When I asked readers who identified as spiritual but not religious to reach out to me, I was astounded by how much variety there was in the faith experiences of individuals in this group. Some said they found spirituality both in the beauty of the physical world and in communing with other people.
“I found the 12-step program to be sort of a spirituality that worked for me,” a woman named Maggie who lives in the Northeast told me. (I’m not using her last name because one of the tenets of her 12-step program is anonymity.) “It’s about making a connection with a higher power. It’s about trying to improve that connection with prayer and meditation,” she said.
Maggie lost her taste for organized religion, she said, after being disappointed by the way her church handled a situation in which a minister had an affair with an employee. She finds the 12-step program to be free of that kind of hypocrisy and appreciates the “bone-scraping honesty” of her fellow group members. People talk about “what’s really going on in their lives,” she said. “It’s refreshing and often relatable, and it feeds me.”
As I read and listened to the wide range of spiritual stories that readers shared with me over the past few weeks, I thought about the way that nones — the catchall term that describes atheists, agnostics and nothing-in-particulars — can imply blankness and almost a kind of nihilism.
But as I learn more about the idea and the history of being spiritual but not religious, and the growth of this self-definition over the past few decades, alongside the documented move away from traditional church attendance, I wondered if I hadn’t given enough weight to new expressions of faith. Rather than seeing this moment as reflecting the slow demise of organized religion in America, one that leaves some people bereft of community and meaning, it’s worth asking if we’re in the middle of the birth of a messy new era of spirituality.
First, I want to be honest that I’m not going to be able to give a definitive answer through the data here. The polling around questions of spirituality is pretty noisy, because the terms “spiritual” and “religious” are “so amorphous and they overlap so greatly,” said Robert Fuller, a professor of religious studies at Bradley University and the author of “Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America,” when we spoke last week.
It’s also important to note that spiritual beliefs have been part of American faith since the earliest days of colonization. “Colonial Americans were especially eclectic when it came to their beliefs about the supernatural,” Fuller writes. “While less than one in five belonged to a church, most subscribed to a potpourri of unchurched religious beliefs including astrology, numerology, magic and witchcraft.” (And the Indigenous people of North America had their own belief systems that varied from nation to nation.)
When you get granular about what people believe today, specific beliefs don’t always track neatly with the labels that people use for themselves. As I wrote last year in a series about nones, many people who identify as having no religion in particular still go to church and still believe in a higher power.
Pew Research tried to rectify the overall lack of good data on spirituality with a big report in December. Pew acknowledges that this is a tough topic to pin down because definitions of spirituality are all over the map: Though church attendance has definitively declined and formal religion is important to many fewer Americans than it used to be, “the evidence that ‘religion’ is being replaced by ‘spirituality’ is much weaker, partly because of the difficulty of defining and separating those concepts.”
That said, Pew’s survey found that “22 percent of U.S. adults fall into the category of spiritual but not religious.” Pew found that some of the things that most S.B.N.R.s believe are that “people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body” and “there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.” They are also likely to believe that animals and elements of nature like rivers and trees can have “spirits” or “spiritual energies.”
In his book, which was published in 2001, Fuller describes S.B.N.R.s as “seekers” who often “view their lives as spiritual journeys, hoping to make new discoveries and gain new insights on an almost daily basis. Religion isn’t a fixed thing for them.” They tend to value intellectual freedom and “often find established religious institutions stifling.”
Even at that time, Fuller wrote that “unchurched spirituality” was “gradually reshaping the personal faith of many who belong to mainstream religious organizations.” And I would argue that this kind of spiritual influence has increased.
While confidence in and adherence to organized religion has dropped since the aughts, according to a 2023 Associated Press-NORC poll, 63 percent of American adults believe in karma, 50 percent believe “that the spirits of those who died can interact with the living,” 42 percent believe “that spiritual energy can be rooted in physical objects,” 34 percent believe in astrology and reincarnation, and 33 percent believe in yoga “as a spiritual practice.”
There are those whose fears about the retreat of organized religion have reached the point that they insist the world would be a better place if more people were forced to be like them. You see the fruits of this panic everywhere: in Louisiana’s new law that requires posting the Ten Commandments in all classrooms, and in the Oklahoma state superintendent’s edict that the Bible must be taught in all public schools.
But there’s another, more nebulous concern that I have heard — and expressed myself — that organized religion is an obvious way to find meaning outside oneself and to form community, and that those things may be harder for some people to achieve without the ready-made structure that existing churches, temples and mosques offer.
Reporting this piece has changed my thinking somewhat, because I’ve been focused on the decline: the decaying church buildings with their fraying exteriors and cold, emptying pews. What we may be seeing instead are the first shoots of regrowth, of something else that’s too new and diffuse to really track or understand properly.
Many spiritual communities form online, which means that cataloging them is even more difficult. “There’s such a large number by now of groups that form over affiliations with S.B.N.R. or nones that it’s hard to know where to begin,” said Linda Ceriello, an assistant professor of religious studies at Kennesaw State University. “These sorts of groups had plenty of momentum prior to the pandemic, but that circumstance cemented their presence and utility for so many.” She made it clear to me that we won’t know the full shape of the change until this period is in the rearview.
Still, I was most moved hearing from Brent Wright, an Indiana-based hospital chaplain, who also believes that we’re in some kind of transitional period. When we spoke, he said, “Those of us who are living right at the cusp of this shift are the ones bearing the burden of the cultural assumptions that came before us that we’re breaking out of, but then bearing the uncertainty of what does this mean?”
He talked about the profound, transcendent spiritual connection he experiences through his work with patients. “I can look in their eyes and they look back and whatever our conversation is, whatever the content on the surface of the words, there’s a spiritual connection,” he said. “There’s a togetherness and aliveness that is profoundly rooted in the fact that we are both simply human beings and we’re here right now and I care.” I can’t think of a deeper, more meaningful experience than that.
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