I wonder, however, about two things. One is about form and one is about content.

1. The question about form: Is this a genealogy?
2. The question about content: What are the avenues of spirituality that the project maps?

With respect to the question about form, I wonder just what kind of genealogy the project traces, and if genealogy is the right word for the project at hand. The collection reads more like a buckshot of spirituality. Or a scatter graph of spirituality. It is—and maybe this is appropriate—too broad, too idiosyncratic, too peculiar, too diffuse to tell us anything at all about spirituality, except that those are the terms on which it makes itself clear to us. I could have written my essay about any number of things (to limit it to just record albums, I could have written about Radiohead’s Kid A or Coltrane’s Live in Europe 1964 or the seminal praise and worship recording: 1971’s The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert). If spirituality is really as vast, encompassing, and peculiarly populated as all that, then I’m not sure a genealogy is useful. Or even possible. It might be interesting, as the contributions here certainly are, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about spirituality as a singular phenomenon or as an aspiration or as a very real element of people’s lives.

Certainly, the general leaning of the project is toward the spiritual-secular, anyhow. But, if you’re really going to trace the genealogy of this thing, we might want to include more avowedly “religious” voices here too. Not because they have a monopoly on the stuff, but because those of us who are secularists might yet be able to learn a thing or two from our counterparts who occupy other pews. One might conclude that religion and spirituality ought to be joined at the hip or that they represent separate phenomena or maybe that they were separated at birth, but however you genealogize, they are certainly related. It’s one thing to hear spiritual overtones in books or people, historical events or concepts of our choosing, but it might be something else entirely when one attempts to square the spiritual with the theological.

To be sure, squaring the religious with the theological won’t answer the genealogical question, and I don’t mean to suggest that we might find a genealogical answer to spirituality’s questions by looking to religion. Instead, I hope that my invitation might open the investigation even further—beyond the boundaries of social secular culture and curios. If we’re going to lead this conversation with such loose reins, the discussion might benefit from looking or listening to voices from religion—where spirituality seems so genealogically related, but so difficult to find.

With respect to question number 2, I keep coming back to something I read in a New Yorker article a few years back. It was a profile of David Simon, co-creator of HBO’s The Wire and now, Treme. Simon’s brother, explaining their Jewish upbringing in Baltimore, observed that they felt traditional, but not religious. This spoke to me, growing up in an observant-ish Jewish household where we were steeped in ritual, but certainly not in spirituality. If God were to have shown up on some occasion or another, my mom would have set God a place at the table and asked if He or She had any food allergies.

Traditional but not religious. Simon was talking about avoiding pork or performing ritual, but without the trappings or limitations of religion. It’s a powerful inversion of the preference for things “spiritual but not religious” that has become a refrain of postwar American religious preferences. The taste for the spiritual over the properly religious (whatever that is) has become a nearly orthodox, practically fundamentalist statement of faith for both Baby Boomers and those who study them.

Somehow, opting for spirituality over religion seems to create opportunities that religion closes off. Spirituality seems to suggest syncretisms and recombinations and possibility, while religion appears to offer little more than dogma, discipline, and the routine denials of the syncretisms that we all kind of already know are there.

And so, we have spirituality manifest in everything from pubic hair to Mark Twain’s Palestine with a freedom and writerly panache absent from the literature of most houses of worship. This, I think is a good thing, but moving so fully toward the spiritual and leaving the religious behind seems to accept too readily the overtones of the “spiritual but not religious” chorus. What about David Simon’s formulation of being traditional but not religious? What about being religious and not spiritual? Surely there’s something beneficial, helpful, even redemptive in those recombinations—even if we don’t call them “spiritual.” But the decision to avoid connecting one’s affinity for certain behaviors to something called “religion” seems questionable. As my friend and teacher Steven M. Cohen once said, “God is too important to leave to the religious.”

Surely there are other ways into and through the currents of transcendence, depth, and meaning-making that don’t approach religion and spirituality as an oppositional pair, or that don’t privilege spirituality as religion’s younger, hipper, cooler sibling. According to the implicit logic of Baby-Boomer religious tastes (as articulated by those who don’t define themselves as religious, of course), and by the framing of Frequencies, we might want to sleep with spirituality, but we want to avoid waking up with religion.

My two questions—about the genealogical nature of this enterprise and about the other avenues that spirituality might take—led me back, almost inevitably, to a single concern: the separation of religion from spirituality. The multiplicity of voices and phenomena captured in the essays, the multiple frequencies and resonances of the broader project, the dualities of form and structure, have led me back to the singularity of my question. And what more could I expect from an investigation of spirituality than that?

