This is part 2 of a multi-part series on Spirituality, Science and Socialism. See the other parts here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

I have always been secretly spiritual. Growing up it was difficult to avoid. Catholic ornaments scattered around the house by my mum. Sat on the pews of one dusty, empty church after another, listening to my dad as he repaired their organs. Playing the piano at Christmas: O Little Town of Bethlehem, Away in a Manger, Silent Night. The nativity scene under the tree. At school the Children’s Bible was my favourite book, my link to a magical past. I sat in assemblies, singing hymns with back straight and falsetto soaring over the other bored, slouching bodies around me. I would apologise silently to god for my impure thoughts.

And then I grew away from it. Hymns turned to pop songs. Bibles turned to novels. Thoughts of God turned to thoughts of the atom. Psychological submission turned to rebellion. Jesus stopped being real at about the same time as Santa.

For a while I welcomed it. It felt like maturity, a release from authority and fantasy. Yet I never lost the yearning for … something. A greater purpose, a feeling of wonder. You felt snatches of it from time to time, but always fleeting, in a song or a film or in a moment of love. So I buried myself in rapturous, ethereal music. In quiet contemplative arthouse cinema. In romantic obsessions. In hindsight, I was longing for a secular divinity.

Atheists talk about replacing love of God with love of science – but where are the churches where we worship the infinite? Where are the hymns we sing to the glory of the electron? Where are the accepting scientific communities we can turn to for ethical guidance (that don’t require a PhD to engage in)? Just as the individual seeker of truth replaces the community of faith, our support systems have been increasingly privatised and individualised – to therapists, doctors, job centres, the nuclear family. And to ‘self-care’, which many have noted can play both a liberatory or an oppressive role. Freedom from religious dogma has come at the expense of atomisation, and has helped along the rise of neoliberalism.

Our understanding of the universe has become divorced from our bodies. Far from increasing our awareness, the dominance of atheist rationalism has stripped people of their systems of explanation. Speculation and creativity in understanding the world is patronised and attacked. ‘No, you’re wrong. Trust the experts’. Yet as long as that expert knowledge is so safely guarded behind paywalls, university walls, cultural and language barriers, there is not and cannot be a public understanding of science. Capitalism fuels not just economic inequality, but educational inequality too.

Many people know, rationally, that global warming is bad. But it doesn’t hit them in the chest. The information they receive is divorced from a wider understanding of place in the universe, divorced from their bodies. You would scream at those who tried to burn down your house. The world has forgotten how to scream.

The Left

The socialist left, at least in the west, tends to avoid spirituality, often seeing it as directly contradicting the materialist philosophy associated with communism. On the other hand, those on the left most attracted to spirituality and its embodied practices – such as in the peace movement – tend to move away from what socialists would think of as a materialist analysis of society (sometimes even veering into pseudoscience and orientalism). This ambivalence towards spirituality has implications for how the left organises in communities. Given that the vast majority of global workers are in some way religious, to lack a spiritual practice (or a proper appreciation of it) is a barrier to creating trust and solidarity, and hinders movement building.

So how do we move beyond this division and create a synthesis of socialism, science and spirituality? Can atheists reclaim spirituality without necessitating a return to religion (and without patronising those who do)? It’s not enough to simply appeal to people to learn more about religions – we have to actually construct spaces in which people can come together to collectively explore these questions, to develop emotional bonds with one another. Rational inquiry alone is not enough; people need to see the relevance to their own lives and feelings. They need to experience spirituality and recognise it as such.

To begin with then, we need to define ‘spiritual’ more precisely. This will help us to show how religious and non-religious people share certain rapturous bodily experiences, regardless of the system they have for explaining it.

Pluralistic Spirituality



Rather than merely being a synonym for ‘religious’, I take spirituality to be something distinct: the bodily experience associated with religiousness. In the eyes of theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra, spirituality conceived in this way is fully consistent with complex systems science, and particularly the theory of embodied cognition:

Spiritual experience is an experience of aliveness of mind and body as a unity. Moreover, this experience of unity transcends not only the separation of mind and body but also the separation of self and world. The central awareness in these spiritual moments is a profound sense of oneness with all, a sense of belonging to the universe as a whole.

