the future will be mystical
designing the social architecture for post-religious spirituality
159 years ago, a German theologian named Ernst Troeltsch had a prediction: “The most rapidly growing [type of spiritual group] in the future will be mysticism.”
At some point in humanity’s future, I believe everyone in society will become a mystic. And if that were the case - I’ve been thinking about a lot about what kind of infrastructure would usher in that world and sustain it in its becoming.
DISCLAIMER: If you would like to read the scholarly and long version of this essay please check out the paper here.
You may already be a mystic. A mystic in Troeltsch’s eyes was not necessarily someone who received miraculous visions or signs or supernatural experiences. Instead, mysticism signified a personal and subjective form of religion that erred internal rather than external, individual rather than institutional, more experiential rather than scriptural. For the mystic, Troeltsch said, membership in church or sect is of no significance—it was the free personal experience that mattered the most.
The West, and America in particular, has been in bed with mysticism since the early founding of the nation. The philosopher, Charles Taylor, notes that Western religiosity over recent centuries has seen “a steadily increasing emphasis on a religion of personal commitment and devotion, over against forms centered on collective ritual”. Particularly in America, scholar Leigh Schmidt remarks “the American fascination with mountaintop mysticism and seeker spirituality goes much deeper than any generational fixation”. The result is an emerging spiritual milieu that arches towards prizing individual experience and inward devotion, often suspicious of external authority or dogma.
You might have read the words of these folks in a bout of existentialism on a Sunday afternoon: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William James. This diverse group of thinkers, writers, and organizers were at the helm of transforming “mysticism” and “spirituality” from obscurity to prominence in America. In much of their work, the locating of religion’s essence in the solitary individual was of prominence, as well as the sympathetic capacity to appreciate and appropriate other religious traditions as spiritual resources.
Among this group, it was William James in 1902, a Harvard philosophy professor, who treated personal experience as the heart of religion, more fundamental than institutional dogmas, in his famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience. His oft-quoted definition of religion was “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” He viewed organized churches and creeds as secondary attempts to socialize and intellectualize the original experiences of their founders: “Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition,” James observes, “but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.” For James, the mystical experience stands as religion’s primal source—an unmediated moment of insight whose authority rests not in external validation, but in the transformative conviction it leaves within the individual. It challenged burgeoning scientific secularism at that time, which dismissed spiritual experiences as superstition or neurosis. By foregrounding the mystical and inward dimensions, he gave intellectual respectability to the idea that the essence of spirituality lies in immediate feeling and insight, accessible in the personal depths of any individual.
mysticism is just the “spiritual but not religious” of today
If the definition of mysticism is a personal and experiential relationship with the divine, often independent of institutional religion, and the contemporary definition of spiritual but not religious (SBNR) is a person who identifies with spiritual beliefs or practices but rejects or distances themselves from formal religious institutions, then there is strong probability that today’s SBNR population includes many modern mystics.
In effect, mysticism in the 1900s has been transformed—recast under the contemporary banner of the spiritual but not religious. These individuals, like the mystics of Troeltsch’s and James’s time, prize inward experience, intuitive knowing, and personal meaning over external dogma or collective ritual. Rather than disappearing, mysticism may simply be changing form—less about monasteries or mountaintops, and more about meditation apps, solo pilgrimages, and the quiet, contemplative moments in ordinary life.
Courtney Bender, a sociologist of religion, is a deep researcher of the practices of the Spiritual But Not Religious in contemporary society. In her ethnography The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, Bender immersed herself in the spiritual subcultures of Cambridge, Massachusetts – attending meditation circles, channeling groups, healing sessions, and informal gatherings where individuals share and discuss their spiritual experiences. Far from finding “spiritual seekers as cultural and theological orphans adrift in fragmented, post-religious worlds”, her research revealed “various networks and internal distinctions within the spiritual networks” that connected people. They create, in effect, mini-institutions or ad hoc communities – what Bender terms an “emergent network” or “shadow culture” of spirituality. These networks are “weakly organized” compared to churches, as Bender notes, but they are nonetheless real channels through which ideas and interpretations circulate.
Individuals who might on a survey report “no religious affiliation” were in fact participating in yoga classes at a church, meditation circles at a Theosophical society, lectures at a Spiritualist temple, and reading groups at a metaphysical bookstore. Bender observed that the people in these circles spent a great deal of time talking about their experiences with one another – interpreting them, comparing them, validating or occasionally critiquing them. In describing one mystics’ discussion group Bender writes, “Their stories were dense with detail and presented occasions for extended, changing, and conflicting interpretations.” In these conversations, interpretation is not a solitary act but a social one. Participants frequently drew upon whatever frameworks were at hand – perhaps Jungian psychology to interpret a dream, or Theosophical concepts to explain an energy feeling. Through such dialogue, the group effectively trained its members in how to experience and articulate the mystical.
