c. 2004 Religion News Service
ASHLAND, Ore. _ In North America’s newest spiritual mecca, the well-off, highly educated residents who fill the coffee bars, boutiques and healing centers do not see themselves as mere Americans. They see themselves as citizens of a sacred cosmos.
In this idyllic town of 20,000 in the isolated south of Oregon _ where it seems almost more difficult to find someone who hasn’t written a book on spirituality than someone who has _ residents have turned upside down the patriotic Pledge of Allegiance to “one nation, indivisible.”
This new wave of Oregon seekers are adamant critics of their federal government. They’re convinced American culture is a violent wasteland. And they tend to roundly condemn organized religion, particularly President Bush’s evangelical Christianity, as “exclusivist.”
Sociologists of religion are dubbing the people of Ashland an important new “secular but spiritual” cohort.
Some scholars believe Ashland’s residents may represent the wave of North America’s future.
Many seekers have been flocking to this remote resort town in the soft-green Cascade Mountains, 200 miles south of Portland and 350 miles north of San Francisco, because they believe it has a last-gasp chance of becoming a new paradise on Earth.
More than a few people believe Ashland _ which until recently was most renowned for its seven-decades-old Shakespeare Festival _ is replacing Sedona, Ariz., and Boulder, Colo., as the continent’s top centers for alternative religion.
Ashland is for the socially elite, a quaint, European-looking tourist town of artists and the educated.
There are 15 coffee shops, countless boutiques, numerous outdoor restaurants, spas, poetry groups and a dizzying array of therapy centers, says Bob Paterson, owner of the well-stocked Blue Dragon secondhand bookstore. For his part, Paterson was into alchemy when he moved to Ashland and now he’s into aikido, the martial art. Some of his friends explore psychedelics.
Despite the city’s relative isolation, the houses are among the most expensive on the continent; the average price is $300,000. People who work in the service industry struggle to find affordable housing. Southern Oregon University is located here, and the city’s artistic life is vibrant. It’s not uncommon to see musicians, jesters and actors wandering in costume through the bustling streets.
President Bush is toast here, Paterson makes clear. So do the bumper stickers, including “Drop Bush, Not Bombs.” The Ashland-based National Public Radio station, one of the most popular in the country, frequently hosts New Age speakers and recently advanced the book “The New Pearl Harbor” by Claremont Graduate School religion professor David Ray Griffin. The book suggests the Bush administration may have allowed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to occur.
Like one of Ashland’s famous leading lights, Neale Donald Walsch, author of “Conversations With God,” many folks in Ashland believe the rat-racing, polluted outside world is headed for doom. While enjoying the region’s Mediterranean-like air, they’re yearning for a lifestyle that’s peaceful and intimate with Mother Earth.
Judy Honore, the blond, bubbly owner of Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, typifies the nature-revering flavor of her West Coast region when she says: “I stopped going to Catholic Church. The ocean became my religion. When I snorkel, I marvel at the variety of fish. I’m not into Jesus, Buddha and Moses. When I die, I figure there will be a lot of room in heaven for all of us.”
The dozens of big-name spiritual authors who have moved to this small town have together sold more than 10 million copies of their scores of titles, such as “The Seat of the Soul and the Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story.”
As well as being prototypes for the future of religion, scholars maintain the soft-spoken residents of Ashland typify the spiritual personality of the continent’s unique northwest corner _ which comprises the forested, tradition-busting U.S. states of Oregon and Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia. The visionaries who make this genteel town their home are having a big impact on the educated mainstream of North America and Europe.
The region’s gurus are headed by Walsch, who says “Conversations With God” was dictated to him by the Supreme Being. It was on The New York Times’ best-seller list for more than 140 weeks.
The hillside city is also home to venerable psychotherapist Jean Houston, who guided Hillary Rodham Clinton in a conversation with the late Eleanor Roosevelt. And there are rumors from Walsch’s camp that his friend Deepak Chopra, head of a veritable spiritual empire, is on his way.
Other big New Age names include Gary Zukav, author of the multiyear best seller “The Seat of the Soul,” as well as James Twyman and mystical film producer Stephen Simon. The shelves of the city’s many bookstores are peppered with dozens of tags boasting “Local Author.”
What does Ashland reveal about the eclectic religious personality of Cascadia, the name given to the rugged expanse of evergreen forest that stretches from Oregon through Washington to British Columbia?
Ashland graphically displays the characteristics of a Pacific Coast region at the forefront of what scholars are calling the fastest-growing “religious” group on the continent: people who declare they have no religion.
In the United States, the percentage of people who say they have no religion (dubbed “the Nones”) doubled in the past decade to 14 percent. In the same period in Canada, the figure mushroomed from 11 percent to 16 percent.
In the Northwest, the “Nones” are stronger than anywhere else on the continent. In Oregon, the percentage of residents who claim to have no religion is 21 percent. In Washington state, the religious “Nones” account for 25 percent. In British Columbia, it’s 35 percent. It would be safe to say Cascadia has a much higher proportion of people who basically dismiss religion as too authoritarian, divisive and doctrinaire.
But their widespread disapproval of formal religion belies the intense spirituality fermenting on the northwest coast. This is a region where the so-called non-religious have definitely not given up on searching for divinity.
Cascadia has been a fertile land for often-contentious new religions.
Oregon and Washington have been home to the Rajneesh commune, psychedelic guru Ken Kesey, the original Unification Church (the Moonies), long-established pagan groups and Ramtha, the 35,000-year-old warrior who speaks his wisdom through a former housewife.
Releasing themselves from the religious shackles of the past, for good or ill, many residents of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia have been promoting a fluid, freedom-loving, highly personal mysticism. They don’t care that many religious people think they’re flaky; they’re adventurously trying innovative and elastic forms of spiritual expression.
“It’s still the frontier here. Different people for different reasons have come here seeking Eden,” says Mark Shibley, a noted professor of religion at Southern Oregon University, after taking off his broad-brimmed felt hat for a breakfast of yogurt and fruit at the city’s Wild Goose Inn.
MO/PH END TODD
