​Granted that for the past four centuries the relationship between religion and science has been a conflictual one in the West, there is good reason to believe that such conflict will diminish significantly in the coming years as we evolve further and further away from both the limiting parameters of the Axial-based model of religious faith that has dominated Western culture for over 2000 years and away from the dogmatic adherence to naturalism/materialism that has come to dominate the scientific community in much the same way that doctrinal orthodoxy once dominated the church.
 
The  model for Axial faith was based on an a priori acceptance of a sacred text – the Bible for Christians – as the mandatory starting point for valid knowledge of truth or the nature of reality. If one starts from that position, a conflict with science is inevitable, given both the methodology of science and the content of scientific knowledge. If you start out with Biblical literalism as a prerequisite, you’re going to have a difficult time coming to terms with a scientific understanding of the nature of the Cosmos.
 
But that simply will not be a problem in the religion of the future if that religion is no longer dependent on ancient texts for a starting point. If the spirituality of the 21st century and beyond is grounded in empirical experience, or our capacity to sense the Sacred or Spirit, then we are not locked in to concepts of the nature of the world that were developed over two millennia ago. A contemporary, post-Axial spirituality, in which a believer need not make any intellectual or moral sacrifices in order to believe, is one which almost by definition will be open to incorporating whatever the scientific worldview has to offer. If the 21st century spirituality is rooted in a simple awareness of the existence of a transcendent Meaning and Goodness in the Cosmos, unattached to any specific culturally-limited and parochial myths and legends, then the opportunity for a religion vs. science conflict is far less likely to arise. The new religion, rooted in the Spiritual Minimalism which we described in a previous post, of the post-Axial Age is one which finds no basis to challenge science.
 
At the same time, however, we should recognize that science also is likely to make certain adjustments that will further facilitate a reconciliation with religion. For starters, science itself will hopefully become less dogmatic and recognize that while the scientific method is a remarkable tool for understanding the realm of matter/energy as it exists in space/time, such a comprehensive understanding of the natural world does not preclude the existence of a spiritual dimension, which, by its every definition, stands outside of or transcends the natural realm. Science tells us a lot about the world of “stuff” – but it tells us nothing about the spiritual dimension of meaning and value. In addition, as we have indicated earlier, many in the scientific community already recognize that the scientific dogmatism that sees reality in strictly materialist and mechanistic terms is no longer credible in light of the findings of how the quantum world functions.
 
So neither religion nor science is going away, but both are changing, and changing in rather dramatic and significant ways such that the centuries-old conflict between them will continue to diminish. Early in the 20th century, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead spoke of the need for a “deeper religion and more subtle science,” and that appears to be what is slowly emerging. The spirituality of the 21st century will be “deeper” in the sense that it will be free from adherence to ancient texts and the parochial mythological worldviews found in those texts, and rooted in a spiritually open empiricism. Science of the 21st century will be more subtle in the sense that it will be freed from a reductionist, deterministic, simplistic materialism and liberated from the hubris of 20th century science’s parochial notion that science alone provides a true and comprehensive explanation of the nature of reality. Science will be open to the existence of Mystery, and religion will be open to the experience of Mystery, in all of its glorious multiplicity of manifestations.
 
 

​While we can only make vague guesses about what the many dimensions of the post-Axial religion of the 21st century and beyond will look like, we can probably assert with considerable confidence that the future religion will be one characterized by an embrace of religious pluralism and a rejection of exclusivism. The notion that there is only one true religion and that religions can be neatly categorized into “true” and “false” is already rapidly disappearing among many populations, and the pluralistic appreciation of a multiplicity of spiritual beliefs and practices will likely, over time,  become the new norm. The exclusivist assertion that there is only one true religion, one true revelation, and one true path to salvation is simply not credible to people whose perspective is fully informed by study of the history of religions, which exposes the sociopolitical factors that influence the formation of each religion, and the study of World Religions, which demonstrates the multiple commonalities between traditions.
 
