Comments on: Who are the “spiritual but not religious”?

By: Aumlan Guha

Aumlan Guha — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 19:16:03 +0000

I am among those who identify as SBNR. But, the term spiritual in this context probably means different things to different people. I use it for instance to indicate that I do believe in a Higher being, a Divine power, but I personally do not differentiate amongst religions; I aver that all of them have a large number of similar tenets and principles. What I oppose are rigid practice and rituals of any kind. Also, though I am extremely God-fearing, it does not matter to me what label or nomenclature is used – I am not particular about that.

P.S.: I may place on record here that I was born in a Hindu family and had my schooling at a Christian missionary school, but prefer to remain distant from all organized religion. I feel stable and at peace when I communicate with the Divine internally, but do not feel comfortable when it comes to organized religion…

By: Martha Murphy

Martha Murphy — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 20:51:44 +0000

I am among those who might describe myself as “spiritual but not religious.” In my case, I am a Christian believer who has become disaffected from the organized religious tradition i which I grew up. I am very offended by the “religious right” and their tendency to view right wing political beliefs as synonymous with Christianity. Many church leaders today are blaspheming the name of Christ on a regular basis.

I miss the social environment of church and belonging to a group with similar beliefs, because I my more liberal associates often do not share the deep Christian spiritual beliefs I hold.

Incidentally, a Belief.net survey I took told me my beliefs most resemble those of a traditional Quaker. I hold a reverence for God and God’s creation that guides my everyday actions.

My guess is that “spiritual but not religious” means very different things to different people. “Religous,” to me, means that one follows the traditional tenets and rituals of a particular religion on a regular basis.

By: Courtney Bender

Courtney Bender — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 17:56:26 +0000

I appreciate Laura’s post and the attention it brings to the ways that Americans answer survey questions about spirituality (in this regard, Vincent Pecora’s comments are also valuable). As a point of clarification however: The New Metaphysicals does not argue that the people I met in Cambridge think of their religious or spiritual aspirations in non-social terms. I emphatically argue the opposite, and my book presents ample material that challenges this common sociological representation (and also provides some reasons for why this incorrect representation endures). Four chapters directly address the ways that spirituality is institutionally organized and how spiritual practitioners understand their social ties to others, both locally and globally.

Thus, while I agree with Laura that many metaphysical practitioners do not view congregational religion as necessary as they pursue their religious goals, this is quite a different thing than saying they view their religious lives in non-social terms or that they lack social ties to co-religionists.

My book does not weigh in directly on whether metaphysicals’ social organizational forms are conducive to political mobilization or not, or for that matter under what social conditions they have been or could be. This is necessary to discuss further. I would, however, urge scholars who are studying the political lives of spiritual not religious Americans to ground their observations in historically and empirically grounded study of the varieties of American religious organizations and institutions that extend well beyond congregational religion.

By: Vincent P. Pecora

Vincent P. Pecora — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:35:30 +0000

One of the problems with the SBNR label—and it has been a problem for any systematic, empirical study of the phenomenon, as far as I can tell, since 1945—is that the term “spiritual” has even less coherence in common usage than the term “religious.” That is not to say that there is nothing actually there to investigate, as William James quite elegantly demonstrated over a century ago. But it is to say that some set-up questions probably need to be asked before the one about spirituality, if this can be done without priming the pump too much. That is, do the people responding to this survey feel, right off the bat, that they reveal something terribly negative, depressing, or perhaps callous and cynical about themselves if they say they are not “spiritual” at all? For many, denying spirituality may be more akin to denying deep feeling, sincere emotion, perhaps the capacity for love of another, rather than denying anything we would call religious or transcendent or eschatological. It is quite possible this sort of reaction is tied to the finding in the surveys that people who describe themselves as “spiritual” also note a greater degree of unhappiness in their lives. I should note for example that, both in big cities like Los Angeles and smaller ones like Salt Lake, one finds large degrees of claimed “spirituality” within the psycho-therapeutic communities, with the strong secular dissent often emerging from the harder core (but also much smaller) psychoanalytic community. Unless we can find ways of getting at how people—and especially Americans—connect the the spiritual with the psychologically healthy (or, at least, the desire for greater psychological health then they feel) we may miss something important about the SBNRs among us. Of course, this is a question to be asked of all religious belief too. But the SBNR cohort seems to me to foreground the link far more than organized religion does. There are now often non-denominational chaplains in business offices, where one might expect a psycho-therapist. They are there not to push any beliefs, but to make people happier (that is, more productive) employees. It is an interesting development.