Those who call themselves “religious” are the most obvious examples. Both Evangelical Christians, who often see themselves as beleaguered or oppressed by secular culture, and Hasidic Jews, who cordon themselves off from English and American culture by creating Yiddish-speaking enclaves in Brooklyn, do this. For these communities, secularism is a constant threat, couched at the door of their churches, synagogues, schools, and communities. With overly sexualized television programs and other entertainments that pander to people’s base desires, secular culture is waiting to pounce on unsuspecting religious folks and drag them down into its amoral maw.

Yet, similarly, those keen on calling themselves secular are engaged in a parallel pursuit: trying to survive, create, or discover meaning in the wakes of disenchantment and rationalism. This kind of survival is never easy; one cannot simply look toward a book or a code or a personal relationship with the divine for guidance or meaning. Questions about human existence cannot be easily deferred to the divine, and engaging them existentially can be taxing even for secularism’s most ardent affiliates. Secular life, despite its roots in the rationalism and logic of the Enlightenment, remains awfully murky to navigate.

And then, of course, there are those who call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” “traditional but not religious,” or “spiritual seekers.” These account for the 44 percent of Americans who identify with faith traditions that are different from those into which they were born, whom the Pew Research Center cleverly called America’s “faithful unfaithful.”  Americans are notoriously choosy, and in recent decades religion has become another of the many options people pursue in search of a richer, more meaningful life.

Whether you see “the secular” as a threat or a refuge, an option or an impulse, we are all trying to survive it, and one could argue that religious folks are trying to survive the secular far more ardently than secular folks are trying to survive the religious (at least in the United States). Of course, most of us fall somewhere in between—looking for and cobbling together meaning in and around the edges of religious and secular schools of thought and belief. Yet, for all of the boundary marking and making, secular and religious are not mutually exclusive; they are mutually constitutive.

And that’s where Lofton (along with an audience of millions) finds Oprah:  at the intersection of religious and secular, in between spiritual and material, personal and communal, ritual and improvisational. And it is a brilliant discovery.

Oprah, Lofton reminds us, is not a religion, but Oprah moves in religious ways. From confessions to consumer goods, from rituals of self-care to reading sacred texts, Oprah operates religiously without operating like a religion. She’s got rituals (of reading and watching), she elicits confessions and grants abdications, she promises “useful” information, and she offers salvation to those in need of help. For all the miracles she documents on her show, she’d be a shoe-in for sainthood.

For Oprah, religious sensibilities are crucial for surviving the secular, but religion, as such, is not. In this way, she is the perfect figure for shedding light on contemporary American religious culture, which is increasingly characterized by individual choices, by withering denominational structures, and by the spread of the “faithful unfaithful.”  One need not find a religion to be religious, and one need not be religious in order to be spiritual. For many, Oprah provides a venue for doing just that—that is, for surviving the secular without opting for religion.

It is, as Lofton shows us, the enshrinement of individual choice as the marker of American religious culture and the fullest conjunction of consumerist and religious ethos. “Abundant consumption and abundant selectivity in that consumption pose no moral threat” in Oprah’s religious-without-religion universe. Oprah’s path of the religious is beset on all sides by sumptuous goods, candid confessions, jaw-dropping books, and opportunities for spiritual reflection, provided one has the proper accessories.

And you’ll know if you have the proper accessories because Oprah will have anointed them with her iconic O. The O will guide viewers through the desert of individual choices, like a pillar of fire or a column of smoke. Though she endows the glory of individual choice on her viewers, they should not be left with too much choice, lest they stop their subscriptions or find something better to do at 4:00 PST, each weekday.

Because Oprah is ultimately a business, it cannot simply support “choice” (either religious or material) in the abstract. Oprah has to advocate for particular choices—this pen, that journal, this time slot. For all of Lofton’s close readings, Oprah cannot quite be the prophet of personal choice, because Oprah needs her viewers, readers, followers, consumers, and advertisers. And, like jealous gods and charismatic leaders that have preceded her, she needs them to behave. In this way, Oprah is closer to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor than she is to his prisoner.

Yet, this is precisely why Oprah is so vital to conversations about American religious life: because she talks the talk of individual choice and spirituality, of consumerism and confessions, while embodying the needs, structures, and desires of her industry. She’s not ready to grant her followers access to the transcendent truths just yet. So she’ll keep them in the dark, and keep them watching for just one more episode, one more issue, one more book, celebrity interview, makeover, great prize giveaway, journal, bath. . . . She’ll keep them tuning in, scratching and scraping to survive secularism, all the while convincing them that that’s the best that they can hope for.