We already see a movement away from the traditional exclusivist norm as, for instance, the traditional boundaries between various branches of Christianity are dissolving, with practicing Lutherans being quite comfortable attending a Presbyterian service or even a Catholic Mass, and indeed with many Protestants not even familiar with the theological differences that once created a sharp and often acrimonious wall between different denominations. Today many Protestant Christians would be hard-pressed to describe the theological differences between, for instance, Lutheranism, Methodism, and Presbyterianism, and many mainline Protestant congregations are populated by members simply by virtue of family tradition rather than theological choice.
 
This openness to other traditions also extends beyond the different branches of one’s own faith and into completely different traditions, as we see Christians and Jews practicing Buddhist meditation and participating in Hindu religious festivals.
​
We appear to be heading for what Duane Bidwell has referred to as believers who are “spiritually fluid” (see Bidwell’s When One Religion Isn’t Enough:  The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People). Rather than feeling a need to be confined to one tradition, the spiritually fluid believers (which appear to be rapidly increasing in numbers) do not identify with any one tradition, but feel comfortable drawing different elements of their spiritual life from different religions. The spiritually fluid believer might, for instance, participate in a Christian Mass, practice Buddhist meditation, hold a worldview derived from Hindu Vedanta, and read Confucius for ethical guidance, all the while seeing no conflict in the blending of various traditions and not exclusively identifying with any one of them. To the spiritually fluid believer, being religious does not require identification with a specific historical tradition, but rather consists of an acceptance of and commitment to spiritual reality that transcends association with any particular expression of faith.
 
This embrace of pluralism and movement toward spiritual fluidity doesn’t mean that we are necessarily headed toward some sort of universal, global One Religion. Spiritual beliefs and practices are influenced by many variables, some reflecting differences in personality and taste, some reflecting local traditions, and countless other subtle differences in human personality and culture that lead to a preference for one rather than another mode of spirituality. These factors will likely ensure that, as the religion of the future slowly evolves, it will develop along branches that reflect these many differences in preference, but the new normal in which such variations exist will almost certainly be one which strongly affirms religious pluralism.
 
 

​Given that the sense of moral goodness and duty to act virtuously is a universal element of religion, it would follow that if religion evolves, our sense of moral responsibility also should be expected to evolve.
 
If we look at the long term, big picture evolution of human morality, we see a gradual expansion of our sense of moral obligation from family to tribe to village to larger political units such as states and nations. What, then, will be the next step in what has so far been an ever-expanding sense of human moral responsibility? What will morality in a post-Axial Age spirituality look like?
 
First, our sense of spiritually-grounded moral obligation likely will extend to the entire human species, not just to one’s “own” group, whether that be a church, nation, ethnic group, or whatever. For many contemporary believers, that sense of moral obligation has already been extended to its maximum breadth within the human community through a sense of moral obligation to all humans, regardless of religion, ethnicity, race, gender, nationality, etc. The notion of a “brotherhood (or sisterhood) of man (or humanity)” is hardly a new idea, and its origins can be seen even in the teachings of Axial traditions (Jesus extending the sense of moral obligation beyond his Jewish followers to the Gentiles, the Buddha teaching the importance of extending compassion and other moral virtues to people of all castes). In real life, of course, this sense of a moral commitment to the entire species is often forgotten and sullied by its confused connection with various forms of religious exclusivism (moral obligations only to fellow true believers), nationalism (moral obligation only to God’s chosen nation), and similar limiting perspectives. Nonetheless, over the course of the 20th century, and especially among the post-Baby Boomer generation that has grown up with a previously unknown global ecological awareness and more informed recognition of the consequences of many aspects of modern human technologies, we find that the sense of community with the entire human species to be more and more the norm rather than the exception. Such a trend is likely to continue, and the moral teachings of the religion of the future will reflect this sense of the need to treat all of humanity in a virtuous manner.
 
But we would suggest that there are also signs that the expansion of our sense of moral responsibility is already extending even beyond the human species and evolving into a sense of moral responsibility to all living beings.
 
