The secularization thesis held that organized religion would fade as modern science came to take hold in modern culture and so all of human life would be slowly and properly “disenchanted” or “de-spirited.”

This hasn’t happened. Instead, a far stranger development, one charted by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, has long been unfolding.

More and more people are “post-secular.” They’re not returning en masse to, for example, traditional Catholicism or orthodox Judaism, but they’re also not satisfied with purely natural scientific explanations either. Therefore, they’re not strictly theists nor are they strict scientific materialists or atheists.

What are they? What, in other words, are we?

What we’re witnessing–and experiencing ourselves–is a period that’s typified by sincere spiritual longing. “In my heart, I know that there’s more to reality than what I can put my finger on, more also than what I can think or conceive of. Yet what that is is elusive.”

And here’s where the trouble sets in. In an effort to “go it alone,” a spiritual seeker, however sincere he or she may be, easily gets lost.

On the one hand, he may fall into a New Age mentality, one that’s not precisely wrong when it says that “All this is one” so much as it’s foggy and, bluntly put, a bit cute. Call this “a purple haze.”

On the other hand, she may too quickly embrace “the triumph of the therapeutic” (to cite Philip Rieff’s seminal book) and, in so doing, find herself inadvertently adopting some form of spiritual or even nondualish groupspeak: cooing about “presence,” nodding her head when another confides, and embracing wellness or well-being as the end.

We’re not wrong to insist on “moreness,” but we’ll remain in “spiritual purgatory” unless we thicken our account. What we need is not only rigor–both intellectual and experiential–but also wholesomeness (so, no more hedonic hookups at festivals that get redescribed as “love”) and fellowship (a spirit of friendliness toward others). We need to be open to metaphysical doctrine as well as to some of the chief elements–like devotional singing and homey greetings–that have long been provided by all kinds of houses of worship.

To sum up: Truth says, “I know that something more exists.” Humility says, “I don’t know what ‘that more’ is, and also I can’t keep going it alone.” Then openness chimes in: “I need to open not just my mind but also my heart to others.”