The Sacred Commons: Towards a Spiritual Democracy
For most of human prehistory, cooperation was a local affair. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari observes that our ancestors lived in bands of roughly 150 people — the cognitive ceiling beyond which trust, built on personal relationship and direct knowledge of others, begins to collapse. What changed everything was not a new tool or weapon, but something far more subtle: the capacity to believe in shared fictions.
Harari calls these fictions “myths” — not in the pejorative sense of falsehoods, but in the anthropological sense of intersubjective realities. Gods, kingdoms, laws, nations: none of these exist in the way that rivers and stones exist, yet millions have lived and died in their service. The genius of Homo sapiens is precisely this ability to coordinate behaviour at massive scale through belief in things that cannot be seen or touched. Religion was humanity’s first great myth-technology — and for millennia, it did extraordinary work.
The Myth That Built Civilisation
The early religious systems of the ancient world were, among other things, elaborate cooperation technologies. They established moral norms that extended trust beyond the family and the tribe. They encoded obligations — to the poor, to strangers, to the land — that would otherwise have had no enforcement mechanism. The temples of Mesopotamia functioned as redistributive economic centres. The Torah’s Jubilee laws attempted to periodically reset debt and inequality. The Christian concept of caritas, Buddhist dana, Islamic zakat: across traditions, something structurally similar was at work — religion providing the moral grammar through which large, anonymous societies could cohere.
The nation-state, when it emerged, did not replace this grammar so much as absorb and redirect it. National myths borrowed liberally from religious ones: the sacred soil, the chosen people, the martyred heroes, the promised future. Flags became icons; constitutions became scripture; war memorials became shrines. Religion and nationalism were, for a long time, deeply intertwined — often uncomfortably so, but functionally codependent. Both were in the business of answering the same question: why should I sacrifice for people I have never met?
The Money Myth and the Moral Vacancy It Left
Into this already complex picture came another myth, one that would prove both more universal and more corrosive than either religion or nationalism: money.
David Graeber’s monumental Debt: The First 5,000 Years overturns the comfortable story that money was simply a practical evolution from barter. Graeber shows instead that credit, debt, and obligation preceded coinage — that money emerged from relationships of power, ritual, and moral accounting long before it became a neutral medium of exchange. In early societies, debt was not merely financial; it was existential. One owed debts to the gods, to ancestors, to community. These obligations were the very texture of social life.
What happened over centuries — and accelerating sharply in the modern era — was a process of moral laundering. The language of debt was retained, but stripped of its sacred and communal dimensions. What remained was the transaction: clean, impersonal, and morally empty. Markets became the organising logic of the state, and the nation-state increasingly defined its purpose not in terms of virtue or the common good, but in terms of growth, productivity, and the management of competing interests.
This was not without its benefits. Markets did enable a form of cooperation across cultural and religious difference — you could trade with someone you considered a heretic. But here it is worth pausing on a piece of history that tends to be forgotten in contemporary celebrations of the free market: Adam Smith, capitalism’s founding philosopher, never believed markets could function without a moral foundation. His Wealth of Nations was always intended to be read alongside his earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he argued that sympathy — the capacity to feel with others — was the indispensable basis of a functioning society. For Smith, the market was embedded in a moral community. It was a tool in service of human flourishing, not a replacement for it.
What came after Smith — particularly in the more aggressive forms of capitalism that took hold in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — represented a quiet betrayal of that vision. As Karl Marx observed with forensic clarity, capitalism divorced from moral constraint does not tend towards equilibrium and shared prosperity. It tends towards concentration. The logic of capital accumulation is self-reinforcing: those with capital acquire more, while those without it find themselves increasingly dependent, their labour commodified, their dignity subordinated to the demands of the market. Marx’s critique was not merely economic — it was humanistic. He saw in industrial capitalism a process of alienation: workers estranged from the products of their labour, from each other, and ultimately from themselves. The rich fabric of human community was being unpicked, thread by thread, in the service of profit.
These dynamics have not gone away. If anything, in the era of financialised, globalised capitalism, they have intensified. The decades since the 1980s have seen a dramatic and well-documented rise in material inequality across much of the world. Wealth has pooled at the top with a concentration not seen since the Gilded Age, while wages for ordinary workers have stagnated, public services have been hollowed out, and the security that previous generations took for granted — stable employment, affordable housing, reliable healthcare — has become increasingly precarious for large portions of the population. When the market is the primary myth, and the market is rigged, the social contract does not merely fray at the edges. It tears.
The result is a population that is, in many cases, simultaneously materially deprived and spiritually bereft — cut off from both the economic security and the communal meaning that make a life feel inhabitable. People find themselves connected to vast global systems and yet profoundly lonely, participants in an economy that measures everything and values almost nothing that matters most. This is the fertile ground in which resentment, nihilism, and the hunger for belonging grow.
The Backlash and Its Limits
It is in this context that the global resurgence of religious nationalism becomes intelligible. When secular liberalism and market capitalism fail to provide meaning, belonging, and moral coherence, people do not simply accept the void. They return — often with fierce intensity — to the old myths. The appeal of movements that fuse religious identity with national identity is not hard to understand: they offer exactly what the market cannot. A sense of sacred purpose. A clear moral order. A community of belonging. An answer to the question of why.