The ethicist Peter Singer has coined the term “speciesism” to describe and criticize the traditional approach to morality in which we treat one species (human) as more deserving of moral consideration than other species, whether plant or animal. Singer argues that speciesism, like racism and sexism, are relics of a morality which humanity is growing out of. We already see the early signs of the emergence of what might be called a “trans-human” morality in the growth of vegetarianism and veganism (growing to the point that even fast-food restaurant chains now offer plant-based alternatives to beef and chicken) and the growing popularity of organizations and movements devoted to natural conservation, environmental protection, and ethical treatment of animals. One might speculate that given these trends, just as today’s believers look back critically at earlier religious moralities that were confined to one’s own tribe and identified sexist and racist behavior as morally acceptable, religious people in the future might someday look back at today’s nationalist and speciesist morality as similarly primitive and brutal.
 
This movement toward a trans-human global ethic is explored by Ervin Laszlo, who sees the evolutionary development of the human species as heading into a post-Axial Age in which human consciousness will become more attuned to our trans-human connections and consequently a similarly expanded ethic will eventually develop. As our concept of God/Spirit/the Sacred expands, so will our sense of ethical responsibility:
 
When people evolve transpersonal consciousness they become aware of their deep ties to each other, to the biosphere, and to the cosmos. They develop greater empathy with people and cultures near and far and greater sensitivity to animals, plants, and the entire biosphere (Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, 125)
 
Again, this will be problematic for those who cling to Axial religions and their less expansive moral teachings, and as with basic beliefs as discussed above, it will take time to develop a more detailed set of post-Axial moral principles. But whatever form those principles take is sure to be one which is certain to reflect a moral commitment on a global scale, covering not only all humans but all sentient beings.

​Let’s continue with our brief look at what a post-Axial religion might look like, with each aspect to be covered in more depth in later posts.
 
Our traditional religions, rooted in Axial Age spirituality, tend to be belief-oriented. That is to say, being religious is understood as primarily a cognitive act of choosing to think that certain propositions as defined in specific creeds, sacred texts, dogmas, theologies, etc., are true. However, the credibility of sacred texts and detailed doctrinal beliefs has been significantly diminished by the epistemological humility which, in the previous post, has been as deriving from a recognition of the cultural and historical contextual nature of all such doctrinal statements.
 
But if the future of religion is not grounded in doctrine, dogma, and reliance on divinely revealed sacred texts, then what will it be based on? What’s left as the basis for religious faith once our confidence in these traditional Axial Age factors has been substantially diminished?
 
We are suggesting that the religion of the future will likely be less rooted in declarative statements, theological arguments, and stories from ancient texts, and more grounded in the everyday awareness of the sacred quality of reality that remains available to people of faith even after the legitimacy of the doctrines and texts of the past have lost much of their credibility.
 
In a sense, this will simply be a return to a meaning of “faith” that brings us back to the origins of religion and that from which the verbal expressions of faith (texts, doctrine, dogma, etc.) derive. Belief in a proposition about a historical event whose veracity must be accepted without evidence, or in “blind faith,” is quite different from belief in a statement about the nature of reality that can be confirmed by one’s own immediate awareness, or experiential faith. In the present era when many of the traditional bases for religious faith are no longer credible for much of the educated population that thinks in 21st century terms, religious experience stands out as the most reliable, substantial, unassailable basis for belief in a spiritual reality.
 
This doesn’t mean that future believers all will be full-blown mystics who walk around in something like altered states of consciousness rooted in intense, prolonged non-dual experiences of the Sacred. Such overwhelming, rapturous nature of a mystical experience is just one type of spiritual experience. Equally valid and compelling is the everyday, ordinary sense of a spiritual dimension to the Cosmos, an often vague but also confident sense that there really is “Something More” than a Universe of time, space, matter, and energy. This perception of a Spiritual dimension does not require intensive and difficult spiritual practices leading to a clearly identifiable moment of overwhelming spiritual illumination. Certainly such extraordinary religious experiences happen, and they are profoundly meaningful in the spiritual lives of those who have them. But for the everyday person of faith who has neither the opportunity nor the interest to pursue the rigorous practices that lead to such experiences, there is the simple, humble, easily acquired sense of Something – a Something which is supremely Good and which confers meaning to the Cosmos, even in spite of the daily messes, challenges, and tragedies of normal, everyday human existence. Leaving doctrines and sacred texts aside, each person still has access to those subtle, quiet, yet powerfully meaningful moments when one senses the presence of Spirit, the presence of the indefinable Something More that has never been adequately captured in doctrinal statements or pronouncements in sacred texts.
 
