience a momentary reduction in one’s blood pressure and heart rate, by sitting for 15 minutes. It’s another to be repeating that practice every day for 10 years in terms of its long-term benefits, and short-term, amplifying short term benefits as well. So that when you, when you spread out the practice, when you return to it over and over again, when you add Sanga, which is the traditional, it’s the Buddhist concept of sitting in community. Or if you add Dharma, the, the teachings of Buddhism, it’s actually that triptych that is the essence of Buddhists, Buddhism. So that’s just another way of saying intention, attention, repetition, and community, is adding those elements. So there’s always more to, more to discover, that translate individual spiritual practice into something that has much more potential to work in people’s lives.
Q. The spiritual infrastructure of the future?
To us, the spiritual infrastructure of the future is emergent pathways of distributing human wisdom about what matters most. How to ask questions, how to engage these practices, how to find wisdom, teachers, and stories and teachers of song, how to sustain commitments and resilience during movements for social justice, that we’re going to see the emergence of new pathways, of transmitting human wisdom about what matters most. We’re just in this moment of tremendous flux. And so, the spiritual infrastructure of the future is that which is emerging to carry those, those traditions in, in whole new ways to hold the people. It’s the sort of um, the future birthright of transmitting all this wisdom for, for humans that are going to follow us in future generations.
Q. What has the internet done to both religion and spirituality?
Well, one of the things that traditional religious communities have done is it narrows the aperture of resources for meaning making. It focuses people’s attention in certain places. And I think what the Internet has done, is that it’s really widened the aperture, so that there’s more available for people to experience, observe, engage, than ever before. So the aperture is so wide, it’s quite a lot like drinking from a firehose. And I think what traditional communities do is kind of put that aperture a little more focused in the middle and reduce people’s choices. And I think, at the risk of oversimplifying, some of what we’re seeing is a battle between what are the forces that control the mechanisms that affect what we see and how we engage it. And I think that is, it’s in tremendous flux, the ethics are so complicated around who controls the algorithms that feed us information and experiences on the one hand, but on the other hand, folks are increasingly able to pursue their own interests, which I see as a total net positive. But on the other hand, it’s actually not having to choose your own path that is one of the great joys of a traditional religious or spiritual life, it’s actually been, being given pathways to pursue, to say, look, this has worked, here’s, here’s our people, here’s how our people do it. Check this out, listen to this person, sing this song, practice this practice with these people. There’s real gift in not having as many choices. And I think that’s part of what we’re, part of why this moment is in such flux, is this, I don’t want to set these up as opposites exactly, but the, the contradictions between total freedom and access to information and help in digesting what we’re encountering and making meaning from it. It’s a real, a real tense moment around that, that dichotomy right now.
Q. Is there a spiritual loneliness, spiritual homelessness that we’re seeing?
I think so, I think that folks are the rest of the traditional pathways to make meaning and to understand themselves in community, to think about what matters most. The stories and people who sustain folks through troubling times, through suffering. I think people are increasingly dislocated, from those three ways of that wisdom. And the result is increasing despair, increasing loneliness, and social fragmentation, isolation, and mental health crises. We’re literally seeing all those numbers increase. And I’m convinced that the reduction of the people’s engagement with what the human family has learned about how to survive those very things, it’s not an accident that these are happening at the same time.
Q. New forms of community and spirituality that are emerging?
Yeah. How workplaces are contending with this moment is especially curious, especially in the extremities of COVID. People, some people being able to work at home, and the emergence of a more integrated human on the other end of a work phone call. Where, in especially among professional classes, where we’re literally calling into work from people’s living, living rooms with their kids crawling over their laps, it’s impossible not to see other humans as having a fuller life, then the buttoned-up person who arrives in their uniform to the restaurant may work in, or the human that’s in the conference room. So there’s a way in which we’re actually literally seeing each other as holder humans. The implications for workplaces, I think, are really huge. So on the one hand, in a lot of professional environments, we’re seeing kind of spiritual elements being integrated in the workplace as essentially a workplace benefit or offering. There’s also an overlay of growing concern for the actual lived situations in which people find themselves. I would like to think that’s about more than productivity. But I think in truth, what we’re seeing is a lot of companies catching up to the fact that when their workers are suffering, the work is suffering. And so there’s perhaps increasing attention to taking care of people. And most folks understand that people’s spiritual and religious lives are a critical element of their overall well-being. So we’re seeing some increasing experimentation in the work world, in delivering, you know, certain, certainly certain experiences like yoga and meditation for, for some rarefied work environments. But I think in general, the question that has emerged in COVID, of like, what is essential, is increasingly being asked in workplaces of all kinds, to help understand worker experiences and the lives behind folks who we usually just used to just see at work.
