In this article, I look at how, in late modern societies, science and religion have become so closely integrated that they often fuse together, becoming a hybrid of the two—something that is both science and religion, or perhaps neither. We can leave until later whether we like this prospect; my first point is that it is actually happening on a large scale, whether we like it or not.

In the recent literature within the sociology of religion, the question of secularization has been much discussed. Until about the 1990s, it was pretty well agreed upon that secularization was an inherent feature of modernization, an inevitable consequence of social evolution. However, the resurgence of various forms of religiosity across the globe forced sociologists to question this evolutionary framework and its rationalist assumptions (see Casanova ). Indeed, no less a scholar than Peter Berger ()—at one point the lead proponent of secularization—decanted his commitment to the theory, heralding the “desecuralization of the world.” While there are some, like Steve Bruce (), who remain steadfastly committed to the secularization thesis, many sociologists of religion have followed Berger and begun to consider the possibility that modernity might not so much dissolve religion as transform it (e.g., Heelas and Woodhead ; Campbell ; Davies ). Indeed, talk of a turn toward “spirituality” in the West, and what it might mean for the future of religion has become a staple of much sociology of religion (Houtman and Aupers ). While there is not yet a clear consensus on what a religiosity adapted to the conditions of late modernity might or does look like, it is precisely this question that has preoccupied me for some time. Consequently, my investigations, both theoretical and empirical, have led me to identify the basic outlines of a (if not the) dominant religious form of today—what in emic terms is often called “spirituality,” but what I, from an etic perspective, call the religion of the heart.

This article proceeds as follows. I begin by outlining the nature of my empirical investigations, explaining how I came to identify this shared religious form. Second, I explicate what I mean by the “religion of the heart,” and draw on the work of Ernst Troeltsch and Colin Campbell to identify what I take to be its historical antecedents. Third, I analyze the ambiguous relationships fostered between the religion of the heart and the discourses of science and religion, respectively, in late modernity. In so doing, I aim to illuminate how the social conditions of late modernity undermine or challenge what we conventionally think of as scientific and religious authorities, while at the same time creating existential needs that the religion of the heart is well adapted to meet. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this process, especially as it relates to the sustainability of science and religion, as independent enterprises, in the twenty‐first century.

BACKGROUND

In 2015, I began conducting qualitative research consisting of semistructured in‐depth interviews with Canadian millennials (born between 1982 and 2000) who self‐identify as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). My original motivation was simply to better understand what was being signaled when these young people distanced themselves from “religion” and simultaneously embraced “spirituality.” While I recognize, with others like Nancy Tatom Ammerman (), that the SBNR designation holds different meanings from context to context, and by no means refers to an established set of beliefs, I nevertheless argue that SBNRs are not nearly as unique as their self‐images suggest. Indeed, despite the apparent diversity at the level of belief, there is a striking uniformity at what we might call other levels of commitment. Indeed, I argue that the shift from “religion” to “spirituality” is indicative of a massive cultural or religious shift ongoing in late modernity, one that has largely gone unnoticed. For this reason, I have argued that many sociologists of religion have missed the forest for the trees, that is, they have failed to account for the underlying similarities exhibited by SBNRs (Watts ). Accordingly, in an earlier publication, I called the shared discourse informing my SBNR interviewees’ accounts “self‐spirituality” (Watts , b), borrowing a term from Paul Heelas (, ), well known for his work in New Age studies. When writing that piece, I did not think to look beyond the SBNR camp for something like self‐spirituality. However, with time (and a number of propitious chance conversations), I was led to investigate a number of spaces that transcended the confines of the SBNR label, yet exhibited strikingly similar cultural logics. These included a neo‐pentecostal or charismatic church, a twelve‐step Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting frequented by young people, and a Toastmaster's International club meeting, all located in downtown Toronto. Indeed, upon conducting over a year of fieldwork at each site, I have come to believe that the type of spirituality exhibited by my SBNR study participants is far from wholly distinct from what I found in these other ostensibly “religious” or “secular” spaces. While members at these various groups may hold quite different ideological and indeed theological commitments, I am convinced they subscribe to a shared religious or cultural structure. As a result, I have been forced to find a term other than “self‐spirituality” in order to capture the broader or more general religious form that seems to pervade these seemingly distinct contexts—hence “the religion of the heart.”