We can already see the emergence of this more experientially-oriented approach to religion in the growth of the “spiritual but not religious” population. Numerous polls have consistently found a steady growth in the number of people who, on the one hand, do not consider themselves to be “religious” in the sense of formally belonging to an existing tradition or accepting the doctrines of a given faith, while on the other hand identifying as “believers” in the sense of affirming the existence of a spiritual reality. In a sense, this trend is the leading edge of what might likely continue to evolve from a fringe movement to the most common expression of religion in the future: experiential, or empirical spirituality.

​​​Speculation that we have entered the early stages of a Second Axial Age from which there will emerge a post-Axial spirituality that is significantly different from that which we find in the traditional, or Axial Age religions that are with us today is certainly not a new idea. Its origins are sometimes traced to the philosopher Ewert Cousins and the cultural historian Thomas Berry, both of whom were at Fordham University in the 1970s. Many others have added to the conversation about a second Axial Age, some explicitly and others implicitly, from mainstream figures such as sociologist Robert Bellah and historian of religion Karen Armstrong, to more non-traditional contemporary philosophers such as Sean Kelly and Ervin Laszlo, to leading figures in the “Big History” field such as Brian Swimme and David Christian, and many others. So what we are exploring on this website clearly is an idea that is “in the air,” so to speak.
 
While further posts on this website will examine the multitude of diverse manifestations that post-Axial religion might head in the 21st century and beyond, in this series of six posts we would like to simply introduce a brief summary of what this “religion of the future” might include – each of these items explored in more detail later, as well as in Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century: A New guide for the Perplexed.
 
A Different Way to Think About “God”
 
As soon as we affirm that Spirit/God exists, we must also immediately acknowledge the utter inadequacy of human language to describe that Ultimate Reality. In a sense, religion is an activity in which humans use whatever linguistic symbols (i.e., words) are available in the culture in which they live to attempt to try to describe the indescribable. Necessarily, that has often meant using words derived from our experience as humans to describe God, a practice known as anthropomorphism (God is a father, king, ruler, etc.).
But it increasingly appears to be the case that the Axial Age anthropomorphic language used to describe “God” is no longer adequate for the sense of the Sacred that exists for much of contemporary humanity, living as we do in very different cultural and historical circumstances than those of the humans who developed that anthropomorphic God-language.
 
What we need, then, is a way of talking about Spirit that uses more contemporary language and symbols, producing a “religion than is appropriate for our time” (see note below on J.L. Schellenberg).
 
Such a new way of speaking about Spirit is likely to be less anthropomorphic and less rooted in pre-modern value-laden terminology (words such as “king” and  “lord”  might have had a positive connotation in pre-modern and feudal societies, but they have not retained such a positive association in many contemporary cultures). Conceiving Spirit as a male king, ruler, lawgiver, punisher, father figure, and, at times, rather capricious personality, is just not as meaningful or credible to a 21st century sensibility as it was to humans at the beginning of the Axial period when today’s major religions developed.
 
So what is the alternative? That’s hard to say, since we are still in a transition period to post-Axial religion, such that at the present time we can only make best guesses as to what the emerging post-Axial language of faith will be like. However, it seems reasonable to postulate that as the new post-Axial spirituality emerges over the coming centuries, a new religious language will develop to help humans express that which is beyond language. The “God” of the 21st century and beyond will be a much bigger and more expansive sense of “God” than we currently find in the existing traditional religions, and a language to adequately refer to that “God” is yet to be developed.
 

In an earlier post we suggested that religion is a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon. Religion changes all the time, and at the present time it appears to be at a transition point where (like many other aspects of human culture) it could change dramatically in the coming years, decades, and centuries.
But before we begin to look at what those changes might look like as a 21st century spirituality evolves, it might be helpful to look at a model of the long-term evolution of human religion which both helps us to clearly see how religion has evolved in the past and provides a framework for speculation on where religion is headed in the future.
 
The model that we are referring to is the Axial Age, a concept proposed by Karl Jaspers in 1949. Jaspers’ model is not universally accepted today by historians of religion, and clearly it has its share of deficiencies and controversies. But despite those shortcomings, it provides the most useful framework for thinking about the “big picture” of the evolution of human religion.
 
