During the latter decades of the Twentieth Century church-state debate focused primarily on the Christian Right which openly organized as a political movement to confront such issues as school prayer and abortion. Largely ignored by media and scholars has been the growing political influence of religious movements outside of traditional Judeo-Christianity, particularly those characterized as Christian-Environmental, New Age, Neo-Pagan, Environmental, and Native American. Why these movements have been ignored is a factor of their perceived relative novelty or size. Assumed to be small in comparison to traditional Judeo-Christian religions they are overlooked or incorrectly assumed to be small in influence.
However, these movements are neither small nor inconsequential. Advocating universal pantheism, they are multiplying independently and within established Christian churches and other established religions. In February, 1998, the Guardian reported that Pope John Paul II had urgently ordered the preparation of an encyclical to confront New Age religious philosophy. The Guardian stated, "If, as reports from Rome suggest, a rare encyclical is issued, it will be a measure of the alarm new age thinking provokes at the highest levels in the church." The Guardian described the New Age movement as "an amorphous collection of spiritual ideas ranging from wicca, shamanism, and neo-paganism to the human potential movement and astrology."
As New Age religious movements stress "holistic spirituality" they will present a particularly difficult challenge for the separation of religion and government in the Twenty-First Century, and, indeed, are already doing so. Whereas in traditional Judeo-Christianity God transcends physical Earth, man is distinct from animal and religious belief is distinct from science, pantheistic movements, like their ancient pagan proto-types, consider God present and interwoven equally in all parts of creation. They insist that for peace and harmony to exist on earth, the spiritual may not be separated from the physical whether animate or inanimate; neither may spiritual be separated from science or government.
In May, 1998, the Chicago Tribune reported that, though difficult to quantify due to lack of formal organization, neo-paganism is the fastest-growing religion in North America with the Internet being the prime means of proselytizing. One neo-pagan quoted stated, "Some who have embraced contemporary paganism have come from an environmental, scientific place. They see paganism as a place where science and spirituality can come together." "[Neo-paganism] gives a clear spiritual path to integrate environmental consciousness into religious practice, and that's wonderful," said another neo-pagan. New Age believers quote Alfred North Whitehead who wrote, "We need to rely less on authority of reductive empirical research and more on the habit of aesthetic appreciation." Neo-paganism thus merges science, religion and government into an inseparable trinity wherein spirituality challenges objective knowledge essential for governmental decision making.
American government is based upon the principle that separation of religion and government is feasible, desirable and necessary. New Age holism directly challenges the foundations of the principle of separation of religion and government. As a result government is now under siege to establish New Age religious beliefs and will be increasingly so in the Twenty-First Century.
Christian-Environmentalism, New Age religion, neo-pagan religion and environmental religion are labels for inter-related religious movements which have strongly manifested in the latter Twentieth Century. A useful discussion of these movements by one of their own is titled, "Ecommunion: How the New Cosmology is Resurrecting the World Soul" and until recently had been located at www.doubleclickd.com/ ecommunion.html. Ecommunion author Carolyne Pion starts with recounting the Hopi creation story. She then states:
"Many years and many journeys separate us from this Hopi creation story, yet its prescient message is surely a metaphor for our time. Pahana's need to remember, to rejoin his new wisdom to his ancestral knowledge, parallels our own civilization. Our current cosmology, our understanding of the world, has been crippled by our perspective. Dazzled by gifts which technology showered upon us, we discarded our organic and animistic beliefs and embraced dualistic, anthropocentric values instead. ...
"Then, oddly enough, science--our ally in self-deception--began to question the foundations of our belief system. New scientific paradigms, such as chaos and quantum theory, restated what our ancestors knew all along--the fundamental connectedness of all things. United at last, the inner and outer birthed a new cosmology of communion and consciousness.
"An ECOMMUNION is in progress, right now; a conscious merging of the wisdom of ecology and spirituality (Eco-Spirituality) with all the other disciplines of our modern age. Psychologists, feminists, scientists, spiritual teachers, social activists, educators, mathematicians, health practitioners, poets, musicians, scholars and other who have been busy redefining their individual streams of consciousness for the last twenty or thirty odd years, have begun to converge, to weave a cosmology of inclusion, a context which honors all lifeforms and the mother which creates and nourishes us, Earth.
