17/03/2022
discussion panel
The Sacred and the Profane
featuring JJ Charlesworth, Byzantia Harlow and Jan Tarnas
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Among 16-29-year-olds in the Western world, Christianity (understood as a faith or religion) is in rapid decline. A 2018 report entitled Europe’s Young Adults and Religion found that in 12 out of 22 countries in Europe (including Israel and the UK), over 50% of young adults claim not to belong to any religion. The exceptions are Poland and Lithuania, where 82% and 71% of young adults (respectively) claim to be Catholic. In an increasingly multi-racial Europe, the rise of black Pentecostalism and Islam are significant. Traditional western Christianity is, without doubt, waning.
- Secularism dominates Western countries, such as the UK, France, Czech Republic and Sweden. At the same time Enlightenment, atheist, secular, humanist philosophy as well as reason, rationality, objectivity, human and technological progress are also scrutinized and examined. It is easy to write off young people as nihilistic, but the vast majority are not. Post-modernism has shattered culture and splintered society into myriad forms of ‘do-it-yourself’ spiritualism embracing notions of ecology, Gaia, Eastern and African religions, paganism and technology.
- This contemporary, post-modern, syncretic spiritualism is abundant on social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Writer and scholar on Islamic philosophy and theology, Esmé L.K. Partridge writes that TikTok “has become the tributary from which many deinstitutionalized spiritual practices proceed, forming digital subcultures—bound tenuously by hashtags and mutual followers—such as WitchTok, an amorphous hybrid of Wicca and other neo-pagan beliefs, and ‘reality shifting,’ a trend comprised of practices for inducing altered states of consciousness.”
- It could be argued that this ‘reality shifting’ is at the core of woke activism and thinking, where objective and immutable facts, such as biological sex, are contingent to cultural and social subjectivity. John McWhorter has described wokeism as a religion of the left. The alt-right has also embraced the occult and mysticism in what it sees as a spiritual battle against liberal, Marxist, and cosmopolitan tendencies.
- In The End of Christianity, the French Catholic philosopher, Chantal Delsol describes our current moment as follows:
- “The new ecological religion is a form of postmodern pantheism. Nature becomes the object of a cult, only partly based on reality. Mother earth becomes a kind of pagan goddess, and not only among indigenous Bolivians, but among Europeans as well. So much so that Pope Francis speaks today of ‘our mother the earth’, in a Christian sense of course, but leaving open the ambiguity that allows the link with contemporary beliefs. Our contemporaries defend in all its forms a nature distorted by humans, but also, they hug trees. We are at a stage where, in the vast field opened up by the erasure of Christianity, new beliefs waver and tremble.”
- Psychedelic drugs have been used to free the mind in artistic and countercultural movements, opening the door to visions, new insights, and alternate realities. Alexander Beiner of Rebel Wisdom believes that psychedelics can change culture and society and create a new transformation, but also questions the growing capitalist commodification of the psychedelic experience. Augmented reality, virtual reality, psychotherapy, mental health drugs (Prozac 2.0) are embraced by big corporations and profit-hungry businesses. Beiner believes that to counteract this and combat capitalist exploitation, psychedelics need to be grounded in the sacred:
- “The sacred is not there to make our lives better. It is not there to confirm our warped ideologies. It is there to shred us. It guides us to the depths of ourselves to find our own delusions and dispel them. Psychedelics were originally called ‘psychotomimetic’, because they were thought to temporarily induce insanity. It may be that going temporarily mad is the only way to see how mad we already are.”
- Artists, musicians, and writers have been seeking a sense of beatitude for centuries, have struggled with religious traditions and morality, and many have dabbled with hallucinogenics and embraced esoteric mysticism and non-Western faiths.
- Contemporary artists such as Zadie Xa, Tai Shani, and our guest panellist Byzantia Harlow, each in their own way, embrace notions of shamanism, ritual, mysticism, the mythic, hallucinatory experiences, cosmology, and witchcraft in both their art and personality and sense of self. Is this the dawn of a new age where the sacred and technology – the sacred and the profane – can merge and offer us, as Partridge writes in her essay Spirituality in the Postmodern World, a greater degree of nuance, opening up “possibilities of metaphysical revival—or perhaps, re-enchantment—in a liquid world?”
- Or, is this 21st-century revival a regressive step back to pre-enlightenment thought and values?
- We look forward to welcoming you to join the conversation about where the future of religions, spirituality, morality, art, and politics meet, with our panel of celebrated artists, writers, curators, and thinkers.
- Curators
- Manick Govinda
- Agnieszka Kolek
Photo: Daniel Czarnocki
Debates have been financed by
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