Is There Still a Place for Spirituality in Our Society?

Is There Still a Place for Spirituality in Our Society?

By André Tarassi (July 2013) - published in the magazine Reflets -

When the French are asked what the word “spirituality” means, they answer that this notion is above all related to “moral values”, then come “love”, “the inner life”, the “beauty of nature”. “Faith in God” and “religion” no longer have first place and represent only a small proportion of the answers given. As for the practices they find most associated with spirituality, meditation comes just ahead of prayer and silence[1]. Consulted on the subject of “wonder”, only 10% of the population claims never to feel wonder. That is all the same 90% who do feel wonder (“often” or “from time to time”)! All affirm, in any case, that this wonder is fundamental to “being happy”. The causes of their wonder often overlap with the answers on spirituality, since the beauty of nature or the moment of a prayer form part of the answers, to which is added, at the head of the list, “the birth of a child”[2].

Love, the inner life, the beauty of nature, coming into the world, wonder… It is as if our fellow citizens had a parallel, secret life, of which one hears very little and which is revealed only on the occasion of specialised surveys. Official information, for its part, speaks to us daily of employment, of purchasing power and of wages, generally in a dramatic and negative way. The dominant media seem capable of presenting us only with the vagaries of our materialist civilisation in distress: the corruption and bankruptcy of an economic system sprinkled with a few climatic catastrophes.

We can only observe a real rupture between the personal life of human beings, their aspirations, their spirituality, the practices of their private life, and the anxieties set out in the media, the subjects of discussion in the National Assembly, the disenchantment of the news. And as if the negative “news” were not enough, it is even common, since the end of the twentieth century, to cast ferocious doubt on, indeed to call into question, the various expressions of contemporary spirituality.

This conflict could be one of the greatest paradoxes of our era. The quest for enchantment, for values, for love, for wonder is constantly undermined. The message that is put across is that the places of the search for enchantment are dangerous. These multiple currents with their original propositions are said to be “cults” that harbour the greatest threats, the hotbeds of a particular and insidious criminality, of deception and of manipulation.

If the objective of the message is to inform us that “moral values” are no more to be found in spirituality than in secular governments, that there is no official place for re-enchantment and that one must mistrust everything everywhere, what is really being proposed to us?

Be that as it may, interest in meditation, in prayer, in the inner life is a growing phenomenon. Despite the social scourge that the alternative currents are said to represent, almost all called “cults” by the media (no serious research has ever demonstrated that there were reasons to mistrust these various movements en masse), the French apparently doubt above all those who point the finger at them: 70% have no confidence in political figures[3], a record level of mistrust for decades; 85% think that politicians are absolutely unconcerned with what the population really lives through[4]; and when a comparative confidence evaluation of 33 “actors of society” is made, national political figures are at the end of the list along with estate agents[5]. Political promises have great difficulty being more credible than the spiritual promises they present as deceitful. The same survey indicates, on the other hand, that 61% of the people questioned have more and more confidence in themselves. A sign of a more marked personal development? In another survey carried out at the request of the MIVILUDES, 64% of the French answered that the “cults” do not represent a personal threat[6].

The warnings of the governing authorities have never diverted those they administer from their inner life (but have all the same created a climate of diffuse fear). The development of the inner life obviously remains a crucial element of human existence (even if that must be done, of necessity, in the secrecy of private life). The place of spirituality is confined, laïcité obliging, to that space far from view, far from the news, far from the subjects of debate of our representatives in the National Assembly, digging a deep gulf between the world one sees on screens and the world one lives “in order to be happy”.

This division will not be able to subsist very long. It is even quite reassuring to observe that no repression can overcome the search for love, for beauty and for wonder, and that the true “scourge” is perhaps to be found more, for the French, in the corruption of our materialist democracy (and the creation of scapegoats, such as the “cults”) than in the hopes, sometimes strange or astonishing in form, of spirituality.

[1] BVA survey for Psychologies magazine, 1999

[2] CSA survey for La Croix, 2010

[3] LH2-Nouvel Observateur survey, April 2013

[4] CEVIPOF, December 2012

[5] Harris survey, April 2013

[6] IPSOS/SIG survey, September 2010