THE RELIGION OF THE HEART

I have come to think the heart a central metaphor for “spirituality” today. Its meaning is multiple, speaking to the various dimensions of its cultural structure. For instance, a member of AA described spirituality as “following my heart in any way that it directs me,” while for one of my SBNR interviewees it entailed “listening to my heart.” The heart beckons themes of authenticity and sincerity, central to today's spirituality (Taylor ). In our interview, an SBNR artist lamented, “I'm a very cerebral person, so I feel like I've neglected my heart.” The notion that spirituality gives primacy to the heart and not the mind is a common theme. Well‐known spiritual teacher Deepak Chopra writes, “the heart is intuitive; it's holistic, it's contextual, it's relational…. At times it may not even seem rational, but the heart has a computing ability that is far more accurate and far more precise than anything within the limits of rational thought” (1994, 44).

In Heart Religion, historian John Coffey notes that the Oxford English Dictionary defines the “heart” as “the seat or repository of a person's inmost thoughts, feelings, inclinations, etc.; a person's inmost being; the depths of the soul; the soul, the spirit” (Coffey 2016, 6). To know oneself, for my study participants, requires getting in touch with one's heart, not one's head. Moreover, the heart is where, or through which, you access the divine. An SBNR participant, in describing how she thinks about “spirituality” told me, “love has a lot to do with it.” Of course, love—however, we might understand it—is often symbolized by the heart. As an emblem, we associate it with that which we are most attached to, that which fills us with joy, serenity, and peace. Hence the reason why an SBNR theatre practitioner described “spiritual experiences” as those that leave her thinking: “I am so very privileged to and lucky to be a part of this!” The religion of the heart models religious commitment on romantic love; one does not come to know God through rational reflection, or by accepting abstract beliefs, but rather through submission to an overwhelming experience, of being overcome by a spontaneous sense of union with something greater than oneself (Campbell ). As a metaphor for a religious form, the heart suggests the primacy of experience—ecstatic, effervescent, and even transcendent in nature. It also suggests compassion, gentleness, and kindness. In Your Best Life Now, evangelical pastor Joel Olsteen counsels, “[k]eep your heart of compassion open. Learn to be quick to follow that flow of love God puts in your heart” (2004, 249). More than this, the heart in Western culture is often used to symbolize health or wellness. We exercise in order to develop a strong heart, and perhaps to feel good. In this, we see how the heart, given its polyvalence as symbol and concept, gestures toward the mind‐body‐spirit connection, a core theme of spirituality today (Heelas and Woodhead ). Very rarely do we associate the heart with negativity or depression, unless, of course, we are referring to a broken or heavy heart. But in this register, we would commonly see the need for healing; hearts may break, but their natural state is one of wholeness. Thus, one of my SBNR interviewees told me, “I think my heart wants to grow stronger. I think it wants to be heard more, and integrated.” And finally, the heart is something that can be more or less pure. Olsteen (, 157) cautions, “[d]on't let your heart get polluted,” and then instructs, “[e]xamine your own heart and see if there are attitudes and motives you need to change” (2004, 208). Thus, despite the seemingly innocuous and innocent self‐presentation of heart rhetoric, it can, and often does, come bearing a moral system, and replete with its own disciplines, taboos, and virtues.

In precise terms, we can think of the religion of the heart as characterized by the following: an experiential epistemology that locates authority—epistemic and moral—in subjective experience and feelings, a suspicion of the outward forms of religion, a conception of the divine or sacred as immanent or as pervading the material world, an expressivism that posits the existence of a “true self” that is understood as ontologically prior to society, and a teleology of self‐realization.