Through Bender’s account we can see how contemporary seekers, even outside traditional institutions, generate interpretive cultures through storytelling, ritual practice, and informal networks of syncretic meaning. And yet, what seems most lacking in these contemporary ecosystems is not experience itself, but the enduring structures that support and deepen it. In previous eras, religious communities served this role—offering not only doctrines but also place, language, memory, and a shared symbolic world in which to situate the ineffable.
Charles Taylor’s account of modern secularity sharpens this diagnosis, tracing how religion in the West has undergone a long arc of “disembedding”—a detachment from both the cosmic and social sacred, which once held individual belief within a larger moral and metaphysical framework. In modernity, he writes, this “revolution disembeds us from the cosmic sacred altogether, and even disembeds us from the social sacred, and posits a new relation to God as designer”—a relation that each person must now navigate alone. The result is what Taylor famously terms the “Age of Authenticity,” where individuals increasingly pursue “self-defined spiritualities” as part of an “individuating revolution,” even as they lament the “break-up” of community and shared belief.
As Taylor observes, many now experience this cultural shift as both gain and loss: unprecedented freedom to craft meaning, yet a spiritual landscape marked by fragmentation, drift, and what he calls “fragile conditions of belief”. This paradox—deep longing for spiritual encounter, paired with weak interpretive infrastructure—calls for a renewed theological imagination. What Taylor gestures toward in his vision of the early Christian ethos as a “network of agape” invites contemporary re-articulation: spaces not organized by rigid orthodoxy, but by love, trust, and the shared task of discernment. A “network of agape” refers to early Christian communities loosely bound not by uniform doctrine, but by mutual care, ethical commitment, and the felt presence of divine love expressed through human relationship. It was a relational and affective infrastructure, where spiritual belonging arose from embodied connection rather than institutional allegiance.
What kind of infrastructure could create the conditions by which a “network of agape” could both emerge and be sustained for the modern mystic?
For lack of a better word, I’d like to create the normative proposal for a “Mystical Commons”: a communal, pluralistic, and participatory space where seekers can come together to hold, interpret, and deepen their encounters with the sacred.
Such a space would not only offer communal meaning-making after the personal experiences of the sacred, but also expose individuals to multiple symbolic repertoires beforehand—expanding what experiences are possible, intelligible, and spiritually generative in our disembedded age.
The main starting attributes for a Mystical Commons are:
Physical place
An embodied value of pluralism
Facilitators not intermedieries
Non-dogmatic rituals that give rise to collective effervescence
physical place.
First, a mystical commons begins as a physical place—an embodied environment that invites people to return regularly and form an ongoing community. This means creating physical and ritual environments that help personal experiences “stick” and gain depth. While digital apps, online forums, sporadic circles across numerous spaces, and private gatherings can supplement spiritual life, they cannot replace the relationship formation which supports integration through consistent face-to-face encounters in a dedicated space.
Anthropologist Courtney Bender affirms this through her fieldwork in Cambridge, observing that what we call “the spiritual” is not disembodied or unstructured, but rather rooted in relationships with built environments and adjacent institutions. She writes, “many [spiritual leaders] do so in religious settings—and not only in the Theosophical Society and the Swedenborgian Chapel, but also in the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, which… opened its doors to the local neo-pagan group; the Friends Meetinghouse, which hosted shamans; and the Congregational Church, which hosted ecstatic drumming and dancing groups.” What Bender’s ethnography makes plain is that people do not simply want to meet—they want to gather in spaces that resonate, architecturally and atmospherically, with a sense of the sacred.
The desire for spiritual depth is matched by a longing for environments that feel holy, set apart, or gently consecrated. Not just any neutral or utilitarian space, but ones that carry the aesthetic and symbolic weight of sanctity, even if reframed for pluralist use. While the mystical commons would not be housed in an existing church per se, it would learn from the architecture of sacred presence that churches and religious buildings have long cultivated. It would be a new typology of physical place that stands as its own and signals reverence, beauty, and continuity, without the exclusivity or theological fixity that often accompanies traditional religious spaces.
In practical terms, this might mean a beautiful, calming environment with symbols from multiple traditions or ones that are universally resonant and open to subjective interpretation (such as nature motifs or archetypal shapes). There might be quiet alcoves, a larger hall for shared presence (meditation, prayer, or contemplation), a wisdom hall for salons and lectures from pluralistic traditions, intimate rooms for interpretive circles, pathways for circumambulation, or altars void of any one God. The key is continuity and embodiment: a place that becomes spiritually resonant through repeated presence. Such a place anchors spiritual practice in the rhythms of real life and encourages an experiential knowledge that mystical insight and interpretation is not just a heady flash but something that takes root and ripens in community and place.
an embodied value of pluralism.