Ms. Pion traces the development of the "Eco-Spirituality movement" after announcing a Common Boundaries Conference to be keynoted by Utah naturalist Terry Tempest Williams, whom Ms. Pion characterizes as one of the "visionaries and apostles" of the movement. Ms. Pion then celebrates Gaia:
"Our ancestors ... knew the Earth's soul and they called her the Great Mother. ... The Greeks knew her as Gaia, the goddess who birthed humanity from the void called Chaos. An finally, despite the witch burnings of the early mechanistic era, the Earth's soul was born again in the 1970's, as the second coming of Gaia: Earth as a single self-regulating organism. ...Crucial to the Gaia hypothesis was the recognition by science--or at least some whole-brained scientists--that parts of the Earth's whole knew, and acted as if, they were part of a whole. If we extrapolate from this, we can understand that the earth operates with a conscious level of intention. Those scientists who defy the nabobs of dualism also believe that the Earth has a soul. ...Theologian and godfather of the Eco-Spirituality movement, Thomas Berry, reminds us over and over that we must cast aside our artificial divides and become one again with the Earth."
New Age adherents believe that as a living, thinking organism, Mother Earth is sick and in imminent danger of death from pollution, development and wars which result from man's failure to know, respect and worship her. They also believe that divinity and goodness resides in each human being and that through New Age proselyting and political activism an Aquarian Age of peace and harmony will arrive with mankind evolving to ultimate goodness and Mother Earth being healed.
New Age doctrines of biocentrism and biophilia proclaim that places, plants and animals are co-equal with human beings and equally contain and manifest the divine. New Age apostles, such as Terry Tempest Williams, preach that there must be a "sense of community" whereby humans accept places, plants and animals as brothers and sisters.
Perhaps the earliest call for environmental religion came from Aldous Leopold who in his 1949 book, The Land Ethic, stated, "No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections and convictions. The proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it." This statement is quoted at the opening of Tom Hayden's book, The Lost Gospel of the Earth, A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit, & Politics. Mr. Hayden, of Chicago Seven and Jane Fonda fame, is a relative newcomer to the environmental religion movement, but thoroughly adopts and addresses its religious imperatives in his book. Hayden states,
"Humans have long sought a fixed address for the divine. Long ago the sacred was believed to reside in the earth. Then came an era when God and the sacred were projected from the earth to a glorious cloud, stranding humanity in a waiting line below. Next according to Christianity, the divine was reincarnated briefly on the earth to redeem the human. Many await a second coming to lift up the faithful from the earth. ... I believe the earth has suffered from the perception that the sacred is no longer resident in its depths. This book prays for a kind of reverse second coming, in which we experience a redemptive return of the sacred to inhabit the earth before it is further abused. ... Only when we believe the sacred is present in the living earth will we revere our world again. The ancient awe of our sacred environment amounts to a lost gospel of the earth, which existed among indigenous people long before the rise of monotheism. It continues in the myths of my Irish Ancestors and the teachings of Native Americans. ..."
Consistent with the Native-American obsession of all New Agers, Hayden devotes scores of pages to American Indians, including the fictional speech of Chief Seattle as though it were historical fact.
Also fully in line with New Age holism, Hayden calls for the end of separation of religion and government. Hayden states that "earth-based" spiritualities must be taught in the public schools, complaining that "our educational system has perpetrated the division between self and the natural world" rather than preaching a holistic "gospel of the earth." In a section titled, "A New Politics of Spirit and Nature," Hayden raves about Vice President Al Gore's "wonderful book" Earth in the Balance, but states, "while it gives great hope of joining spirituality and environmentalism in mainstream discourse, the task remains of transforming the present boundaries and incentives of politics to let nature and spirit in."
Hayden, in clearly stating that there must be an end to separation of nature (aesthetic science), spirit (religion) and politics (government), is most candid. Many New Age activists have pursued their religious-political goals without being so open. The Jefferson 21st Century Institute is dedicated to assuring that the public is aware of, and thereby capable of responding to, the challenges New Age religion in its many forms brings to the separation of religion and government. Knowledge and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution will assure that America remains the free and vibrant country established by the Founding Fathers.
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