In his Social Teachings of the Christian Church, Troeltsch ([1992]) identifies three distinct strands that have coexisted with, and coconstituted, the Christian tradition since its inception: church religion, sect religion, and what he calls spiritual or mystical religion. Oddly, scholars have generally given attention to the first two, omitting or ignoring the third. Yet, in my view, it is the third type—what Troeltsch called “spiritual religion”—which gives life to today's religion of the heart. In outlining spiritual religion, Troeltsch begins by distinguishing between mysticism in a narrow sense, which remains the exclusive remit of spiritual virtuosos and prophets, and mysticism in a general sense, which he contends “is simply the insistence upon a direct inward and present religious experience” ([1992], 730). Moreover, it expresses itself “in subjective religious experience and ‘inwardness’, in concentration upon the purely interior and emotional side of religious experience.” Troeltsch contends that spiritual religion, given its “radical individualism,” is incredibly adaptable, and that it often encourages syncretism (or what is today called religious bricolage): “[t]he phenomena which I have just described proceed directly from the emotional sphere, and for that reason they are comparatively instinctive and spontaneous, and can be combined with every kind of objective religion, and with the customary forms of worship, myth, and doctrine” ([1992], 734).

Writing in the latter half of the twentieth century, Colin Campbell () drew from the work of Troeltsch and argued that the 1960s counterculture represented the flourishing of spiritual or mystical religion. He also argued that a rise in spiritual religion would look very much like secularization, and therefore could be easily mistaken for it:

A growth in spiritual and mystic religiosity might well first become apparent in its negative rather than its positive forms. That is to say, that it would be most noticeable in the spread of an indifference or even hostility toward the churches, especially towards their ecclesiasticism and dogmatism. On the other hand, its positive features might well pass largely unnoticed, or at least unassociated in the popular mind with religion, because they would not be evidenced in clearly circumscribed formal associations or creeds. Hence the early stages of a shift from church religion to spiritual and mystic religion could easily be confused with, and may in reality be intermingled with, a growth of secularism. The data that suggest progressive secularization in Western Europe and North America over recent decades might therefore also be interpreted as indicative of a shift from church to mystic religion. (Campbell , 150)

My empirical observations lead me to believe that the analyses of both Troeltsch and Campbell remain invaluable for mapping the spiritual or religious landscape of late modernity. As I see it, what these social commentators called spiritual religion is simply an earlier iteration of today's religion of the heart. One reason why few have noticed this, I surmise, is because of how chameleon‐like this religious form is. Its emphasis on experience enables it to transcend traditional boundaries separating the “religious” from the “secular,” and thereby fly under the radar of much of today's sociology of religion, indebted as it is to a nineteenth‐century religious imagination (Brown ). Of course, it is not only sociologists who have missed the forest for the trees; most adherents of the religion of the heart fail to recognize the tradition they, in fact, belong to. Those following it in an evangelical Christian setting believe that they are just following Christianity. Those who are SBNR may see themselves as heirs to the Romantic movement, but not traditionally religious at all. Moreover, the “secular” folk I have studied—generally convinced of their individuality—reject any perspective that locates their views within a particular religious paradigm. Indeed, this is precisely what makes the religion of the heart so well adapted to the conditions of late modernity.

In sum, I think it fitting to characterize the religious or cultural structure that shapes and gives meaning to today's contemporary spiritual landscape as the religion of the heart. However, this is not a novel term. The religion of the heart has been used to describe a cultural structure that has deep roots in the West, constituting a tradition of sorts. Still, it takes distinct forms at different times in history; thus, I do not claim that the current expressions of the religion of the heart are, in any sense, universal. Yet, while acknowledging this fact, we must beware of perpetuating an ahistoricism that refuses to understand the cultural present in relation to its past. The religion of the heart, as I characterize it, both belongs to a long‐standing tradition and simultaneously reflects a wholly novel constellation of ideas, practices, and social convictions that have been significantly influenced by the conditions of late modernity.

