We Need Post-Church Spaces, Part 5: We’ve Lost Transcendence

For a refresher of where we’re at in my argument that we need post-church spaces in our modern lives, go here to see my first post on this.

And here’s a quick refresher on definitions:

• WEIRD: Stands for Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Refers to the modern, capitalist, bureaucratic, urbanized societies that you and I live in. WEIRDos are all of us who live in the modern world. WEIRD was coined by the evolutionary psychologist Joseph Henrich.

• OLD: Stands for omnipresent, life-long, and dependent. Refers to the pre-modern, village way of life that most people lived in before 19th century.

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Have you ever rooted for the home team at a football game, and a big, game-changing play was made? And the entire stadium––including you––rose and screamed for joy? Remember that feeling in your body?

Or have you ever been to a concert and the artists play a song that everybody knows and you start singing along with countless other people? Do you remember what that felt like in your body?

That feeling in your body is what some sociologists call “collective effervescence.” I’m going to call it transcendence. It’s that non-ordinary, embodied state of consciousness that lifts us out of the humdrum of everyday life. It’s why people go to concerts and sporting events—both of which can be better seen and heard in the comfort of home. Yet people pay a lot of money and go through a lot of hassle to get a little transcendence, together in large groups. And it’s not just through sports and concerts, but we also get this through political rallies, raves, and group retreats.

Humans have likely had these practices of communal transcendence for hundreds of thousands of years. The capacity for this transcendence is one of the key factors that helped Homo sapiens dominate the planet because it brought us together and helped us coordinate in large numbers, far larger than the bands of 30-50 our nearest primate cousins could bring together. 

Communal transcendence bound us together in large groups through singing, dancing, and other ritual acts, but it did much more than this. When these moments of transcendence are woven into our lives, humans become transformed. Emile Durkheim, the founder of modern sociology wrote:

“The worshiper who has communed with their god is not only a person who sees new truths that the unbeliever does not know; they are a person who is capable of more. They feel more strength in themselves, either to cope with the difficulties of existence or to defeat them. They are raised above human miseries because they are raised above their condition as humans; they believe they are saved from evil in whatever form they conceive of evil.”

One of the defining features of modernity is “disenchantment,” which refers to, among other things, a loss of such transcendence. As modern science and technology explained the world and solved many of our problems, practices of transcendence (like chanting or rhythmic dance) were seen as primitive actions that whipped up childish passions. The experience of such transcendence was seen as irrational and dream-like. 

Rejecting the irrational, old ways is what helped humans leave the dark ages and step into “the age of enlightenment,” which one famous modern philosopher defined as discovering and knowing the world through the light of reason and rationality. And it’s a good thing we did! In part 3 of this series, I outlined just a few of the amazing benefits of modernity. 

But in exchange for these benefits, we’ve lost access to the vital forces that connect us to a larger community, the world and the universe, and also open us up to something inside that makes us capable of feeling and doing more. As Durkheim noted above, transcendence raises us above our human miseries and even the human condition. 

When the forces of modernity disenchanted our lives, we gained much better health, far more comfort, and immeasurably more knowledge. But we also lost our ability to connect to each other as well as connect in the presence of something outside our daily, mundane lives. OLD (omnipresent, lifelong, and dependent) religion still survives but its days have been numbered for centuries. Europe has long since secularized, and the United States is well on its way. 

Rejecting OLD, religious methods of transcendence came with benefits (like science and technology, but also reason-based ethical and moral frameworks) but the costs come in a loss of sacred meaning and sacred community, and also the loss of the vitality and strength that came with such sacredness. There are many different efforts underway today to bring transcendence back into our lives, but I think they’re all either doomed to fail or will only succeed in transient, partial, and fragile ways. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Recovering old-time religion. The desire to return to the origins of one’s religious traditions is at the heart of WEIRD modernity. Some historians locate the beginning of modernity with the Gutenberg printing press in 1439 or with the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. The printing of the Bible contributed to the Protestant Reformation, which was among other things a call to return to the roots of Christianity. 

Over the next hundred plus years, various Protestant sects arose and wars were fought over this idea. This should give us a clue as to where religious-based methods of transcendence lead: to sectarian splintering, in-group fighting, and between-group fighting. Religion gives us no way out of this. For hundreds of thousands of years, religion was an amazing way to bind humans together in communities through practices of transcendence. But it cannot work in the modern WEIRD world, on a planet of 8 billion people, in social contexts that are unavoidably diverse, dense, and dynamic. 

Furthermore, transcendence based in religion cannot meet the requirements of WEIRD modernity: religion demands intellectual dishonesty by asking its adherents to believe things that are not open to interpersonal, empirical examination. Faith is taken as a virtue in religious traditions, rather than as a problem requiring radical humility. 

Art. Since the rise of Romantic artistic movements in music, painting, poetry, and philosophy, some WEIRDos have argued that art is our way back to transcendence. No doubt, art can certainly lift us above ourselves, but it cannot create a stable community, and the moments of transcendence seem to be the most fleeting. The virtue of transcendence through art is that it doesn’t seem to lead to tribalism and inter-group conflict. But it also doesn’t seem to have enough power to extend beyond a moment, connect individuals together in a stable way (fan clubs are pretty weak sauce), or do the third thing that a post-church church should do: support personal growth and development. 

Nature. Communing with nature is a tried and true modern method for accessing some sense of the transcendent. Wild nature was seen in the pre-modern European world as dangerous. But as nature became subdued by modern technology, it became a source of spirituality, sacredness, and transcendence. But it has the same challenges that art does: the feelings it produces don’t seem to contribute to a stable, vibrant community and it doesn’t seem to produce a lot of personal development. In fact, it seems to me that transcendence through nature is an escape from WEIRD modernity, rather than a solution for integrating transcendence into it. 

Psychedelics. The virtue of psychedelics as a thoroughly modern method for access transcendence is that you don’t have to believe anything (like you do in religion), have any special knowledge (like you do for most art), or have a special affinity for it (like for people who LOVE nature). If you ingest enough psychedelics in a safe setting, you will be reliably lifted out of our your ordinary consciousness and experience a sense of transcendence. Perhaps the transcendence is terrifying; perhaps it is blissful. But it will certainly not be mundane and ordinary. 

The problems with psychedelics as the only tool for transcendence is 1) they are fleeting with the experiential glow lasting from several days to several months (and it is probably not advisable to do them weekly); 2) we haven’t figured out how to use them together in stable, healthy communities (notwithstanding group therapeutic use); and 3) in my experience they have the most value as individual therapeutic tools, rather than tools for communal transcendence. I write this with a lot of humility and awareness that we’re at the early stages of understanding how to incorporate psychedelics into modern life. So, I’ll just put a pin in this for now. 

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So, what do we do now? In a later newsletter, I’m going to lay out what I think are a few modern, reliable methods for communal transcendence that do not rely on shared (religious) beliefs, special knowledge (like in art), or an escape from modernity (like with nature transcendence). But first, we need to talk about the third leg of the post-church stool: personal growth.