Shopping for a New Spiritual Movement: So Many Choices!

In an earlier blog post (see here) and in chapter 8 of The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature, I demonstrate how endless questions yield diametrically opposite responses depending on who the “true” God is (e.g., is it prohibited to eat pork?). This conundrum is further exacerbated by the fact that there are roughly 10,000 documented religions, most of which claim to be the purveyor of the grand truth. Boy, it is tough to shop for the one true religion. Most of us though need not worry about making such a willful choice, as we are indoctrinated straight out of the womb to believe in the religious narrative of our parents (who were indoctrinated by theirs and so on).

Suppose that one becomes disillusioned with his/her religion of birth? The person in question is now on the market for an “enlightened” spiritual movement, one that is consistent with 21st century sensibilities. Fair enough. This is not a hypothetical scenario, as many Western “progressives” now view it as gauche to follow so-called organized religion. Rather, they draw a largely fatuous distinction between being religious and being spiritual. When pushed to offer an explanation, they usually retort that they do not believe in a “God who sits in the sky in judgment of us” but rather they believe in a unified energy, an eternal force, or cosmic love [pick your euphemism for God]. As a consumer psychologist, I am obviously interested in how people make decisions. So let us return to the choice of identifying a new religious/spiritual movement. What is the size of the full set of alternatives? 10? 50? 100? It turns out that there are well over 1,000 new religions and spiritual movements to choose from (see here, here, and here for relevant lists). So starting with the original set of 10,000 religions, and the newer set of 1,000+ religions and spiritual movements, it would appear that the universal grand truth is hidden stealthily among an otherwise large number of “fake” religions. If only God were to give us a clear sign as to which is His true religion. Then again, the followers of each of the 11,000+ religions and spiritual movements already believe that all of the signs point to their faith as being the true one.

I’ll end today’s post with a personal anecdote. A few years ago, my wife and I had gone out to dinner with a former neighbor. During our chat, he insisted that he could never marry a woman who was dogmatic in her religious beliefs. Rather, he wanted to be with a woman who was simply spiritual. I asked him if he could ever see himself with an atheist, to which he retorted that he could never be with someone who believed in nothing. The irony escaped him! The likely “spiritual” believer in quantum oneness was casting judgment on the prospective heathen atheist (see my earlier posts on atheism here, here, here, and here). Nice!

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