RELIGION OF THE HEART IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Theologian Ted A. Campbell identifies what he calls the “religion of the heart movements” that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all of which centered their theology in “heartfelt religious experience” (, 2). He includes in this tradition Jansenism, Quietism, English Puritanism, Quaker spirituality, Pietism (especially the Moravian Church), Methodism, Friedrich Schleiermacher's Protestant Liberalism, and Swedenborgianism. Despite their theological differences, Campbell argues that what unites these movements is that, for each of them, “[a]ffective experience became the center of the religious life” (, 3). They all maintained that “sacraments are ineffective without appropriate inward affections” and posited “experience as the basis of knowledge” (3, 17). They stressed the “authority of inward assurance” (17). Among the Puritans, the “heart” was contrasted with the “head,” with the religious life ultimately being concerned with the former, not the latter. In a similar vein, pietism stressed an “epistemology of religious experience” (62), which was taken up, notably, by the Protestant liberalism of Freidrich Schleiermacher, as well as, in a more extratheistic mode, the German and English Romantics. Thus, Campbell argues, “[t]he power that held this unique cluster of men and women, of ideas and movements, together was a fresh way of approach to the religious ultimate, an insistence that ‘the heart,’ the human will and the affections, was the crucial link between divinity and humanity, that the way to God was the way of heartfelt devotion” (177). A useful way of understanding the religion of the heart then is as a kind of “third way” within the Western tradition which has for various reasons been largely overlooked and marginalized in intellectual history. According to historian Wooter Hanegraaff (), the West has been constituted by three traditions, each of which stresses a distinct approach to truth: reason (represented by the Ancient Greeks and Enlightenment rationalists), faith (represented by traditional Christianity), and gnosis (represented by occultist and esoteric movements) (517–19). Admittedly, I am not convinced Hanegraaff's distinctions are all that helpful, given the blurred line separating faith and gnosis. Moreover, I am not yet ready to accept that the religion of the heart is fundamentally a gnostic tradition. However, Hanegraaff's analysis enables us to make useful distinctions, those between epistemologies that stress reason, doctrine, and feeling/intuition. As I see it, the movements that carry on the religion of the heart are united insofar as they give primacy to the last of these: feeling and intuition. In other words, what characterizes the religion of the heart, fundamentally, is its experiential epistemology, as noted above. According to the religion of the heart, “God is experienced rather than believed in, and on that basis His existence is usually regarded as fairly self‐evident and non‐problematic” (Hanegraaff , 183). Thus, one of my SBNR interviewees, a recently graduated business student, said, “I think spirituality, you can't really ignore it. Like you have to acknowledge that there are other things going on in the universe.” The religion of the heart rejects rationalistic and scientific reductionism while at the same time criticizing dogmatic traditionalism. As Hanegraaff puts it, it “rejects neither religion and spirituality nor science and rationality, but combines them in a higher synthesis” (517). Another of my SBNR interviewees told me, “My goal has been for the past year to really strengthen my intuitive voice because that's the one that I haven't given enough attention to. Like I know that I'm rational, and I know that logic is strong. But I don't want to discount that other side of me. I think it's the more important one.” Similarly, an SBNR PhD student in a humanities program asserted, “Knowledge isn't wisdom.” When asked what she meant, she responded, “I've met tons of people who have PhDs, and I don't feel they're very wise.” Hearing this, I was reminded of spiritual teacher and author Robin Sharma's () claim in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, “Einstein said that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge’” (67).

Since the Enlightenment the most important carrier of the religion of the heart has been the Romantic movement, which celebrated human emotion and imagination. It should come as no surprise then that historian Leigh Eric Schmidt () finds the romantic impulse at the core of the religious and metaphysical movements which swept across North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Writing against those who suggest the religious form underlying the SBNR label is wholly novel, Schmidt writes in Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, “The American fascination with mountaintop mysticism and seeker spirituality goes much deeper than any generational fixation allows” (, 2). Extending the list of religious movements that can be viewed as variations of the religion of the heart, Schmidt adds: “Transcendentalists, romantic Unitarians, Reform Jews, progressive Quakers, devout disciples of Emerson and Whitman, Spiritualists, questing psychologists, New Thought optimists, Vedantists, and Theosophists, among sundry other wayfarers” (7). As historian Robert Fuller (, 4) notes in Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America, these movements stressed direct personal experience above all else, preaching that “[g]enuine spirituality … has to do with personal efforts to achieve greater harmony with the sacred.” Following what Schmidt calls “the Emersonian turn—the sense that religion was fundamentally about the sacredness of the individual,” the religion of the heart took on a quintessentially American hue, which continues to inform its contemporary expressions (Schmidt , xv)

