#Seed043: Salt to the Earth

Spiritual marketing & the fragmentation of community

Long-time readers of The Sufi Gardener will know my tendency to set out idealistic principles for community building. But the irony is this: communities are not built on mere principles. They are built on ancestral and generational blood, sweat, and tears. Only after a community has been forged and sustained do we begin to philosophize about its guiding principles. The real question is not one of building, but of stewardship.

The Conjurer by Hieronymus Bosch. 1502.

Too often, this truth is forgotten. When the social fabric frays, attempts are made to patch the holes with marketing. Over the past 60–70 years, nowhere has this been more evident than in the steady rise of ersatz spiritual movements in the West. The post-industrial left a spiritual void that continues to fragment communities all over the world. From the ashes, rose a new style of spirituality, fulfilling individual desires and further alienating people from the land, their heritage, and their cultures.

At the turn of the century, Adam Curtis released The Century of the Self, a documentary tracing how Freudian psychoanalysis, especially through the work of Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the pioneer of public relations, was adapted by business and politics to shape mass consumer culture and modern ideas of selfhood. Curtis’s premise was simple:

1. People are irrational, driven by unconscious desires, and can be guided through symbols and emotions rather than reason.

2. Corporations stopped selling what people needed and began selling expressions of identity, emotion, and aspiration.

3. The marketplace shifted from shared narratives to personal choice.

4. Spirituality was reframed as self-expression and emotional authenticity.

5. This made individuals more susceptible to market segmentation, as self-expression could be satisfied through consumption.

This produced a profound paradox: the “self” became not only a site of so-called liberation, but also the perfect marketing target. Our fears, traumas, experiences, anxieties, and desires were catered to and monetized. New Age gurus, for example, have long used Bernaysian tactics to sell personal transformation, emotional authenticity, and inner exploration, in the form of workshops, paraphernalia, and mindfulness apps that promise spiritual growth but are packaged for consumption.

There is nothing inherently wrong with these products, but they reveal the deeper reality of what much of contemporary spiritual movements actually market: the liberation of the individual from families and community. These movements borrow concepts from (usually Eastern) religious or Indigenous cultures, but strip them from their original contexts. The commodification of mind-altering substances such as ayahuasca or psilocybin, taken in retreat settings outside any traditional worldview, is only one example. Others include the casual use of Sanskrit mantras or the presentation of whirling dervishes as exotic entertainment. What all these have in common is that they float without anchor. Wendell Berry discussed the very phenomenon in his 1972 essay, Discipline and Hope. Mr. Berry illustrated a certain tendency “to make a commodity of religion, as if in emulation of some churches.” Speaking of the rise of hallucinogens, he saw that people were becoming, in fact, “inadequately prepared for the use of drugs, that is to say, people ‘consum’ and waste them.” Furthermore, this wastefulness, which becomes the outcome of ersatz spiritual movements and individual self-expression, point to another truth: “To take and keep, to consume the power of another creature is an act profoundly disordering, contrary to the nature of the creation.”

Sacred rituals cannot truly exist outside the fabric of a community, by which I mean the bonds that tie people together in place and in time. They musn’t be consumed. Communities are made up of all sorts of people. They may share a common culture and language, but they hold a diversity of personalities: elders and children, craftspeople and philosophers, caretakers and the ill. A community is the connective tissue binding them together. It is never a monoculture; everyone has a place. Certain spiritual movements, however, tend to create fissures in this social fabric by attracting one type of individual. In marketing language, this is called a persona, a profile used to target products to a specific group. The market thrives on segmentation. But a segmented group of like-minded people is not a community. In traditional societies, you will always find a tapestry of personas, not a curated niche.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of many spiritual movements is that their leaders become gatekeepers to the very traditions they claim to represent. True traditions possess liturgies, histories, wisdoms, and laws. To sustain a market, these leaders must ensure their followers remain ignorant of the depth of the tradition¹. Yoga retreats often avoid teaching Sanskrit or studying the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. So-called Sufi teachers may withhold access to the liturgical language of Arabic and the richness of the legal tradition. Such things are dismissed as relics of an outdated past. Ironically, this approach produces nothing but a shallow imitation of those “relics.” What is lost is the living tissue that binds people to a tradition, not only in the present, but across generations.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that the great Shaykh, Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, cites in his collection of Prophetic traditions Mishkāt al-Anwār the following:

“There will emerge, at the end of time, men who deceive the world through religion. They will dress up for men in sheep's clothing to display meekness, and their tongues will be sweeter than honey, but their hearts will be the hearts of wolves. And God will say:

‘Are they trying to deceive Me, or are they acting insolently towards Me? By Me, I swear I shall send upon these people such a trial as will leave even the mildest-tempered (halīm) of them in utter confusion.’”

Perhaps the Shaykh is forewarning us of people who use the tradition to call to themselves, attacking the very fabric of community, breaking social cohesion, and turning people against their tradition.

For communities to remain whole, they must carry liturgies, sacred languages, laws, and customs. Leaders need not claim enlightenment; they act as living links to a distant past. The past is our reference point for making wise decisions in the future. We do not build communities. In truth, we cannot. We can only steward them. This is why the fragmentation of a community is like salt to the earth, leaving the ground barren for generations.

1. It is no coincidence that scholars from the Islamic tradition placed great importance on isnād, which refers to the list of people who passed on a tradition, from the original authority to whom the tradition is attributed to, to the present person reciting or compiling that tradition. (Brown, Daniel (2020). "Introduction". In Brown, Daniel (ed.). The Wiley Blackwell Concise Companion to the Hadith. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 1–11.) With regards to anyone in claiming authority, they must have a direct link to to a teacher who gave them to authority to pass on that teaching. It is the teachers responsibility to use his or her wisdom to determine how that tradition will be passed down beyond their lifespan. But they should be forewarned to not break that chain, lest they lose all legitimacy, breaking the bonds between themselves and the community they are serving.