Culturally, the mystical commons embodies a commitment to pluralism, inclusivity, and individual freedom—not as mere liberal tolerance, but as a ritualized practice of engaging difference. As Cohen notes in The Symbolic Construction of Community, “the sharing of the symbol is not necessarily the sharing of the meaning”; thus, community can be sustained not by uniform belief, but by a collective agreement to “incorporate and enclose difference” through a common ideal. While traditional religious communities often cohere through shared dogmas, rituals, or theological claims, the mystical commons coheres through pluralism itself as a shared symbolic commitment and ideal. Rather than enforcing doctrinal unity, the commons affirms that ultimate reality may be approached from many directions, and that each person’s sincere experience holds interpretive weight. People of different backgrounds, beliefs, and cosmologies could thus co-inhabit the commons without having to water down their truths or collapse their distinct experiences into a single consensus. As Bender observes in her studies of the spiritual scene in Cambridge, many participants identify as “a yogi, and an artist, and a singer and a writer, and a mystic” all at once—refusing fixed labels and inhabiting a fluid spiritual identity. In this environment, pluralism is not simply tolerated but ritually practiced: theological difference is welcomed and made fruitful through interspiritual meditations, multi-tradition festivals, scriptural reasoning dialogues, and collaborative discernment circles.
This model reflects a longstanding spiritual pattern. As Ernst Troeltsch observed in Public Religions in the Modern World, “those ‘born-again’ souls who have ‘experienced’ individually the redeeming power of the ‘new light’ have always tended to feel closest fellowship with kindred spirits in other denominations than with ‘old lights’ in their own.” What unites these individuals, he writes, is not institutional allegiance but “a parallelism of spontaneous religious personalities, whose only bond of union is their common Divine origin, their common spirit of love, and their union in God, which is the free and invisible work of the Divine Spirit.” The mystical commons echoes this vision: a space where people gather not because they agree on theological propositions, but because they are kindred spirits—each drawn by the gravity of lived experience, and each committed to interpreting the sacred with humility and openness. This points to a form of spiritual community that is not defined by what members must believe, but by how they relate: through shared longing, intuitive resonance, and a common commitment to exploring the divine as it discloses itself in different lives. The mystical commons echoes this ideal: it is not a church in the conventional sense, but a spiritual commons—a space where kindred seekers gather, not to be shaped by creed, but to deepen through presence, conversation, and the lived immediacy of spiritual encounter.
Importantly, this model does not negate the value of traditional religious institutions. For many, churches, synagogues, temples, or mosques remain vital spaces to deepen within a single lineage—offering continuity, depth, and theological coherence. In fact, the mystical commons may function as a threshold space, surfacing multiple traditions in a way that helps individuals discern which path they may want to root more firmly in. At the same time, for others, formal affiliation with a particular tradition may feel constraining. Entering a church may imply that one’s personal experiences must be interpreted exclusively through that tradition’s metaphysical and moral filters. For such individuals, a more fluid and dialogical matrix for meaning-making—where diverse frameworks are held in proximity but not in hierarchy—offers a more honest and expansive spiritual home. The rise of this need is evident in the broader social trend: for the first time in U.S. history, church membership fell below 50% in 2020, according to Gallup, signaling not necessarily a rejection of spirituality but a shift in the institutions people trust to steward it.
“An ecology of spiritual exploration” nourished by gardeners, not gurus
Rather than a fixed program, a mystical commons would an “ecology of spiritual exploration”. Its activities would emerge organically from the evolving needs and inspirations of the community, more like a garden than a curriculum. Participants would collectively curate rituals and dialogues that speak to them: periods of silent meditation, interfaith prayer, spiritual text book clubs, dream interpretation circles, journaling workshops, or storytelling evenings. Interpretive discussions would likely follow any profound individual experience: for example, after someone shares a mystical insight or vision, the group might engage in communal discernment—listening and reflecting together on what the experience might signify. Such interpretive circles allow multiple perspectives (psychological, theological, symbolic) to be offered. In this collective reflection, personal experiences are neither automatically validated as universal truth nor dismissed as delusion; rather, they are lovingly tested and refined in the crucible of shared inquiry and mirroring.