Jaspers coined the term “Axial Age” to describe a period of human history, running from approximately the 8th century BCE to close to the beginning of the Christian era, during which there was a radical shift in religious consciousness in civilizations across the globe. Religion prior to this period tended to be fairly uniform in the various cultures covering the Earth; but during this period, in many civilizations we see the slow emergence of a dramatically modified sense of Spirit, almost as if human consciousness turned on an "axis" and, spiritually speaking,  made a shift to something radically different from what preceded it.
 
 Using Jaspers’ model, we can distinguish between pre-Axial religion, Axial Age religion (represented by the various world religions that are still with us today), and what we will refer to as post-Axial religion, or the newly emerging sense of Spirit that could form the basis of what religion will look like in the future.
 
Pre-Axial Religion
 
We can refer to the period from the earliest evidence of human awareness of a spiritual dimension as early as 40,000 BCE to the 8th or 9th c. BCE as pre-Axial religion. During this extended period, religion throughout the world tended to contain some combination of the following elements:

• Awareness of a spiritual dimension, or what we might describe using contemporary language as a sense of a real dimension of existence that differed from (though was often seen as also present in) the tangible world of matter. In other words, there existed a religious sensibility of some type

• Belief that this spiritual dimension was found in multiple entities, some being presences in nature (referred to by historians of religion as animism), others being personified deities in a “heavenly” realm (i.e., polytheism)
• An essential quality of the spiritual dimension was power. Whether spirits in nature or deities in a heavenly realm, the spiritual entities of pre-Axial religion were understood primarily in terms of their power, and in particular their power over the tangible aspects of human existence that were necessary for survival (crops, game, weather, births, health, protection from enemies, etc.). Moral qualities and an afterlife typically were not significant aspects of the spiritual dimension in pre-Axial religion
• Sacrifice was the primary behavior that established a relationship between the spirits and the human realm. Animals, plants, and even humans were sacrificed to the spiritual powers in the belief that in return for such sacrifice, the spirits/gods would bestow benefits on the sacrificing parties. Morality, while certainly not absent, was not a prominent element in how humans related to the sacred
• Divine beings often acted in a very capricious manner, displaying qualities such as anger, jealousy, favoritism, etc. Gods, in other words, were seen as fearful beings more so than morally exemplary beings
• Acting in a manner that was understood to be “religious” was largely a matter of following rules about giving to the gods what they wanted in order to avoid divine wrath and hopefully (though not in any guaranteed sense) secure divine protection. The human-divine relationship was largely a transactional one, in which parties on both sides could nevertheless be somewhat capricious and unpredictable at times

 
To summarize, in the pre-Axial era humans recognized the presence of invisible, powerful spiritual presences in this world and in a heavenly realm, but they understood these spiritual realities as something that was primarily a source of power, and something that was related to through the performance of sacrifices. Moral qualities (kindness, generosity, compassion, justness, etc.) were neither seen as part of the nature of spiritual reality nor an important aspect of religious behavior.
 
Axial Age Religion
 
And then things changed dramatically, over the span of about five centuries (a remarkably short time in the larger context of the history of the human species) – in China, in India, in the Mediterranean civilizations – in a remarkable manner which would result in a radically different type of spirituality. This change would produce the great World Religions that are still with us today: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism all emerged during this period, in what Jaspers coined “Axial Age” religion, based on the notion that it seemed as if humanity was collectively pivoting on an axis and turning to a very different understanding of the spiritual dimension of reality.
 
More specifically, it was during this period that we see a shift away from understanding the sacred as a capricious and threatening power which is often intertwined in some way with Earthly existence, and toward a perception of Spirit as the unitive and transcendent embodiment of all perfections and the source of universal meaning to existence.

