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The changes that took place in American religious life during the late twentieth century were, in some important respects, unprecedented. As the U.S. became hospitable to virtually all the religions of the world, more religious switching and experimenting occurred than ever before. In other respects, the enthusiasm for spirituality in this period was similar to previous Great Awakenings that have marked American religious history in the past. This concluding chapter compares the transformation of American religion in the late twentieth century to previous awakenings, suggesting that the impetus to spiritual expansion can be traced back through the American Transcendentalists to the New England Puritans and their influential role in shaping American culture.

The most famous intellectual in America at the time of the Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson had started out confused and rebellious. Like his father he became a minister, but he resigned his pulpit in 1832 feeling that Unitarianism did not respond to the stirrings of the heart. In the next decade, he developed his ideas on the place of the individual in society. In Nature, he encouraged readers to break free from the stranglehold of the past, from empirical science, and from artificial social arrangements, all of which had combined to fracture and blind mankind. He called for intuition and spontaneity. By the time he was done, he had followers. Some were also young New England men and women who gathered together, became known as Transcendentalists, and published a paper called The Dial.

This chapter examines the essay “First and Second Series and Representative Men” to suggest the ways in which philosophical reconstruction occurred. Emerson drew on the tradition of Platonism and on the ideas of his fellow Transcendentalists to reconstruct philosophical practise. In part, the revision has to do with how philosophy is actually defined. But it also has to do with how one goes about defining.

This chapter examines Alan Watts' relationship with the Beats, as well as Christianity, which is the dominant religion of North America, and its common points with the philosophies of Hinduism, Zen, Taoism and Buddhism. It takes note of Watts' doubts about the Beats' spiritual authenticity and discusses his philosophy, which is rooted in the tradition of the American Transcendentalists, where mysticism is considered to be the most important goal of religion.

This chapter offers a reading of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Widely recognized as the quintessential “American novel,” Moby-Dick focuses on the transnationalism of nineteenth-century commercial whaling. The chapter examines transnational interpretations of Moby-Dick, including C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953). It also considers communist and socialist interpretations of Moby-Dick, along with the Transcendentalists’ conception of friendship. Finally, the chapter reflects on the philosophical and psychological forms of subjectivity associated with Western modernity and their applicability to the real conditions of globalization.

Serious and intelligent debates between elite Northeastern Protestants from the Reformed traditions characterized religious discourse in the early American republic. At the same time, this chapter shows, the emergence of modern nationalism had transformed the broad gamut of Reformed Protestant traditions in America. Like their Congregationalist and Presbyterian counterparts, Unitarians and Transcendentalists embraced the nation as a sacred community, as the basic social metaphysic. They also turned to missions and missionary work as a way of advancing their religious and nationalist vision. While more complicated than a mere class interest project, missions and missionaries emerged on a social and geographic basis, and sought to advance a program generally identifiable as bourgeois and nationalist.

This chapter assesses some common cultural associations people have with Buddhism and where these associations came from. In the case of Europe and America, early in the 1800s, two groups—the Romantics and the Transcendentalists—started to take an interest in ideas from Asia in general and from Buddhism in particular. Another early source of Western interest in Buddhism is a religious movement called Theosophy. It is through these channels that many in the West first came into contact with Buddhism. It arrived filtered through people with very particular agendas and interests. People who had little, if any, command of Buddhist texts or the languages they were written in. Though they popularized ideas and texts from Asia, they did so with a very specific spin, one that still can be felt today. Ultimately, it is important to keep in mind that there is more to Buddhism than one's own idealized version of it because there is a real danger in projecting what one wants onto Buddhism and ignoring the rest.