But these movements carry a structural flaw that makes them unsuitable as a long-term solution. At their core, most forms of religious nationalism are parochial by design. They derive their energy from distinction — from the claim that our god, our people, our truth is the real one, set against the error or corruption of others. In a world of 8 billion people, hundreds of languages, and civilisations with deep and legitimate spiritual traditions stretching back thousands of years, this kind of exclusivity does not unify. It divides. The trap of “only our religion is true” is not merely intellectually limiting — it is politically dangerous. History has shown, repeatedly, what happens when sacred certainty meets state power.
Towards Spiritual Democracy
What might a better synthesis look like? The good news is that we are not starting from nothing. Across the twentieth century, a remarkable series of individuals and movements have already been quietly building the foundations of what we might call Spiritual Democracy — demonstrating in practice that deep religious commitment and genuine pluralism are not only compatible, but mutually enriching.
Mahatma Gandhi is perhaps the most powerful example. A devout Hindu who drew freely on the Sermon on the Mount, the Quran, and the Bhagavad Gita alike, Gandhi insisted that his political struggle was not the property of one religion. “I am a Hindu, I am a Muslim, I am a Jew, I am a Christian,” he declared — not as an erasure of identity, but as a refusal to allow spiritual truth to become a weapon of division. His concept of sarvodaya — the welfare of all — was explicitly universal, rooted in the conviction that the divine could not be confined to any single tradition’s borders.
The Austrian-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber arrived at a similar place by a different route. Always active in constructing dialogue across borders, Buber co-founded the first high-level periodical to be jointly edited by members of the Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic faiths, and continued interfaith correspondence throughout his life. His philosophical masterwork I and Thou proposed that genuine encounter with another person — meeting them as a Thou rather than an It, as a subject rather than an object — was itself a form of encounter with the divine. For Buber, the religious dimension of authentic relationship was existential and relational rather than doctrinal. This was a theology that dissolved exclusivity at its roots: if God is found in genuine meeting, then no tradition can monopolise access to the sacred. Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThird Well
The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh carried this insight into the modern era with extraordinary grace. Developing what he called interbeing — the radical interdependence of all things — he drew equally on Buddhist, Christian, and humanist sources, founding the concept of “Engaged Buddhism” that brought contemplative practice directly into social and political life. Nhat Hanh’s dialogues with Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk, became legendary examples of how deeply different traditions could illuminate each other without either one surrendering its depth.
Less well known today, but significant in his reach, was Frank N.D. Buchman, the Pennsylvania-born Lutheran pastor who founded the Oxford Group and later the Moral Re-Armament movement. Buchman’s thinking evolved across the Second World War and the early Cold War as he tried to develop a world philosophy that could offer an answer to war and materialism, with his impact felt particularly in the areas of conflict resolution between nations and interfaith dialogue. In 1938, Moral Re-Armament broadened its appeal to include all faiths; Buchman hoped that the world would avoid war if individuals experienced a moral and spiritual awakening. His methods — emphasising personal moral transformation as a precondition for social change — crossed denominational and cultural lines in ways that were genuinely radical for his time. Project MUSEEncyclopedia Britannica
Behind all these individual lives stands an institutional landmark: the Parliament of the World’s Religions, which opened in Chicago in September 1893 as the first organised interfaith gathering in history, now recognised as the birth of the worldwide interfaith movement. Swami Vivekananda, representing Hinduism, addressed five thousand assembled delegates with the greeting “Sisters and brothers of America!” — his declaration introducing Hinduism to the West and calling for global tolerance and an end to religious discrimination. The Parliament was imperfect — it bore the marks of its era, with a heavily Christian framing and notable absences — but its central aspiration, that the world’s traditions could meet without any one of them claiming sovereignty over the rest, was genuinely visionary. That vision continues: modern Parliament convenings have drawn participants from more than 200 diverse religious, indigenous, and secular traditions across more than 80 nations. Wikipedia + 2
What these figures and gatherings share is not agreement on doctrine, nor the flattening of difference into comfortable vagueness. It is something more demanding: a willingness to be genuinely changed by encounter with traditions other than one’s own, while remaining rooted in one’s own. This is the posture that Spiritual Democracy requires — not the abolition of conviction, but the dethroning of exclusivity.
The concept of Spiritual Democracy asks religious communities to make a distinction that is, in fact, latent within most of their own traditions: the distinction between loving one’s own path and insisting it is the only path. It asks them to bring their most valuable gifts — their moral seriousness, their psychological depth, their rituals of meaning and mourning, their visions of justice — into a commons where those gifts can be shared without hierarchy or dominance. In that commons, the great question is not which religion is right, but what kind of human beings do we want to become, and what kind of world do we want to build together?
Harari showed us that the myths we believe shape the civilisations we build. For most of human history, we have been building with myths designed for a smaller world. The task now — urgent, difficult, and perhaps the defining spiritual challenge of our time — is to imagine myths large enough for the one we actually inhabit. The pioneers of interfaith understanding have already shown us it is possible. The question is whether we have the wisdom, and the will, to follow where they have led.
