Modernity and Spirituality

A reader writes:

I find it difficult to stomach this kind of conservative humbug, that Modernity is anti-spiritual. Western society is the mechanism that allows groups like the Pentacostalists (and cosmos-loving atheists, and Wiccans, Buddhists, et al.) to exist. It is the ground in which they survive. What seems to irritate some conservatives is the fact that they cannot impose their will upon all of society and poison the soil which succors them. If anything, and the USA is the exemplar of this, modern Western society is besotted with spirituality. 

You cannot drive down a street in the greater Los Angeles area, a zone of the country supposedly noted for its secular ways, without encountering churches, synagogues, mosques, reading rooms, meditation centers, Scientology storefronts and other physical manifestations of the "higher" realms. Spiritual desert, bah! It's an earthly garden of a thousand blooms.

I couldn't agree more. The notion that freedom and spirituality are incompatible is an old one. It isn't an American one. The freedom that creates Anna Nicole Smith is the freedom that makes America the most religious and spiritual advanced country on the planet. And the freedom is indivisible.