Arguably, in the late nineteenth century, there was no spokesperson of the religion of the heart more important than William James. In his Varieties of Religious Experience, James prioritized religious experience over and above institutions and doctrine. Moreover, his pragmatism reduced religion to what it did for individuals, thereby giving scientific legitimacy to the Romantic idea that “anything that is subjectively experienced as real must therefore be regarded as real” (Hanegraaff , 227). This pragmatic, experience‐based, approach to spirituality is a staple in much spiritual literature, new and old. For instance, in The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale (, x) sought to assure his readers that positive thinking was simply “a system of creative living based on spiritual techniques.” New Age authors Esther and Jerry Hicks () write in Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires: “Your true knowledge comes from your own life experiences” (40). Of course, it is a crucial part of my argument that the religion of the heart is not isolated to emically “spiritual” texts and locales. Thus, it is worth pointing out that James's pragmatic and experiential approach to self‐development is a staple of much “secular” self‐help. For instance, in Awaken the Giant Within, self‐help coach Tony Robbins assures his readers, “you don't have to believe or use everything within [this book]. Grab hold of things you think are useful; put them into action immediately” (, 29). We also find this emphasis on personal experience in much humanistic psychology. In On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers describes the philosophy of his client‐centered therapy in especially stark terms: “Experience is, for me, the highest authority…. Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man—can take precedence over my own direct experience” (1961, 23–24).

As Charles Taylor () has observed, we live in a culture of authenticity. It remains a core precept in both my participants accounts, as well as popular literature, that we all have within us a true or authentic self that reflects who we really are, and which it is our life's goal to realize. Taylor calls this an expressivist conception of human life. He writes, “[t]his is the idea which grows in the late eighteenth century that each individual is different and original, and that this originality determines how he or she ought to live. . . . Each person is to be measured by a different yardstick, one which is properly his or her own” (Taylor , 375). On this view, the ultimate purpose of life is to fulfill one's own nature, which “means espousing the inner élan, the voice or impulse” within, however that is understood (, 347). In other words, this expressivist view of human life postulates that each self has its own distinct potential—bequeathed by God, or Nature—which it becomes an imperative for each individual to realize.

Following Colin Campbell, a crucial period in the flowering of the religion of the heart was the counterculture of the 1960s (McLeod ). Accordingly, what historian Callum Brown () calls “the Death of Christian Britain” was also the flourishing of the religion of the heart. As observed by Campbell, the sexual revolution, gay and women's liberation, the environmental movement, and the counterculture embodied a revival and dissemination of the religion of the heart (most obvious in the New Age, Charismatic, and Human Potential movements of the period), which shifted what had always been culturally marginal to the center. Indeed, it was at this time that the religion of the heart was embraced by a large swatch of the population in the West—predominantly youth—and consequently found its way into the cultural centers of modern society, such as the arts industries, the university, health care institutions, popular culture, and eventually daytime television (Campbell ; Lofton ). This explains why my various millennial study participants can be said to subscribe to some version of today's religion of the heart. Moreover, this is indeed what makes late modernity so unprecedented: the religion of the heart now occupies a dominant position within our cultural landscape.

SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND DISENCHANTMENT

There are different ways to conceptualize why the religion of the heart has gained so much traction, especially among the young, but my focus here will be on its relationship to disenchantment. As we shall see, this approach helps to illuminate particularly well why the authority of both religion and science have come under threat as the religion of the heart has flourished.

It was Max Weber who proclaimed in 1918 in a lecture entitled “Science as a Vocation” that the modern world is disenchanted. According to Weber, the processes of rationalization, instrumentalization, bureaucratization, and mechanization were ridding the world of both magic and the supernatural, leaving in their wake the threat of meaninglessness before a cold dark universe. Interestingly, while Weber lamented this, he nevertheless argued that the triumph science—especially social science—demanded it.

