The Sprial Dynamics perspective understands religious experience not as a desire for compensators but as a response to the great existential crises of life arising when the dominant personal level of consciousness no longer proves efficacious and a person feels an overwhelming sense of unease and a need to take action.  The most common and the most typical existential crisis in the industrialized society is the transition from red impulsive to blue purposeful, the adaptation from the life of agriculture to the life of the city, what we have called the road to the middle class.    Religious organizations like the Methodists of 1800, the American Catholics of 1860, and the Religious Right of 1990 are clearly social responses to the experience of trying to move up from red consciousness to blue.

The unchurched Americans who were drawn into the enthusiastic Protestant movement did not think of their situation as an existential crisis.  They experienced themselves, when prompted by the revivalist preachers, as living in sin, and they ached for salvation.  But the educated middle class Americans who began to experience an existential crisis in the nineteenth century  did not feel like sinners.  They were uneasy because they wanted to live life not as obedient communicants in a religious community, but because they felt a deep need to become authentic individuals.  In Either/Or, Kierkegaard asserted that “it is not so much of choosing the right as of the energy, the earnestness, the pathos with which one chooses…  [The] crucial thing is not deliberation, but the baptism of the will, that lifts up the choice into the ethical.” (Bretall 1973 p106 p108) The existential fear of being one of the crowd just going along because it is the right thing to do is resolved in the risk of creating an authentic, creative life for good or evil.  For Kierkegaard this choice meant denying the comfort of marriage and conventional church membership and creating a tension between himself and the bourgeois Danish round of work, Sunday worship, and innocent recreation in the Deer Park, brutally dumping the girl he had engaged to marry, and railing against the hypocrisy of the established church prelates.  In Heidegger this sentiment crystallized into the difference between the ontic and the ontological, the unself-conscious inauthentic everyday life against the self-conscious authenticity that breaks with the unreflective “they.”  A decade later, in Paris, the Existentialists put this into practice.  Determined to create their own creative space and not have social norms imposed on them, they one-upped Kierkegaard and dumped girls by the dozen.  In Spiral Dynamics terms, this existential crisis occurs at the transition from blue consciousness to orange consciousness, at the point that the idea of conforming to the One True Way that everyone else is following ceases to hold meaning.  The self-conscious creative ego is being born for whom the essence of meaning is the creative work of individuation, the signature of the creative artist.  That this noble quest became comically a mass phenomenon in the “creative” 1960s when every young bourgeois sprig was called to the creative life, dropping out of the rat race dressed in mass-produced flower prints, does not invalidate the experience.  After all, the baby boomers were the first generation in the modern world to be mostly middle class.  Born to the security of a middle-class childhood, they wanted something better.  They couldn’t help it that they thought like millions of others.  A century before, when Kierkegaard and Thoreau were experiencing the same middle-class angst, they were sons of privilege, the very few whose very bourgeois fathers—Kierkegaard’s was a merchant, Thoreau’s a pencil manufacturer—permitted their sons the luxury of sitting around and philosophizing without being gainfully employed.

Since the existentialists, ancient and modern, were experiencing the need to liberate themselves from the rigid rules of community into the experience of the individual creative ego, they did not institutionalize their yearnings in a religious community.  The vision quest of the creative ego was not communitarian.  In Stark’s terms, their desires for the impossible goal of immortality through creative individuality could not be satisfied by compensators offered by the social interactions of a religious sect or cult.  There was no alternative for them but to go out upon their quest, and have the luck, like the heroes of The Fairie Queen, to fall in with Una or Belphoebe at the right moment when help was needed.  But others, trying to transcend the limitations of the creative ego and discover a paradise of universal community, were not so disadvantaged.  The socialists and the Progressives, disturbed and offended by the all-too-human creative egos at the head of giant corporations, were provoked to ask: So what?  What profiteth a man if he gain money, power, and the love of beautiful women as the most creative artist in the world, if he lose his own soul because crude capitalists are doing the same?

The spiritual turmoil that has characterized the second half of the twentieth century has been an appropriate period of reflection after the murderous wars and genocides of the first half of the century.  But it has not been a consequence of those wars.  It  reflects the existential challenges faced by ordinary people as they go about their lives, trying to breathe meaning into events that seem to gasp for explanation.  What has been lacking has been explanation of the secular events of the Fourth Great Awakening.  What causes spiritual outbursts?  Why is religion surging in popularity a century after the Death of God?  What is the meaning of all the cults, the Zen centers, the yoga classes at the fitness center?  What is New Age all about?  The fusion of the theories of Robert William Fogel, William G. McLoughlin, Rodney Stark, Don C. Beck, and Ken Wilber demonstrate that all the confusing events of the Awakening make sense.  They are natural and healthy, and demonstrate millions of people going about their lives and responding properly and sensibly to the challenges they face.  The problem was a lack of knowledge, the lack of a theory to explain the social phenomena presenting themselves for analysis.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill