Today, they can be your coach.
Molly Worthen is a religious historian, so what was she doing writing thousands of words this weekend about "spiritual coaches" who are not part of any organized mainstream religion? The answer lies in part in her interest in the vast space between the one-third of Americans who now say that they are religiously "unaffiliated" and the two-thirds who are more or less orthodox believers. |
"At a time when more and more Americans call themselves spiritual but not religious," Worthen writes in her guest essay, "these coaches give us a glimpse of the allure and the hazards of 21st-century D.I.Y. religion." |
If you are one of the unbelievers, as I am, why should you care? The key there is another facet of Worthen's work, the fact that she is a religious historian of the United States. The phenomenon she describes, while it has its analogues worldwide, is a peculiarly American one, and in its own way quite familiar. As Erica Carrico, one of the women Worthen profiles, explains, in the Colonial era, "Women who were healers, who were connected to the moon cycle and nature, they were considered witches." |
Spiritual coaches, in other words, "are a new chapter in the long history of female religious entrepreneurship in America — a tradition that runs from Boston in the 1630s, when Anne Hutchinson's packed religious meetings outraged Puritan ministers, to today's evangelical conference circuit." |
If you take the time to read Worthen's piece in full — and I urge you to do so because it is only by understanding the changing nature of belief in America that we can begin to understand what is happening in America more generally — you'll get a sense of what these women are up to: "By blending eclectic religious practices with the gospel of entrepreneurship, spiritual coaches pitch their clients (who, like the coaches, are mostly women) the things that religion has always promised," Worthen explains. "They offer a path to meaning in the midst of suffering and tools to recover a sense of agency in a world that flings us around by our heels." |
I worked at The New Yorker before I came to The Times nearly two decades ago. Once, when I had just embarked on writing a dark story (that never saw the light), the magazine's editor, David Remnick, called out after me as I was leaving his office, "Don't forget: Whatever it is, it must give pleasure." He is right about that, and one of the wonderful things about working with Worthen is that she never forgets it either. |
Nor does she forget to connect her extensive reporting to a larger sense of where we are headed as a country. "As church attendance and other marks of the authority of traditional religion continue to decline," Worthen points out, "American hunger for a sense of transcendent meaning isn't going away. Instead, it is fusing with a longstanding civil religion that worships the entrepreneur as a guru and mixes and matches ideas that help us to imagine our way to a better life, to pretend that making up our own rules will bring true freedom." |
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