As such, integrating personal insights into communal dialogue guards against the spiritual narcissism or solipsism that sometimes plagues purely individualist paths. It fosters a form of mutual responsibility, in which individual revelations are not isolated events but become occasions for shared discernment, ethical reflection, and the slow formation of communal wisdom. Crucially, those who guide these kinds of activities would be facilitators and “garden-tenders”, not gurus. Rather than authoritative prophets or priests interpreting truths, facilitators focus on holding space, tending the container, protecting the process, and infusing it with loving presence. For example, a facilitator might simply open the gathering with a poem, ensure that everyone has a chance to speak in a circle, or maintain an atmosphere of respect. This approach guards against hierarchy while still providing structure.
ritual as collective effervescence, not dogma.
In addition to these kinds of interpretative practices, ritual is a foundational modality of the mystical commons. Far from being a vestige of archaic religiosity, ritual constitutes a primary technology of human meaning-making. As Émile Durkheim argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the sacred does not necessarily originate in metaphysical content but in the collective effervescence generated when individuals gather and act in synchrony. Sacredness, in this view, is not a property of doctrines or deities, but an emergent quality of coordinated presence: “The sacred is the effect of a momentary uniting of individuals into a jointly acting collective.” These moments act as liminal spaces where inner experience is externalized, reshaped, and received in a shared field of attention by turning feeling into form, and form into meaning.
In the context of a mystical commons, we can thus reposition ritual not as the remnant of fading religious traditions, but as a generative force in communal life—one capable of shaping shared attention, anchoring spiritual experience, and cultivating new forms of collective sanctity. Within the mystical commons, such ritual technologies can be intentionally repurposed: not to restore the structures of the past, but to open symbolic containers for presence, transformation, and meaning in a pluralistic world. Such rituals might include communal meditation, rites of passage, grief circles, seasonal observances, or silent processions. Each of these experiences would be intentionally crafted not around theological consensus but symbolic resonance. Indeed, what binds these acts is not shared dogma but the mutual willingness to enter into symbolic space together: to make solitude porous to solidarity, and contemplation receptive to communion.
As Hans Joas underscores in The Power of the Sacred: rituals “create a controlled environment that temporarily suspends the mechanisms of everyday life,” enabling participants to inhabit ideal states not merely as ideas but as lived experiences. In the context of a mystical commons, these states may not revolve around doctrinal certainties but around ethical and existential qualities like reverence, presence, gratitude, or collective mourning. Their sacrality lies not in orthodoxy but in their capacity to convene difference into a shared moment of transcendence. In this sense, ritual performs a double movement: affirming spiritual autonomy while inviting individuals into freely chosen, embodied togetherness. It does not restore religion-as-institution but reimagines sacred practice as a civic and spiritual commons—where meaning arises not from divine decree but from the intersubjective space between us, in acts of shared attention and reverent presence.
a provocation.
Perhaps mysticism was never meant to stay cloistered in monasteries, hidden in footnotes, or relegated to the confines of our privatized lives. Perhaps it was always meant to overflow—into the cities, into the commons, into the ordinary rhythms of life. Perhaps the continual downfall and distrust of our institutions, political and religious alike, was never a bug, but a triumphant prelude to a future in which meaning is mediated through our own discernment. Morals derived from experience derived from first principles.
What we need now is not another church, nor a vague escape from institutions altogether, but something in between: a holding structure for mystery, made by many hands, creeds, and co-existing truths. A mystical commons offers not a final answer, but a shared question: How might we live if the sacred was not somewhere else, but right here—between us, among us, arising through us?
“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
—Leonard Cohen
Bibliography
Bender, Courtney. The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Cohen, Anthony P. The Symbolic Construction of Community. Routledge, 1985.
Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. Free Press, 1995.
Flammarion, Camille. L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire. Hachette, 1888.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902.
Joas, Hans. The Power of the Sacred: An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment. Oxford University Press, 2021.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. University of California Press, 2005.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
Troeltsch, Ernst. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. Translated by Olive Wyon. Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.
I’m Patricia and I write this newsletter in my free time every time an insight needs to be grappled with and birthed. If you want to support my writing, you can join me down the rabbit hole 🕳🐇
This is very interesting as a glimpse on how people are replacing the old church like structures. I hope that most of this places and practices are not new forms of self delusion, but focus on belonging and communal care. This is paradoxically the contrary of the way this article defines mysticism, as a mainly individual practice and experience. The other risk that lurks in social structures like those described is the risk of easily deriving into cults or into “us versus them” groups.
This was a captivating read. It honestly sparked a lot of thought into how communities are in need of more communal places that don’t subject a person to a certain conformity. Everyone has their own relationship with spirituality and these “spiritual centers” would be wonderful areas for people to explore their connection more freely. Great job, Patricia!