Q. Some have pointed to Google in terms of optimizing these sorts of spiritual and other reflective means as a way of getting people to work more in place— capitalist ethic, rather than really attending to the needs of those who are seeking spiritual guidance?
Absolutely. Whenever we see workplaces, engage their workers, religious and spiritual lives, we should be cautious and understanding what the motivations for doing that are. And I think what we’ve seen over and over again, is the concern for productivity is at the heart, a lot of those engagements. Productivity, partly in terms of maximizing people’s output, but there are other ways to think about productivity that I think are a little less potentially dangerous, that have to do with making sure that folks have the support they need to be able to show up at work. And that begins to get a little fuzzier in terms of the, the ethics behind it, and I think potentially super helpful to hold cadres of workers. If more care is being shown for the lives they’re living away from work that can often be to the good. But, on the other hand, we’ve learned to be suspicious of folk’s motivations for engaging other people’s religious lives. There’s a real danger of control, of lack of privacy, of sort of enforced engagement with certain practices, all of which I think we are understandably suspicious about. I for one thing, it’s generally a good thing to get workplaces oriented towards whole, the whole people who work there, it remains to be seen if workplaces can find ways to engage that are healthy, employee-focused and a little bit altruistic, quite frankly, in their motivations outside of just pure productivity motivations.
Q. How do you think spiritual innovators can be in the right relationship with their tradition?
This is a question that we’ve thought so much about, about how innovators are engaging with their traditions, we see folks across the map. So there are innovators that are firmly ensconced in traditions. And they’re usually innovators in, in distribution, not usually in content. So the, the sort of tradition, embedded innovators, tend to share that, that content in fresh ways. But there are also loads of innovators along the edge of traditional religious communities. So they might have a credential, they might be a rabbi, and they might be ordained, but are serving a congregation that focuses on ritual paths, for example, in the Jewish world. So we see a focus on individual practices rather than cohesive, all-age communities. I think there’s a lot of innovation in delivering some of that traditional wisdom, even in those, among those edge innovators. And then there are religious or spiritual and community innovators completely outside of the traditional religious world, many of whom, according to our research and work, actually grew up in traditional religious communities. In many cases they are the sort of golden children of their religious communities, but having disavowed those communities, are seeking a lot of the same outcomes but in non-religious communities. So it’s a way of transmitting that wisdom but in completely fresh and theologically clear realms.
Q. In terms of your research at the design lab, what has surprised you the most over the last couple of years?
So many of those moments, especially for me, as a traditionally ordained person from an existing religious community. My work before Sacred Design Lab was working with hundreds and hundreds of congregations in New England. And one of the first things that surprised me about being exposed to spiritual and community innovators outside of traditional communities, was their deep desire to be in relationship to traditional wisdom, and the practitioners of traditional wisdom, and the stories and the elders from those places, that so many of these community and religious innovators were bereft of feeling supported and connected and a part of something that was bigger than themselves. They knew they were exercising a kind of leadership, spiritual leadership, I might call it, that they were not equipped for, they had no specific training in, but they knew they were doing something different than the average nonprofit world. And they were absolutely delighted to encounter the fact that there were people out there who were already knowing how to do some of what they were trying to do. So it was actually a real moment of discovery for these innovators to realize that there had been hundreds of years of people essentially engaging the same questions, and that they could learn from what those communities had, had learned. So that has been one of the great joys of my professional life, is in seeing the joy of innovators discovering that other people have walked this path before them, and that there are gifts that await their discovery.
Q. Do we risk losing some of that traditional wisdom as millennials, Gen Z and Gen X move toward a more spiritual tradition?
Yes, I think we do. I think that I think traditional religious communities, that’s just, let me just use congregations as an example. In fact, let me be even more specific and choose mainline Protestant congregations as a specific example. I think congregation will probably be around for a long time and the way that islands continue to exist in rising seas. So we’ll see a diminishment of a lot of the smaller congregations and a few congregations will remain. But, those are becoming increasingly isolated, in the, the inability, the lack of creativity of engaging the outside world, with the wisdom that they have been stewards of, and able stewards of, for literally 1000s of years. So yeah, I’m really deeply concerned about how few ways there are for all of the, all the younger generations to even, to know that those communities exist, much less the stories and ancestors and teachers and songs and tunes and texts and practices that have animated those communities for thousands of years, we’re in real danger of losing, losing that wisdom. And that’s part of why we need this, this new infrastructure to help repopulate those pathways, not just back to traditional religious communities, but to tell those stories and transmit some of that wisdom in fresh new ways. Personally, I’m agnostic about whether those traditional communities survive, I think that story has yet to be told. But I’m very invested in humans not losing what we’ve learned over the last tens of thousands of years about how to survive this suffering life.
