Romantic-Liberal Spirituality
Typology
Six Formations, Two Genealogies, and One Counter-Genealogy
Erik Haines:
"The first runs through twentieth-century Catholic theology: from Sarah Shortall's history of the nouvelle théologie, through Milbank's Radical Orthodoxy, to the Catholic Integralists now in the White House. Žižek's Christian atheism and Peter Rollins's pyrotheology are examined as the left expression of the same structural logic — formally atheist but structurally theological, positioning democratic accountability as a derivative rather than foundational. The Peterson-Žižek debate of April 2019 is read as the point where the convergence became publicly legible. Finally, the Tutt-Cutrone debate — conducted on Tutt's Emancipations podcast, with Cadell Last's Philosophy Portal serving as a wider node in the conversation — is examined as the most consequential exchange currently taking place on the Marxist left about whether the Lacanian ontological frame or the Lukácsian historical method provides the adequate diagnostic architecture for the present emergency.
The second genealogy traces the vitalist and process lineage running from Bergson through Whitehead through Gebser into the spiritual marketplace, and from there into the two integral formations that inherit it: the California Institute of Integral Studies and the process-relational tradition associated with it, and Ken Wilber’s integral theory. These movements and sociological formations are examined as the most ambitious attempts in the Anglophone world to hold contemplative depth and rational accountability together — and therefore the formations whose failure in the present emergency is most consequential. Wilber’s sustained endorsement of Andrew Cohen and Marc Gafni is read not as an accident but as a structural consequence of the nondual position overriding the post-metaphysical corrective.
The essay concludes on a constructive project. Drawing on Jacques Maritain’s integral humanism, the Canadian critical theology tradition of Charles Davis and Gregory Baum as documented by Marc Lalonde, Armour’s philosophic federalism, and Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, it articulates a post-metaphysical alternative capable of carrying genuine contemplative depth into the democratic norms and procedures of justice where democratic life actually takes place — rather than holding it above that space as a sacred reserve exempt from accountability. The Canadian speculative philosophical tradition — with its founding commitment to peace, welfare, and good government, its philosophical anthropology of community over possessive individualism, and its century-long inquiry into how diverse communities hold themselves together without domination — is argued to be not merely a historical inheritance but a live philosophical resource adequate to the present emergency: one that could, if clearly articulated, demonstrate to the world that a democratic federation built on stewardship rather than power, on community rather than the sovereign individual, has resources for holding contemplative depth and democratic accountability together that the dominant formations of both the right and the left have failed to provide."
(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/revisiting-lukacss-destruction-of)
Discussion
Erik Haines:
"What Watts’s Spiritual Turn names, and what Selling Spirituality named seventeen years earlier, is the philosophical-anthropological formation running through all four clusters as their common centre of gravity. The formation is romantic-liberal in the precise technical sense Watts develops at length: it draws on the post-1960s spiritual turn toward deinstitutionalized, individualized, experientially grounded religiosity; it operates within the broader liberal political framework of the educated middle class across the Anglophone world; it valorizes authenticity, depth, expressive individualism, and self-actualization as the core human goods; and it treats the recovery of meaning, spirituality, and purpose as the central cultural task of late modernity. Watts is careful to distinguish romantic liberalism from progressive liberalism—they are politically and culturally distinct, often opposed—but he demonstrates they share the underlying liberal moral framework, and that the differences between them are inflections within a single broader formation rather than fundamental disagreements about what human life is for. This formation is genuinely culturally generative. It has produced the wellness industry, the contemplative-revival publishing arc, the integral-spiritual conference circuit, the meaning-crisis podcast economy, and a substantial portion of contemporary popular religion in its non-institutional forms. On Watts’s analysis, it is the single most influential moral-metaphysical position in the contemporary educated-Anglophone world. The philosophical-anthropological work of figures like McGilchrist, Vervaeke, Dempsey, and Segall serves as the highbrow articulation of what the formation believes about itself.
What Selling Spirituality had already named in 2005 was the political-economic substrate of the formation. Carrette and King traced with considerable empirical detail the way the discourse of spirituality had been progressively privatized, commodified, and metabolized by neoliberal capitalism—turned into a market product, instrumentalized for managerial and corporate ends, and severed from the socially transformative dimensions of the historical religious traditions it claimed to draw from. Under neoliberalism, right-hemispheric modalities like mindfulness and flow states are stripped of their ethical demands and repurposed as corporate productivity hacks, stress-reduction techniques for burnt-out managers, or personal-brand enhancers for the creative class. Carrette and King’s diagnosis is sharper than Watts’s precisely because it foregrounds this political-economic mechanism: the formation is not merely a moral-metaphysical position with systematic blind spots, but a culturally productive arrangement of religious and spiritual resources serving specific political and economic functions in late capitalism. It is spirituality defanged of its capacity to challenge structural economic realities. Watts adds the ethnographic and theoretical depth that Selling Spirituality did not have time to develop. Taken together, the two books constitute the empirical substrate from which this essay’s diagnostic proceeds. The formation has its political-economic substrate (Carrette and King), its philosophical-anthropological articulation (Watts), and its highbrow-philosophical apparatus (McGilchrist, Taylor, Segall, McGrath, Vervaeke, Dempsey). It has its institutional carriers (Perspectiva, Rebel Wisdom, CIIS, Integral Life, the Daily Wire in its meaning-crisis register, the Liminal-Meaning web more broadly). And it has—though few of its participants would recognize this—its political downstream: the post-2016 cultural-political wave mobilizing romantic-liberal philosophical resources for an explicit political project that romantic liberalism itself, as a moral-metaphysical position, would not endorse but cannot recognize itself as enabling.
The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves (December 2024), written as the first sustained public deployment of the diagnostic this essay extends, took up Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart category of the lifestyle enclave and applied it specifically to the American integral community organized around Wilber’s Integral Life platform. The argument was that what began as an integral movement aspiring to civic, intellectual, and spiritual transformation had progressively become a lifestyle enclave in Bellah’s precise sense: a community organized around shared private leisure consumption, internally cohesive but politically disengaged, religiously serious in form but entirely unable to translate its commitments into the public-sphere institutions through which democratic life is actually sustained. A lifestyle enclave retreats from the friction of structural politics into the comfort of shared aesthetic and spiritual consumption. The present essay extends that diagnostic at scale. What was true of the American integral case is true, in different inflections, of the British Perspectiva-Rebel-Wisdom cluster, of the CIIS-process-relational tradition, of the Vervaeke-Peterson mass-cultural strand, and of the broader Liminal-Meaning web ecosystem taken as a whole. The institutional infrastructure across all four clusters produces lifestyle enclaves at increasing scale, anchored philosophically by the romantic-liberalism Watts diagnoses, served philosophical-anthropologically by figures like McGilchrist, and completely unable to recognize themselves as such because the categories of analysis available within the formation cannot reach the structural-political level at which the diagnostic operates. That diagnostic is what Section V now lays out."
(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-enchanted-flatland-iain-mcgilchrist)
More information
Bibliography
Via Erik Haines:
Galen Watts, The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (Routledge, 2005)
Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California Press, 1985)
Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Belknap Press, 2011)
Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (Harper & Row, 1970)