It is not difficult to see what he meant. Consider how the social sciences of today encourage us to view ourselves as humans: much sociology reduces us to cogs in a social system, much evolutionary psychology reduces us to our genes, and much neuroscience reduces us to our brain, conceived as a kind of computer. As theologian Rowan Williams () has recently argued, much contemporary science has this reductionist tendency. Isabel Clark captured this well in her presentation at the meeting of the Epiphany Philosophers, as she made clear how transcendence is often reduced to the physical or psychological. The “rationality assumption,” as Clark put it, is precisely what Weber had in mind when he spoke about (and indeed contributed to) the dynamics of modernity. It is obvious how taking this stance toward the world and ourselves can be disenchanting, for it presumes that all is in principle calculable, and thereby allows no room for mystery or meaning.

Thus, we can see just how prescient Weber was. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to suggest that the world is wholly disenchanted. Things have not worked out as Weber expected. Church attendance may be in decline in the West, but, as I have shown, attraction to the religion of the heart remains strong. What does this tell us? As I see it, the religion of the heart reflects an attempt to re‐enchant the world. In other words, the disenchantment of modernity has produced social conditions that leave individuals craving meaning and mystery. The truth is that few can accept and live in a disenchanted world. Indeed, Weber himself is a case in point. Despite his public stoicism, Weber himself never embraced or fully experienced disenchantment, as he maintained esoteric interests throughout his lifetime. As Jason Josephson‐Storm () notes, he even flirted with mysticism.

So, we can see that disenchantment—the triumph of rationalization, bureaucratization, and mechanization in modernity—provokes re‐enchantment, and many today look to the religion of the heart to accomplish this. But why? What makes it so attractive? I think the sociological insights of Peter Berger help us to answer this question. According to Berger (), in order to have certainty in our beliefs, humans depend on what he called plausibility structures, that is, institutions that serve to reinforce what we take to be true. However, he argued that in the social conditions of modernity, defined by pluralism, what he called “the sacred canopy” comes under threat. Further, in a famous book titled The Heretical Imperative, Berger observed, “Modernity pluralizes both institutions and plausibility structures,” thereby forcing individuals to look within for epistemic authority. He concluded: “modern consciousness entails a movement from fate to choice” (, 11). In other words, according to Berger, we in modernity are forced to choose what to believe, for no longer can we take our beliefs for granted. It was these sociological insights that led Berger to conclude that secularization was an inevitable feature of modernization. He presumed that, as the sacred canopy eroded, and the heretical imperative assumed an ever‐wider social significance, religious and spiritual commitments would fall away. In my view, Berger's secularist conclusion should be rejected but his premises should not. Indeed, Berger's observation that “modernization and subjectivization are cognate processes” (, 20) remains crucial for understanding the perseverance of the religion of the heart in late modernity. What Berger failed to see was that processes of subjectivization only undermine Troeltsch's first two types of religiosity: church and sect. In contrast, the experiential epistemology of the religion of the heart can survive (arguably thrives) in a late modern world characterized by pluralism and superdiversity. Thus a revised version of Berger's theory that accounts for this possibility can be stated as follows: The heretical imperative naturally encourages individuals to go within for epistemic authority, for as the external world becomes more insecure and open to doubt, individuals seek security and certainty within themselves. This explains why the forms of religiosity that flourish today are various iterations of what I call the religion of the heart, which roots epistemic authority in subjective experience. I would therefore argue that disenchantment of the outer world has always meant a simultaneous enchantment of the inner world.

MUTUAL ENHANCEMENT OR MUTUAL CORRUPTION?

What implications might this hold for the respective enterprises of science and religion? There is a sense in which today's religion of the heart draws on both scientific and religious discourses for legitimacy. Consider: Many who subscribe to the religion of the heart see themselves as “modern” in virtue of their empirical approach to religion (e.g., “my beliefs are based in my experience”). Thus, mindfulness programs, yoga regimes, and alternative healing techniques gain legitimacy in virtue of their alleged “scientific backing.” Furthermore, the religion of the heart views religious tradition as ultimately secondary to what it claims is most basic to religion itself—direct experience of the sacred or divine. In this way, the religion of the heart gains legitimacy by allying itself with science, and denigrating religion. Indeed, what is most fascinating about the semantic shift from “religion” to “spirituality” is how it is commonly justified by means of appealing to spirituality's compatibility with scientific discourses and norms.

At the same time, the religion of the heart challenges the authority of science insofar as it prioritizes subjective experience over reason, calculation, and expertise. As noted above, the religion of the heart espouses an experiential epistemology which challenges conceptions of truth that locate epistemic authority outside of the individual. Thus, it is common to hear among its proponents that the Enlightenment propagated a narrow scientism, at odds with wisdom and authentic human needs, and that science without spirituality is inhumane. Ironically, one finds these criticisms expounded not merely at the margins of contemporary Western culture, but in some of its institutional centers—healthcare, education, industry, and the arts.

This explains how and why suspicion and criticism of traditional religion and the scientific establishment coexist in today's culture. The religion of the heart's experiential epistemology, which places all authority in subjective experience, challenges the authority of religious tradition, as well as that of scientific institutions. It would be wrong, then, to naturally pit science and religion against one another, as if it this were a zero‐sum game. Instead, the religion of the heart exists as a hybrid form, gaining legitimacy from both scientific and religious discourses, while at the same time undermining their respective authorities.

It would seem then that enchantment at the individual level—via going within—has produced a situation where we may be losing a sense of collective authority. Indeed, the age we live in can be characterized in the following way: Disenchantment emboldens individuals to collectively seek re‐enchantment at the level of subjectivity. As a result, individuals go within, locating epistemic and moral authority in their selves. However, the cost of subjective re‐enchantment—necessary for individuals to find meaning—may be the existence of shared epistemic sources. Or, to put it more metaphorically: If original enchantment constituted a world where we once occupied the same land surrounded by a vast ocean, disenchantment broke that land into separate parts, leaving us floating on our own islands. Consequently, while our existential survival requires that we hold tight to the ground beneath us, this only increases the sense of distance between us.

While I personally celebrate much of today's religion of the heart, the challenges it presents to us in late modernity are many. Let me conclude with what follows.

1. How do we retain the integrity of religion and science, respectively, in the face of the spirit of late modernity? How do we ensure it does not undermine their authority for the sake of subjective enchantment? One concern is that while the religion of the heart might re‐enchant the world, staving off meaninglessness, it could simultaneously undermine the authority and institutions of both science and religion.

2. From a religious perspective, how do we manage the antinomianism encouraged by the religion of the heart, which rails again tradition as such? As I argued above, what makes today so unprecedented is that the religion of the heart, which has always occupied a marginal position within the culture, is now dominant.

In his introductory essay to this set, Fraser Watts quoted Karl Rahner who claimed that “the Christians of the future will be mystics, or there will be no Christianity at all.” Of course, the Epiphany Philosophers were emphatic that the church ought to give more attention to the mystical strand within Christianity. Ironically, there is a sense in which their wish has come true, as today's religion of the heart most resembles mysticism—at least in its sociological form. Thus, as I see it, the contemporary predicament is somewhat different than Rahner envisaged. From a Christian perspective, it is not a matter of encouraging Christians to be mystics, but determining how to make mystics Christians. But more broadly conceived, the challenge today is how to persuade a mystic culture that traditions and institutions—be they religious or scientific in nature—matter at all.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Versions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of the Epiphany Philosophers held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, on January 9, 2019; a research seminar hosted by the Woolf Institute, Cambridge, on March 7, 2019; and a keynote lecture I gave at the Religion, Faith, and Society Research Group Workshop hosted by the Center for the Study of Islam in the United Kingdom at Cardiff University on March 20, 2019. I would like to thank Riyaz Timol for inviting me to give this keynote, and for Fraser Watts (no relation) for his feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Funding to attend the meeting of the Epiphany Philosophers was supplied by the Government of Canada through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).