Suddenly I notice the words "spiritual" and "spirituality" all over the place. They are, it would seem, expressions of a yearning for which the speakers find inadequate the connotations of "religion", a word carrying the freight of outmoded forms and rigidities. In this week alone, in Boston where I'm currently working, I noted the following references in contexts where I, at least, did not expect them. I was startled in each instance:

-a black woman on the Million Woman March in Philadelphia tells the nation on TV that she is marching "for strength and spirituality".

-the Boston Globe features a regular Saturday column called "The Spiritual Life". This week's piece is about a black preacher who has come to teach at Harvard. As a student he had an epiphany while listening to Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 in F minor. He says he literally heard God's voice in the melody: "James Forbes, don't you know I have called you."

-a young woman, speaking of her creativity, announces to my seminar: "I feel powerfully, spiritually connected to God at this moment."

-Margot Adler, currently the New York bureau chief of National Public Radio, daughter of the famous New York analyst Kurt Adler, product of an activist left-wing and totally secular family, herself a former '60s activist, has just published a memoir, Heretic's Heart. She is now a leader of the feminist spirituality and witchcraft movement.

The religious impulse-that is, the impulse to give meaning and coherence and purpose to life, to encase our animal existence in a superstructure of teleological thought, and to mark with ritual those events (birth, love, death) that even in the late twentieth century remain mysterious and still evoke awe-that impulse, so multitudinous in its forms, can be traced as a phenomenon throughout history. Religious belief itself may be a gossamer thing, unquantifiable, but its imprint is definitely observed and measurable; it has social, political, architectural, and artistic consequences. I very much doubt whether the religious impulse has either waxed or waned in any society or culture, though various guises of it have certainly come and gone, have flourished for months or centuries, have emerged in secret as sects for the disempowered, have grown, mutated, waxed despotic, dominated, waned, become extinct, and then reappeared. There are Druids and witches' covens in Toronto and New York City today.

When the existence of the religious impulse is most denied and repressed, that is when it seems most likely to rocket up like a rubber ball that has been held under water. Consider Robespierre, imposing and fantastically elaborating his Feast of the Supreme Being as fast as he was guillotining priests.

Therefore, to ask: will there be a revival of religion in the twenty-first century, and will this be a good thing? seems to me as odd as asking: will there be a revival of government and of forms of social organization in the twenty-first century, and will this be a good thing?

But to ask: will the forms that the religious impulse (or government) may take in the twenty-first century be a good or bad thing?-that is a rather more valid and urgent question.

The word "religion" itself has become foggy and imprecise and much qualified: mainstream religion, fundamentalist religion, New Age religion; the major religious traditions (respectable; though they were not, of course, in their infancies) vs. religious sects (not respectable). The usual working definition among intellectuals is that if a system of meaning/cohesion posits a Supreme Being it is a Religion; otherwise it is a Philosophy, it is Enlightened Humanism, it is Rationalism (though by this definition, Buddhism is not a religion, and Robespierre's Cult of Reason was).

But the proudly secular who have rejected the religious traditions of their forebears, or of their own childhoods, because they found such traditions stifling or coercive or simply meaningless (I myself am an escapee from the stifling/coercive camp) are nevertheless dishonest not to acknowledge that they remain the beneficiaries of an inherited value-system, a system of coherence, that affects everything from their response to literature to how-and if-they vote to what they want for their children to how they approach death.

It is those who, for one reason or another, feel that they have fallen through the net of meaning altogether, who will shape and reshape the forms of the religious impulse in the next century; and in times of global upheaval, economic, military, and social, with massive geographic displacements, and everything from gender roles to reproductive techniques to genetic engineering up for grabs, the number of those who feel that all existing systems of meaning have become obsolete is growing exponentially. It is out of radical social instability that the most alarming sorts of rough religious beasts come slouching toward new Bethlehems to be born. Those freefalling through anomie, the desperate-and to be without meaning is truly a desperate condition-want fast consolation. They want safety. They want powerful magic. They want the chaos to make sense, and thus become bearable. They are likely to turn to charismatic figures (Hitler; Jim Jones; David Koresh; leaders with insatiable power-hungers and agendas of apocalyptic self-aggrandisement). By submergence into the Powerful Other, the seekers-of-meaning do indeed find short-term meaning, and acquire the illusion of power.

"Pop transcendence" is the apt term coined by Mark Edmundson (professor of English at the University of Virginia, author of Nightmare on Main Street) for quick dead-end routes to reassurance.

Or the seekers turn to fundamentalisms (Islamic, or Pentecostal, or those of a mysticized and spiritualized race identity, such as the Aryan Nation Militia groups, as well as Louis Farrakhan's followers) which offer certainties: easy answers and no hard questions. Such groups begin as consolation and empowerment for the disempowered, but they turn into new systems of tyranny at dizzying speed. Their fear is turned outwards, against the demonized Other, and the Other is everyone not in the sanctified group.

Much mayhem has been caused throughout history by this dynamic of polarization, whose fearful progress I sought to explore in my novel Oyster. It seems to me that anyone (such as Oyster himself) who believes he has an absolute corner on Truth is most to be feared. But xenophobic reaction and intolerance toward a differently-observant group is also part of the equation of damage. An embattled group, not listened to, is explosive. Consider the direct link, the quick oscillation and escalation, from Waco, Texas, to the bombing in Oklahoma City.

It is this dynamic of polarization which I fear will intensify.

It's certain that those governments (including Ontario's) so busily dismantling the safety nets and systems of social cohesion that remain, are midwives to the birthing of brand new systems of meaning and cohesion which may be monstrous.

Janette Turner Hospital's most recent novel is Oyster (Knopf Canada), which we reviewed in December 1996.