Q. What does a flourishing future look like?
I think a flourishing community is, both creates and is created by healthy systems, healthy people, healthy individuals and healthy communities at all levels, healthy nations, healthy neighborhoods. And I think part of why we’re in such a suffering moment right now is that there’s so much ill health like literally in this pandemic moment, but also well beyond that, where so many of those systems have broken down that some of what is creating people and our world views and our imaginations, is so unhealthy, especially in terms of systemic oppressions, and racism and income inequality, and a host of other social ills, social fragmentation and isolation, that cultures working on individuals is increasingly harmful. But also— oh, gosh, I just totally lost my train of thought. I’m so sorry.
A flourishing future looks like humans accessing stories and wisdom from before, from previous generations, previous times, in other moments of time, that give them strength and succor and resilience, to make a life of meaning for themselves, and hopefully to co-create communities that are worthy of the questions at the heart of their lives. So communities that are safe, communities that are, that are not, though, don’t suffer from racism and inequality, communities that allow for flourishing and don’t systemically interrupt people’s ability to access their full potential, that full sense of becoming, that make the obstacles reduced to build that belonging and becoming an beyond that we spoke with, that’s a flourishing community, yeah.
Q. What gives you hope for the future of spirituality, spiritual exercises?
This is going to sound perhaps cliche, especially as a as an older Gen-X-er, but honestly, the depth of the questions that spiritual innovators, spiritual community innovators are asking, the longing that they have the ability to articulate and to convene people around, their hunger for the old stories, their joy at discovering wisdom is there to be had, that there are folks who have some of what they wish they knew, that there are practices to follow to support a meaningful life, the joy of engaging each other in these questions that matter most. There is so much hunger there, that I have a lot of faith that we’re in good hands, if we can do what we can to remove the obstacles to people accessing that wisdom. And if we can remove the systemic obstacles to people engaging freely with what matters most, I think we’re in for a long human story that is in very good hands.
Q. Are their cultural, linguistic contexts that you think shape how people think about flourishing? Abundant life?
Yes, I was in the conversation then which Jasmine, Reverend Jasmine Smothers said that comment.
One of the, one of the joys of talking about human flourishing is in the challenge of communicating across such tremendous difference of experience and social location. When you just think about the challenges of idiom alone in communicating meaning and value and tradition. It’s a wonder we can talk to each other at all about these questions. The obstacles are so high, the accretions of history are so profound, the trauma that traditional religious communities have done to so many. The depth of commitments that fuel people’s orthodoxies. I mean there’s a reason that religion and spirituality are hard to talk about. So yes, there are tremendous obstacles, but the stakes are so high. The problems that I think are, so many people in our culture are facing are so deep and have to do with what matters most to people and whether they, whether they, whether they matter, that we have to rise to the occasion by coming up with some soul-centered solutions to match those challenges. And I think that’s the opportunity underneath all those challenges, and it makes the whole quest worthwhile.
Q. And this helps define what it means to be human?
Yes, and that is why we continue to uplift these questions about the soul. To give it try to give it some shape, and some, some shape so that more people can talk about it. And that’s, I think one of the geniuses at the heart of the Templeton World Charity Foundation’s work is a desire to lift up those experiences and those stories and say, how does this work, how do we know, and how can we share it with other people. The world is so bereft of all that wisdom. We need all the ways we can think of to share it with other people. That’s the joy at the heart of this work.
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Casper is great at soundbites, but he is a millennial, and the question I want you to ask him, even if this might unsettle him a tiny bit, is basically like, dude, you are an unchurched millennial, why are you devoting your life right now to engaging questions of religion and spiritualty, because there’s going to be something about his answer that gets to the heart of why this still matters to people. He’s basically an atheist…
He’s a little bit of a pagan fairy boy, which I can call him and you can’t, but nonetheless, to get underneath that…
He has much better command of the stats than I do, so if you want like a pithy sound bite about x-numbers, percentage of millennials not going to church anymore, he’s the guy to ask specific questions, in fact you might even ask him the two or three stats that really leap out, telling the story.
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