Fisher Kings and Public Places: The Old New Age in the 1990s

Abstract

The New Age is best seen as a new spirituality with pervasive ties to a large general American culture rather than as a narrowly defined movement with mostly theosophical roots. In fact, the New Age is an expression of American nature religion, intimately tied to a nineteenth-century past that blurred distinctions between spirit and matter. This nature religion carries considerable moral weight and, especially with its emphasis on healing as reconciliation, contains a social ethic. It also reveals ties to Protestant America by pointing toward evangelical ideas of disharmony and sin and by the ambiguities of its millennial preoccupation. Finally, its social ethic means a willingness to engage in public discourse on themes of environmentalism and related concerns. Thus the new spirituality demonstrates an ease in the “naked public square,” which Christianity and civil religion have not been able to inhabit comfortably in our time.