We see this movement from belief in multiple sacred spirits or deities toward a sense of the unitary nature of Spirit in the monotheisms of the Abrahamic traditions, in the non-dualism of the Hindu Brahman and the Buddhist Shunyata/Tathata/Dharmakaya, and in the Chinese Dao. In all of these Axial developments we see an evolution away from a sense that the Sacred is a scattered reality to an awareness of some sort of unity or oneness. This is the period of the rise of monotheisms in the West and the rise of non-dualisms in the East. In the Mediterranean world, the old gods clearly are in the process of receding by the time you get to the Temple period in Judaism, while in Asia the multiform sense of deity never completely disappears but rather becomes incorporated in the larger picture as part of a larger Oneness, as seen, for instance, in the Hindu Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhist tradition.
 
But along with this movement toward an awareness of the unitary nature of spiritual reality, we also find a dramatic shift in the understanding of the qualities of that sacred reality. Spirit becomes the source of transcendent meaning, in the sense that it is no longer solely concerned with the specific circumstances of a given tribe or people, but rather imbues the world with a broader, transcendent purpose and meaning, and the human relationship with the spiritual dimension is seen less as a means of acquiring power and protection for one group against another group, and more as the means by which we participate in universal meaning, a meaning that is salvific in nature and includes recognition of the perpetuation of consciousness after death of the physical body.
 
In addition, Spirit becomes moral during the Axial Age. Sacred reality is no longer characterized by capricious, petty, insolent, vindictive behavior, but rather is understood as the repository of moral perfection. Rather than gods acting like immoral humans, the Axial Age sees a morally perfect spiritual reality which is the source of all moral goodness. Spirit is now associated with love, compassion, kindness, justness, and other moral virtues.
And given this new awareness of the sacred, humanity’s understanding of how it should relate to the sacred also changes. Sacrifice is gradually replaced by virtuous behavior as the fundamental spiritual practice. Whereas in pre-Axial religion, morality was at best secondary to the performance of ritual sacrifices, in Axial religion the role of sacrifice gradually diminishes and is replaced by the importance of leading a life based on moral virtues.
If we look at religions across the globe in, say 3000 BCE, we find people offering sacrifices to a collection of rather unpredictable spiritual beings in return for protection from harm. If we look at religions across the globe in the first century CE, we often (although certainly not exclusively) find people endeavoring to lead virtuous lives in accordance with the will of a benevolent and all-powerful deity or force.
 
Of course, this short account of the shift from pre-Axial to Axial religion is an oversimplification of the complexities of religious life during that period, but the point that we’re trying to make, even in this simplified account, is that religion changed, and changed radically during this period. And, to finally return to the point that led us to a consideration of the Axial Age religion, if we have definitive evidence that human awareness of the Sacred changed radically in the past, why should we assume (as many apparently do) that the human understanding of Spirit stopped evolving around 2000 years ago? Human awareness of the sacred dimension of reality clearly changed radically from the birth of human self-awareness to the beginning of the Christian era… and if so, why should we think that that evolving awareness would have stopped at that point?
​
That much of the world’s population subscribes to this scenario of a religious awareness that is stuck somewhere around the first century or so is clearly demonstrated by the manner in which people from all of the major faiths look to texts that were written during the Axial Age for knowledge about God/Spirit. When a Christian looks to the Bible for an understanding of the nature of God, she or he implicitly affirms that the portrayal of God in that 2000-year-old book is more valuable, meaningful, valid, etc., than what a person living in today’s world can know, sense, intuit, experience about God. The Buddhist who looks to the teaching of the Buddha from the 6th century BCE commits the same error, knowingly or not, of acting as if human insight into the nature of the Sacred can only be found in books that record teachings from 2500 years ago.
 
Post-Axial Religion
 
We are suggesting that just as the human spiritual sensibility reached a point in the past that led to the radical shift in the nature of religion from the pre-Axial to the Axial expression, similarly we have now entered into a period where the religious sensibility that has been developing over the past several centuries has reached a critical point where the religion of Axial Age spirituality, like the pre-Axial spirituality that it replaced, will in turn be transformed into something new, something that is more true to contemporary consciousness and its awareness of Spirit. Some of the old beliefs, the old texts, the old practices that have provided humanity with a meaningful way of relating to Spirit for over 2000 years are nearing the end of their useful existence. The human species and its slowly evolving consciousness have reached a tipping point, from which we will enter into the next phase of human awareness of the Sacred. We are entering a second Axial Age during which there will evolve a post-Axial religion.