A New Awakening, Part 1

Captain Anu Bhagwati

Former Marine Captain Anu Bhagwati writes in The Washington Post of May 26, 2013:

"Why the military needs to recruit and promote more women"

As a woman officer, Capt. Bhagwati sought to bring men in uniform who had committed rapes, sexual assaults, and sexual harassments to disciplinary justice. But the commanders above her — all of them were men — typically stonewalled her. Capt. Bhagwati tells us she wants to see more females in the higher ranks today, as a way of cutting through male officers' intransigence.

That's a good idea, but I think an insufficient one. Military culture abets and magnifies the problem of men treating women abominably. But I think the real problem is society-wide, and I think it can be remedied first and foremost through a spiritual awakening.

For various reasons, we today find ourselves in a society that is at a spiritual deficit. This has to do with much more than what's going on in our various formal religions — many of which are bearing up under woes not unlike the ongoing liberal-conservative contention within my own Roman Catholic Church. Polling by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life shows that a sizable proportion, about 14 percent, of Americans today are "nones," meaning many of them (68 percent of the "nones") believe in God, yet they are nonetheless unchurched.

Many of those who are unchurched are undoubtedly just fine spiritually, as are many of those who attend a church or a synagogue. Yet we see way too much bad behavior all around us. A lot of it is bad sexual behavior, pure and simple, but a lot comes in the form of unwonted aggression. Bullying, for instance, is unwonted aggression — and a lot of the nominally "sexual" offenses Capt. Bhagwati complains of in the military are actually a form of bullying.

It is one of the functions of spirituality to tame and redirect the energies that can otherwise manifest themselves as crimes of sex and aggression such as rape, sexual assault, and plain old bullying. That's why I'm calling for a "new awakening" that would radically boost the spirituality quotient of us Americans.

This is the first in a series of posts in which I will talk more about that.