In The New Metaphysicals, Courtney Bender notes that defining spirituality is “like shoveling fog.” Indeed, a subject as intensely personal as spirituality tends to be subject to as many definitions as it has practitioners or adherents. And as Leigh Schmidt and other historians have shown, spirituality has appeared in myriad forms and meant many different things over many generations. Despite its resistance to concrete definition and operationalization, in its broadest sense the rubric “spirituality” has remained a decidedly steady component of the human condition. Thus “genealogy” seems an especially appropriate approach to Lofton and Modern’s effort to elucidate what spirituality is (and is not). Like any family tree, today’s manifestations of spirituality and its historical antecedents reach far and wide. Spirituality’s DNA also sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways. As anyone who has tried to unearth information about his or her forebears can attest, much can be learned from discovering—or even from searching unsuccessfully—for the branches of a family tree.

I also have been struck by the cleverness of Lofton and Modern’s self-presentation as “curators” of Frequencies, rather than editors or coordinators or some other boring, bureaucratic term. “Curate” is, of course, both a verb and a noun. Thus, Lofton and Modern have curated an art exhibition of sorts (in both content and form, with visual art accompanying each entry)—but even more profoundly, they have acted as curates, taking on responsibility for the care of souls. (I cannot resist noting that the World English Dictionary also lists “assistant barman” as an alternate definition of the noun “curate.”) Because spirituality embodies something so human and alive, it is eminently sensible that Frequencies should be presented in a soulful, considerate, and caretaking manner. In a meaningful sense, freq.uenci.es is akin to ancestry.com.

Lofton and Modern received contributions from observers ranging from senior academics to DJ Spooky. Their invitation called for “fragments in a dynamic, large-scale portrait” and was accompanied by a rather comprehensive list of potential topics. It is noteworthy in the context of genealogy that the contributors to Frequencies often chose to write about topics that diverged from the list provided by the curators, much like one often is surprised by discoveries about long-forgotten ancestors. I suspect that Frequencies offered similar surprises (and delights) to Lofton and Modern as their “large-scale portrait” developed. Frequencies is richer and truer because of the tremendous latitude afforded to its contributors; spirituality’s real family tree has been allowed to take shape.

Several entries are especially resonant (referencing another term carefully chosen by Lofton and Modern) with the notion of spirituality as profoundly connected with various understandings of family. Elijah Siegler’s entry titled “Automation” refers several times to the fact that unlike other academic subjects, “the word spirituality fills [him] with anxiety.” For me, this observation reflects all the worries so many people have about dealing with immediate family members, because, like studying spirituality, doing so often is fraught with complication. (I must note that Siegler’s hilarious book-title generator is well worth investigating as well.)  Darren Grem’s lamentation on the “Chicken Sandwich,” as purveyed by the popular fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, emphasizes the very particularist (evangelical Protestant) spirituality underlying a highly profitable business. Chick-fil-A is so profitable that it retains a longstanding policy  of closing on Sunday, a “decision [that] was as much practical as spiritual…. (A)ll franchised Chick-fil-A Operators and their Restaurant employees should have an opportunity to … spend time with family [emphasis mine] and friends.” In sharp contrast with the moral questions inherent in selling chicken sandwiches are Michael Gilmour’s observations about “Companion Animals.” As I write this with one of my feline family members asleep on my desk, Gilmour’s concluding remark resonates especially strongly: “For the nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, all living things reveal the creator God, with each kingfisher and dragonfly—and let us add each companion animal—offering a glimpse of the divine.” And then there is Chip Callahan’s rendering of the “Highway,” that wonderful conduit of family road trips and maker of lifelong memories. In Callahan’s case, “In the summer of 1978 … my whole family packed into an Itasca motorhome and spent six weeks driving a loop around the country…. I was ten years old, and the trip … was discovery on multiple levels…. It was history and myth come alive as we drove, walked, and slept in places we’d [only] heard and read about.”

