“A Community of Chiefs: Individualism, Religious Eclecticism and the Spectre of the Mainstream.” A reflection by Jeremy Guida

Eclectic forms of religious life in the United States have existed for a long time and have been grouped together under many different labels. The kinds of traditions that Sydney Ahlstrom has called “Harmonial Traditions” are the same kinds of practices that Catherine Albanese has called “metaphysical religions” and that Robert Bellah has criticized under the label “Sheilaism”. Practices and beliefs perceived to be unusual in the context of the United States such as reiki, astrology, and psychic readings, as well as beliefs in UFOs, reincarnation, and untapped human potential are commonly found among people who would fit within any of these scholars’ rubrics. Today, one can read any number of articles published online that use the phrase “spiritual, but not religious” to label this kind of religious (or spiritual) life.

Many of these articles, like Bellah in Habits of the Heart, criticize religious eclecticism, arguing that the people who perform many practices and who hold various beliefs from diverse traditions tend to be individualistic to a fault. Bellah’s term “Sheilaism” emerges from the fear that if all of us adopted such eclectic religious lives, we would become a country whose religions would be tailored to each individual, thus Sheila’s religion could only be called “Sheilaism”, Jeremy’s religion would be “Jeremyism” and so on. The individualistic way in which a practitioner chooses and combines diverse religious and spiritual practices appears to make it difficult for any communities to form around such infinitely diverse religious lives.

The annual Best of Mt. Shasta festival and conference showcases the community of people living in and around the Mt. Shasta area whose religious and spiritual lives are eclectic. People who tour the area for spiritual insights and awakenings have access to the many local spiritual teachers, healers and leaders who participate in the festival. Contrary to the scholarly and outsider concern that religious bricoleurs lack community, the founder’s vision for the Best of Mt. Shasta presumes that there is a community of spiritual bricoleurs showcased in Mt. Shasta for outsiders and others. However, the majority of the people in attendance are from the greater Mt. Shasta area themselves, and more than likely either a vendor or presenter. If the festival is a showcase of Mt. Shasta’s unique spiritual community there is no external audience: it is a demonstration of this community for and to itself.

As I spoke with many of the vendors and presenters at the conference, I found out that many felt that there was not any deep sense of community among them. A common view was that they were merely a group of people who hold similar beliefs and perform similar practices, but who can be quite critical of one another, calling into question the authenticity of each others’ practices and competing economically (sometimes quite maliciously) for a limited market of spiritual tourism. One vendor said that some of the people at that very conference were simply “selling dreams for a buck”. A conference speaker indicated that the Best of Mt. Shasta festival “barely runs” every year because of the lack of a felt sense of community. Another vendor mentioned that although there was a community in the sense that they shared jargon (“energy, chakra, and flow”), many people teach and perform their services without understanding the dangers of what they are doing. She said that many do not know exactly what the jargony words actually mean.

These statements may confirm that there is not a profoundly felt sense of community among the many spiritual practitioners around Mt. Shasta, however they do not exactly take the form one would expect if Bellah’s and others’ criticisms are true, i.e. that the individualistic way in which these people have constructed their religious lives limits the possibility of a community. In the first place, Morgana’s vision of presenting the Mt. Shasta community to outsiders presumes many similarities among the many people in the area. The Best of Mt. Shasta is not an exercise in pluralism in the form of inter-faith dialogue or as the meeting of practitioners committed to various traditions. The Best of Mt. Shasta is an attempt to bring together people with similar views and practices. If these were so individualistic as to cripple the possibility of community, why does Morgana presume similarities rather than differences? Furthermore, if these practices are so individualistic, why is there a shared jargon that can be difficult, especially for outsiders, to comprehend?

The difficulty in creating community among the spiritual bricoleurs in the Mt. Shasta area thus appears not to come from the individualistic ways in which so many combine certain beliefs and practices but instead from the ways that these beliefs and practices are proximate to one another. As much as Mt. Shasta is perceived as a spiritual destination worldwide, the economic resources that this spiritual tourism provides are limited, and the number of people struggling to make a living as a psychic, New Age merchant or spiritual artisan have oversaturated the market. One vendor mentioned that many people feel called to move to the mountain, abandon jobs and family to do so, intending to make a living as a spiritual teacher or service provider. However, once these individuals arrive, they often experience economic hardship and eventually move away, usually after only a few years. This turnover indicates that part of the difficulty of establishing a spiritual community in the Mt. Shasta area is not endemic to individualistic pastiches of beliefs and practices, but to the economic realities of the area.

Another difficulty for the creation of a community emerges from the perspective of many of the practitioners who perceive that their views are counter to what they call ‘mainstream’ American society. Many vendors and participants spoke about having held religious views that they characterized as “traditional” but that became problematic once they began a process of spiritual or religious maturation. Many of these “traditional” views included things like belief in a personal and male deity who punishes unbelievers and the belief that one religious tradition is exclusively true. One person relayed a story in which he became aware in a dream of a previous incarnation. This experience and newfound belief in reincarnation created difficulty among the ‘mainstream’ believers with whom he had associated. He eventually abandoned the group, moved to India and took on a guru. Another vendor mentioned that she had been a Methodist, but that she never fully felt as though she fit in with the community because of her psychic abilities. These narratives indicate that many of the individuals feel as though they hold views that are unusual in comparison to the mainstream and that they have much that they could teach to those whom they consider part of the mainstream. The view that they have much to teach is perhaps most evident in the unusually large number of self-published authors in attendance at the conference, each of whom had something spiritual to share with the world.

However unusual they think their beliefs are, many are not entirely uncommon. For instance the “Portrait of American Life Study” of 2012 has shown that nearly 30% of people in the United States believe that reincarnation is at least likely, and 35%, a plurality by more than 15%, responded that they respect all religions equally. Despite being a sizeable minority in beliefs about the afterlife and being part of a plurality regarding other religious traditions, many of these practitioners still understand themselves to be part of a spiritually awakened minority. They thus tend to view themselves in opposition to a spectre of the mainstream, constructed from stereotypes about religious dogmatism and institutional authority. Because these spiritual bricoleurs move to the mountain only after they have had such spiritual awakenings, they tend to come with the perspective that they are ready to teach or offer their services, rather than learn from those who already live there. This creates what one presenter called a “community of chiefs”: a place where there are a whole lot of leaders, not a lot of followers, and an even stiffer economic challenge to overcome.