With this in mind, I take spirituality to mean:

exploring the metaphysics of the infinite

which becomes expressed in ecstatic embodied experiences

and which informs our ethics at both the individual, collective and wider social scales

In other words, it involves asking three questions: What exists beyond my immediate perception? How does this make me feel ? And what therefore does acting justly entail? This includes religious belief in the traditional sense, but also goes beyond it. The feeling of being humbled by the scale of the universe when staring into the night sky. The feeling of the weight of history and your debt to it when walking through an old building. The feeling of infinite power and possibility on a protest march, surrounded by your friends and community in joyful union. All of these are comparable to a ‘religious experience’.

Whilst this definition allows us to identify spirituality in secular experiences, it does not imply that all of these experiences are good. For example, nationalism might also fall within this understanding:

a metaphysics based on racial and cultural essentialism

becomes expressed in the embodied practices of singing anthems, pride in the flag and love for the monarchy

and informs the ethics and organisational principles of hierarchy, fear of difference, and violence seen as legitimate for protecting racial or cultural homogeneity

Unlike certain commentators however, I would totally reject any suggestion that the left adopt elements of nationalism in order to be successful. Ash Sarkar from Novara Media details here why English nationalism can never be disentangled from racism and imperialism. But it is nevertheless instructive for helping us understand why nationalism is so successful in the West, where the left currently is not. To actually succeed against nationalism we need to have something as emotionally powerful. And to do that we need shared practices for creating communal, embodied emotional connections, based around a shared ethics and metaphysics. A socialist spirituality, but one which is internationalist and intersectional.

The rest of the articles in this series will concentrate on elaborating what this socialist spirituality could look like:

We firstly need a metaphysics which bridges the divide of spirituality, science and socialism. To do this I’m borrowing from 3 main areas, all of which converge around a focus on the constant motion and interconnectedness of everything:

Complex systems science , particularly the concepts of self-reproducing systems (‘autopoeisis’) and embodied cognition



Marxism – drawing both from the earlier dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, as well as from contemporary Marxist Feminism and ecological Marxism



Process theologies informed by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, such as those of Monica Coleman and Allama Muhammad Iqbal.

Secondly, we need to take this framework and apply it to the body: how do we position ourselves in this world? What does it suggest about power and oppression? And what practices can help us to feel this knowledge? I draw in this section from work bridging social justice issues and mindfulness practices, such as Michael Yellow Bird’s neurodecolonization, Beth Berila’s feminist pedagogy and Bessel van der Kolk’s embodied trauma therapy. I am referring to this as Radical Mindfulness

Lastly, we need look at the ethical and organisational principles and strategies that emerge from these practices. The ideas in this section are drawn from discussions in the groups Radical Assembly and the Mental Health Under Capitalism support group, in our engagement with Marxist Feminist and post-work concepts such as social reproduction and emotional labour. We refer to this as The Care Ethic, to contrast it with the work ethic.

Although the metaphysical system set out in the next post will have to be fairly detailed, I’m going to try to keep it as simple as I can. For one thing, this will allow it to be more easily understood by non-academics – something which the theory-focused left often fails to do. It also gives space for the framework to adapt as our knowledge expands and changes. And also, most importantly for me, this allows for it to remain relatively consistent with differing beliefs as to whether any deity or supernatural force is involved. This can help form the basis of shared spaces – perhaps even organisations – that allow socialist collaboration across faith, without requiring people to divorce their spirituality from their organising.

Because whatever your position on the ultimate nature of the universe, we need to be able to work together on earthly matters like capitalism and climate change – while we still have an earth left to fight for.

If you enjoy my posts and/or real-world organising and want to help it continue, you can donate at either of the links below x

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References and further reading/watching:

The Tao of Physics – Fritjof Capra documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBJFJVZMnlo

Capra and Luisi – The Systems View of Life

Monica Coleman short intro, black feminist activist and ‘process theologian’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DjQcE5zo1Y

Documentary on Muhammed Allama Iqbal, Islamic Socialist process philosopher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFhatfkBsI4

Iqbal – The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Beth Berila – https://vimeo.com/97862528 Towards an Embodied Social Justice

Bessel van der Kolk on trauma as embodied https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWEjnGsLN-0

Michael Yellow Bird – Neurodecolonization https://vimeo.com/86995336

Christmas from a liberation theology perspective https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/christmas-culture-wars-revolutionary-gospel-left/

Francisco Varela on science, art and religion 1983 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgZMPcrRmio