As a barometer of a nation’s mind, the ubiquitous airport bookstore is right in the weather zone.  I can be quite obsessive—checking out what’s selling today, who is flavor of the month, what the majority are buying to fill their thoughts as they sit for hour after boring hour on the plane. The bestsellers crowd the stands in the storefront, but having noted the soup de jour, I’m more interested in what’s on the religion menu.

For nothing else speaks so strongly of the communal mentality than what the organism called society is choosing as its fundamentals of faith.

I find a highly significant mix. Buddhism and reincarnation. New age and mysticism. Spiritualism and the occult. Gurus  and savants expounding on how their insights into the “spirit within you” can ensure your material success.

Plenty of stuff on how to make psychic contact, messages for you from the other side, even understanding the zodiac’s plan for spiritual romance based on your former life...
Not much in the way of Christian values here.

Dropping down the shelves I find some heart-warming chicken soup stories (always slightly offensive to my vegetarian sensibilities), a swathe of novels based on the Rapture theory, and some small volumes on weeping and bleeding statues of saints, God was a space alien, spectacular miracles, and close encounters with angels. Hardly a ringing endorsement of one nation under God.

Instead, rather a compelling portrayal of a people adrift, believing little in common except that it doesn’t really matter what you believe. (For what you believe doesn’t matter, the necessary addition in this post-modern age…)

What are the implications? That “god” has many names. In other words, there are many paths to spirituality, and are equally valid. In this pluralism of belief, the cardinal doctrine is the denial of absolute truth. Add in the rejection of ‘traditional’ religious ideas, the scorn—even the fear—of passionately-held religious beliefs, and the end result is a gray mass of spiritual goo. But, they say, the important thing is that this is your goo, and so add in the intense personalizing of faith, for truth is whatever works for you.

Is this it? I ask myself. If these are the contents of the shelves, then they parallel the contents of the minds. A generic spirituality that prefers the vague to the certain, the mystical to the relevant, the self-made to the scriptural. The consequence: a population that finds its meaning in agnosticism (the don’t-knows of the cosmic polls); or in a sure and certain hope of what they cannot really say; or in making up your own answers to the questions (or in deciding the questions to the answers…)

On other shelves: a celebration of violent crime, kiss and tell memoirs of the  rich and more infamous than famous, the “shocking”  exposes detailing all the faults and failings of the newest victims of the latest political scandal, a top shelf full of “erotica” to “entertain” the bored business executive…

Life is a minestrone, in the words of a once-popular song. To me, it seems more like Irish stew, with apologies to the Irish. A mess of mixed-up pop psychology, some lumps of indigestible philosophy, stewed together with mystic sauce and some astrological has-beens, producing an unattractive and unpalatable potful of pretentious platitudes, to which some salt and pepper of personal taste may be added (or is that addled?).

It reminds me of a kids’ painting session, when all the colors end up mixed together so that all the ‘art’ becomes dirty-brown. Religion—or spirituality, or faith belief, or whatever it may be called—is turned into a do-it-yourself exercise, a selective mixing of all kinds of oddness to form a personalized but very generic kind of seeming nothingness.

The barometer is falling...

© Jonathan Gallagher