The Allure of Pantheism

The positives and potential pitfalls of a modern spiritual movement

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

(An eight-minute read.)

I recently had a conversation with a friend that was refreshing in its transparency.

As someone who was raised in a conservative evangelical home, but who is basically in the process of significant faith deconstruction, she’s trying to figure out which parts of her childhood faith to hold onto and which ones to discard.

At this point, she’s embraced a progressive form of Christianity, emphasizing a very compassionate, socially-conscious, love-centered form of faith that recognizes the value and inherent dignity of every human being—and focuses mostly on trying to create a better world now (with little concern for the “life to come”).

As we continued to process this together, she then said the line that was refreshingly transparent. “You know Shawn,” she explained, “I think I may just embrace panentheism.”

The reason I found her admission so refreshing is because of how seemingly aware she was of what she was considering theologically—which many other people don’t seem to be aware of.

The truth is, I suddenly realized a year or two ago—after having many conversations with people who were either deconstructing the Christian faith of their childhood, or who’d never had a Christian faith but were a part of the famous “spiritual but not religious” crowd—that the largest and most alluring alternative to traditional, orthodox Christianity isn’t really secular atheism.

It’s some form of pantheism.

That is, in this age of decreased religious adherence, where fewer and fewer people in the West are choosing to participate in organized religion, the most likely place they’ll land isn’t on an outright and defiant atheism, altogether denying the existence of God and the importance of spirituality.

They’ll probably instead land on some form of pantheism, which maintains a high regard for spirituality, but discards the trappings of organized religion with its insistence on conformity, dogma, and exclusivist thinking.

Truth be told, I totally get the allure.

In fact, as I shared in a sermon a few months ago, I myself am drawn to many aspects of pantheism—especially since people who embrace some form of it (whether they’re explicitly conscious of doing so or not) often tend to promote more compassionate forms of spirituality.

But, perhaps not surprisingly, I’m not ready to go “all in” on pantheism, and I’ll briefly explain why in a second. But first, some definitions.

What is pantheism?

The most basic definition of “pantheism” is the belief that God and the universe are identical—that God is everything in the universe. As such, God doesn’t have distinct personhood and consciousness, separate from the universe, but everything we see, encounter, touch, smell, feel (including ourselves) is God.

Such a view is reflected poignantly in a poem I read the other day by Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling poet who focused a lot on the wonderment of nature in her poetry. In a poem entitled “At the River Clarion,” she reflected:

If God exists he isn’t just churches and mathematics.
He’s the forest, He’s the desert.
He’s the ice caps, that are dying.
He’s the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.

He’s van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert Motherwell.
He’s the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing their weapons.
He’s every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politician, the poet.
And if this is true, isn’t it something very important?

This is pantheism at its finest and most explicit (and it’s a sentiment that’s reflected in many popular thinkers of today and yesteryear—be they Ralph Waldo Emerson or Oprah Winfrey—and especially in eastern religions).

Panentheism, on the other hand, while somewhat similar to pantheism, maintains that God is in everything in the universe, but is also outside and distinct from the universe. That is, everything possesses the divine, but the divine also exists outside of everything.

There are many reasons why people increasingly find some version of these philosophies attractive (again, whether or not they’re conscious of the undergirding philosophical foundations).

For one, they tend to provide an easy framework for connection, compassion, and unity. Since we’re all a part of the divine, we’re all implicitly connected to each other and are all therefore worthy of honor and respect.

This pulls the rug out from any tendencies toward exclusivism and bigotry, and allows us to learn from each other with grace, humility, and curiosity (the divine in me is able to learn from the divine in you).

Similarly, it gives people greater access to an encounter with the divine. God isn’t simply way out there, inaccessible and beyond our reach, but is close and within our grasp (indeed, God is even within us, thus providing a heightened sense of our own value and dignity, and a basis for self-compassion).

As one of my Jewish friends used to say with great joy, “Reverend [that’s what he called me], when I’m out in nature, when I’m on top of Mt. Kineo, that’s God to me. I’m experiencing God” (he was in “Cloud Nine” when I shared a drone video with him that I took and produced of Mt. Kineo—and wanted to watch it over and over and over again).

It goes without saying that people who are concerned about climate change, and who are drawn to the enchantment of nature, are often pantheists of some stripe. They ascribe divinity to “mother nature” and relate to it with a holy reverence and awe.

As I said, I definitely feel the pull to a sort of pantheistic way of relating to the world. But I’m not quite ready to fully embrace it.

Here’s why.

Keeping the baby while throwing out the bathwater

First, I think many of the really positive fruits that people are after in their embrace of pantheism can be found in orthodox Christian thought.

For example, I can recognize the deep value, worth, and dignity of every human being simply by recognizing that they “image”—or reflect—God.

Indeed, orthodox Christianity has always maintained that every human bears the Imago Dei and that every human being is God’s child. And we should therefore honor everyone as such, refusing to bury or diminish their humanity.

Similarly, there are also orthodox traditions which maintain that God’s Spirit is working in, for, and through all of creation—that it’s not simply Christians who can speak on behalf of God, but people who don’t explicitly acknowledge God can still have insights about God, or about other matters of truth, impressed as they are by God’s Spirit (the Gospel writer John explained that God “lighteth” every person who comes into the world, and the prophet Joel, quoted by the apostles on the day of Pentecost, proposed that the Spirit would be poured out on “all flesh” in the last days).

So we can learn from everyone, listening for the Spirit’s communication, without assuming that everything everyone says is a direct communication from God (I doubt we’d want to maintain that Hitler spoke on God’s behalf as much as, say, Mother Teresa).

I could say more about this, and I know there are obviously some versions of Christianity which have produced rotten fruit that contradict the praiseworthy goods that pantheism is after. But I’ll leave it at that.

Negatively, I’d say there are pitfalls of pantheism that we can avoid by embracing a more love-centered version of orthodox Christianity.

I could cite a few, but I’ll just name one: the problem of evil.

Granted, I know many super smart thinkers have already wrestled with this charge, and this may seem like an irrelevant and “heady” objection that the average person who is drawn to pantheism or panentheism probably doesn’t care about.

But I just have a hard time seeing how pantheism can offer a coherent response to evil (and could thus be a full expression of love—since love, I do believe, requires boundaries, and a confronting of the ways people are relationally violated).

Simply put, upon which grounds could we ever confront evil if everything and everyone was a possessor and expression of the divine?

Indeed, evil couldn’t even really exist within a purely pantheistic framework.

And I’m not sure we’d want to claim that—nor prevent ourselves from having the ethical and moral grounds to confront some of the grossest evils the world has ever experienced.

Again, I could offer more concerns, but I’ll just leave it at that one.

Thus, until further notice, I remain comfortable enough in an orthodox Christianity that acknowledges and embraces all the good goals of pantheism (at least as I define “good”), while remaining planted in a loving, compassionate, inclusive form of Christian faith.

And, after all, May Oliver seemed to understand the tension, perhaps having her doubts about pantheism herself.

Indeed, in the aforementioned poem, after wondering whether God was perhaps in all these different things—the forest, the grass, the politician—she seemingly hedged her bets, writing:

Yes, it could be that I am a tiny piece of God, and each of you too, or at least
of his intention and his hope.

To this modified reflection (in the italics above), I say, Amen, Mary.

We can affirm all the goodness in the world—wherever it may be found—and celebrate it as a reflection of a good and loving God, while simultaneously celebrating the good news that there is a good God who is distinct from, and not defined by, the universe (and all its evils).

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Shawn is a pastor and church planter in Portland, Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational and embodied expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.