Why is the West So Attracted to Eastern Religions?

In 1968, the Beatles traveled to Rishikesh, India to learn Transcendental Meditation (TM) from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The spiritual retreat of the world’s famous rock band in the middle of the countercultural movement of the 1960s revealed a popular and growing fascination of the West with Eastern religions and spirituality. 

There has always been a particular fascination among the Western intelligentsia with the East since the Enlightenment with the likes of Arthur Schopenhauer, Max Müller, and Carl Jung. However, this infatuation has now become mainstream in countries like the United States. Here are three fundamental reasons why Eastern religions are so attractive to the West in the postmodern world.

Eastern Religions Offer Spirituality Without the Demands of Religious Affiliation

With the diminishing influence of the church and organized religion in the public space and an increasing privatization of religion, there has been a rise in people identifying themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” A 2017 Barna Research found that the “spiritual but not religious” group held “unorthodox views about God or diverge from traditional viewpoints.” Nearly a third believe “that God represents a state of higher consciousness that a person may reach,” which is closer to Eastern religions rather than the Christian faith. 

For such people, Christianity is too restrictive, requiring a dogmatic faith accompanied by rigid moral requirements of holiness and ritual worship, such as church attendance. Eastern religions, on the other hand, offer the experience of religion without any real objective faith commitment or the call to pick up one’s cross and follow Christ in the path of suffering. Chuck Colson made this very point some two decades ago when he wrote, 

It’s not difficult to see why Eastern religion is such an attractive form of salvation for a post-Christian culture. It assuages the ego by pronouncing the individual divine, and it gives a gratifying sense of “spirituality” without making any demands in terms of doctrinal commitment or ethical living. And to make it even more palatable, the New Age movement reshapes Eastern thought to fit the Western mind, with its hunger for upward progress.

Eastern Religions Provide Personal Ethics Without Guilt and Shame

Sin is an ambiguous and amorphous concept in Eastern religions. There is no concept of breaking God’s holy Law that renders one to languish in guilt of God’s eternal condemnation. 

There is no need for a savior in Eastern religions. There is no need for confession or repentance of sin and fleeing to the cross of Christ. There is no need to seek forgiveness. 

Rather, Eastern religions offer a spiritual experience devoid of guilt and shame that gives freedom to pursue a lifestyle of sexual indulgence. In the hypersexualized modern age, where sexual gratification is seen as the ultimate marker of identity and fulfillment, such religious beliefs and practices are seen as liberating and progressive. On the other hand, Christianity is viewed as archaic and repressive. For many who grew up in the church and have experienced condemnation for their sinful lifestyles, Eastern religions provide a tolerating and accepting environment, unlike their former religious community. 

Eastern Religions Privatize the Truth by Seeking God Within

Contrary to Christianity, which has always maintained a Creator-creation distinction, Eastern religions see the individual as divine or part of the divine. In the post-modern age that promotes the individual as the authentic self and self-love as the highest virtue, Eastern religions provide a worldview that places oneself at the center. 

There is no more external point of reference whether it be an institution such as the church or a book, such as the Bible, to seek transcendent truth, but rather one is called to self-actualise one’s inner consciousness to find the truth. Truth is self-construed. Thus, the individual’s ego is promoted while external public means of grace such as the word proclaimed, the sacraments, and the communion of saints are seen as wholly unnecessary. 

Since there is no objective frame of reference in Eastern religions, what arises is an eclectic range of beliefs and belief systems that vary from person to person. This smorgasbord feature of cherry-picking and building your own religious and moral values is ideal for the modern post-truth culture that values self-discovery.