rd
Religion Dispatches
_Essay_ (http://www.religiondispatches.org/category/essay/) October 24,
2012
A History of the Unaffiliated: How the “Spiritual Not Religious” Gospel
Has Spread
By _Matthew S. Hedstrom_
(http://www.religiondispatches.org/contributors/matthewshedstrom/)
You can call them “unaffiliated,” as in a recent Pew poll, or “nones”—or
even just “_not very religious_
(http://www.religionnews.com/politics/election/the-biggest-slice-of-obamas-religious-coalition-the-unaffiliated)
.” A
brand new poll by the _Public Religion Research Institute_
(http://publicreligion.org/research/2012/10/american-values-survey-2012/)
divides this group
further (and somewhat counterintuitively) into “unattached,” “
atheists/agnostics,” and “seculars.” But whatever you call them, this
ever-growing
cohort of unchurched Americans makes up, _at 23 percent_
(http://www.religionnews.com/politics/election/the-biggest-slice-of-obamas-religious-coalition-the
-unaffiliated) , the single largest segment of Barack Obama’s “religious
coalition” (compared to the 37 percent of white evangelicals who support
Mitt Romney).
While we have yet to see a “Seculars for Obama” bumper sticker, the
unaffliated are clearly _having a moment_
(http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/6493/does_record_number_of_religious_“nones”
_mean_decline_of_religiosity/) . Media analysis, however, has not gone very
deep—there is
a story here that goes beyond names and numbers.
Recent sociological work from _Courtney Bender_
(http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2012/10/10/what-does-spirituality-mean-in-america-today/)
, _Christian
Smith_ (http://www.nd.edu/~csmith22/) , and others does help us understand who
the current crop of unaffiliated are and what they do and believe. Yet we
have precious little historical understanding of this critical and growing
demographic. What are their roots? What religious, cultural, economic,
demographic, and political processes shaped their sensibilities, habits, and
makeup?
In order to understand these still-believing “nones,” we need to
understand that much of the religious dynamism in the United States happens
outside
the church walls, and has for some time now. The “rise of the nones” is
but the latest phase in the long transformation of religion into what we now
commonly call “spirituality.” In my class on “Spirituality in America” at
the University of Virginia, we use _Leigh Schmidt_
(http://www.religiondispatches.org/contributors/leighericschmidt/) ’s
pathbreaking Restless Souls
to trace this phenomenon over two centuries, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
break with New England Unitarianism in the 1830s to the multibillion dollar
spirituality industry of today.
Spirituality can mean many things, of course, and the language of
spirituality is used by traditional religious adherents as well as the
religiously
unaffiliated. But only the “nones” have made it into a cliché: “spiritual
but not religious.”
The history of American spirituality reveals that our commonplace
understanding of spirituality—as the individual, experiential dimension of
human
encounter with the sacred—arose from the clash of American Protestantism with
the forces of modern life in the nineteenth century. While religious
conservatives fought to stem the tide, giving rise to fundamentalism, religious
liberals adapted their faith to modernity, often by discarding orthodoxies
in favor of Darwinism, psychology, and comparative religions.
The majority of today’s religious “nones”—those who claim no religion but
still embrace spirituality—are engaged in the same task of renovating
their faith for a new historical moment. And typically, they draw from this
same liberal religious toolkit. Today’s unaffiliated, like the liberals of
previous generations, typically shun dogma and creed in favor of a faith that
is practical, psychologically attuned, ecumenical—even cosmopolitan—and
ethically oriented.
This liberal spirituality, as it has evolved over time, has been deeply
entwined with media-oriented consumerism. Of course Americans of all religious
varieties have been deeply influenced by consumerism, but media and
markets have particularly shaped the religious lives of those without formal
institutional or community ties. The religiously unaffiliated might not attend
services, but they “do” their religion in many other ways: they watch
religion on TV and listen to it on the radio; find inspiration on the web;
attend retreats, seminars, workshops, and classes; buy candles and statues,
bumper stickers and yoga pants; take spiritually motivated trips; and, perhaps
most significantly, buy and read books.
Since the 1920s, when the major New York trade presses first started
offering nonsectarian religious books in significant numbers, books have been
the
most important conduit for spreading the “spiritual but not religious”
gospel.
This dependency on the consumer marketplace, and especially books, has had
significant consequences for the religious lives of all Americans,
especially the unaffiliated. First, it has enhanced the tendencies within
American
religion toward a therapeutic understanding of the spiritual life. The
profit-oriented commercial presses that came to dominate religious publishing
naturally pursued the largest market possible for their goods, and seized on
the non-creedal, nonsectarian, and psychologically modern forms of faith
advanced by religious liberals as a common American religious vernacular.
These trends have only accelerated from the 1920s to the present, such that
now the line between religion and self-help disappears in the spirituality
section of Barnes & Noble.
Second, spiritual consumerism has fostered a robust cosmopolitanism. Books
allow readers entry into previously unimaginable religious worlds. Since
trade presses entered the religion game with vigor, the lines of denomination
and tradition have mattered less and less. The political and moral
imperatives of World War II provided the greatest stimulus to such interfaith
reading, and before long even the Protestant-Catholic-Jew formulation of the
era could not contain American readers. What matters to the unaffiliated is
not imprimatur but inspiration.
The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith _has observed_
(http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/SociologyofReligion/?view=usa&;
ci=9780195371796) , “Liberal Protestantism’s organizational decline has
been accompanied by and is in part arguably the consequence of the fact that
liberal Protestantism has won a decisive, larger cultural victory.” The “
cultural victory” Smith and others write about happened not because more
Americans joined liberal churches, in other words, but because liberal
religious values and sensibilities became more and more culturally normative.
And
no single cultural force has been more significant to this profound
religious shift than the unabashed consumerism of the religious book business
in
the twentieth century.
Even as religious affiliations decline, religious books sales continue to
rise, as they have steadily for more than a half century. In this ultimate
spiritual marketplace, American religion displays its full shape-shifting
vitality.
--
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