Family ties are bound up with a lifetime’s worth of anxieties, love, and memories—and with the loss thereof. So too spirituality is inextricable from how we deal with loss. Such themes appear again and again in Frequencies. We hear from Wendy Cadge about “Spiritual Care Services” in hospitals, whose “efforts are premised on the belief that everyone has some sense of spirituality that … chaplains can tap into and work with in their interactions with patients and their families [emphasis mine].” Sarah McFarland Taylor evokes the inherent sadness of an “Estate Sale,” at which she “did not expect the intimacy with which [she] would sift through peoples’ lives.” Various contributors to Frequencies grapple with the tension between spirituality and material items, but no one can deny the fact that the physical detritus of everyday life carries special meaning to the descendents of those who owned it—whether we want to preserve such items, sell them, or destroy them. Laura Marris offers two evocative poems under the heading “Loss,” both of which clearly allude both to loved ones and to the self in days gone by. The passage of a family member of a different sort is a theme of Pamela Klassen’s observations about Max Weber’s grave. Weber is a member of our collective academic family tree rather than our biological ones, and Klassen invites us to consider the memorial to him as well as the inherent spirituality of cemeteries in general.

In short, Frequencies goes a long way toward creating the “large-scale portrait” of spirituality that Lofton and Modern set out to assemble. The portrait is not defined by clean lines, but by a mixture of images and ideas. It is messy and surprising in a good way, as is any family tree. And for some reason Frequencies reminds me of one of my favorite moments in film: the closing scene of “A River Runs Through It.” This scene is glorious visually, musically, and spiritually, especially because it evokes the deeply personal complexity and pain of humans’ love for family. In the words of author and fly-fisher Norman Maclean, for whom a river is like the trunk of a family tree:

In the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

Who are the Americans who identify as “spiritual but not religious”? What unifying characteristics, qualities, and beliefs might they share? And to what extent might their distinctive approach to religion, or to systems of meaning, have relevance to political discourse, electoral campaigns, and public policy? As many other contributors to this blog have noted, these questions elude easy answers, because defining spirituality is, as Courtney Bender aptly puts it in her brilliant book The New Metaphysicals, “like shoveling fog.” Nevertheless, perhaps we can obtain just a slight bit of traction by investigating some of the characteristics shared by SBNR Americans.

I took a quick statistical peek at some of the religious, demographic, and attitudinal attributes of respondents to a 2005 survey (conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for the PBS television series Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly) who self-identified as “spiritual but not religious.” Out of a sample of 1,131 respondents, 387 (34.2 percent) selected this label for themselves (49.8 percent chose “religious,” 10.1 percent chose “neither,” and the small remainder gave other responses). I found that SBNR respondents are (not surprisingly) significantly less likely than religious respondents to say “religion is important in [their lives],” to attend religious services (90 percent never attend), or to engage in other traditional religious practices. Surprisingly, religious and SBNR individuals do not differ significantly from one another in terms of age, race, gender, marital or parental status, employment status, education, or income.

How might SBNR individuals translate their belief systems, values, and practices into political attitudes and behaviors? I would like to posit several working hypotheses on this front, but first I wish to echo Joel Robbins’s assertion that the “metaphysicals” about whom Bender writes “understand their social lives in non-social terms.” We must approach the study of SBNR Americans with the understanding that (for the most part) they forego participation in the most common mode of social interaction in the United States: conventional religious worship. Thus, they voluntarily absent themselves from the social networks fostered in and by congregations and hence fail to receive the politically charged messages that many clergy deliver. This lack of connectedness, combined with the evident desire of SBNR persons to forge their own way in the world, outside of the rigid social and cultural boundaries that traditional religion tends to erect, suggests to me that SBNR Americans are unlikely to have any semblance of a clear or systematic political agenda.

Nevertheless, it makes sense to hypothesize that SBNR Americans would place themselves to the left of center politically, at a bare minimum because the Republican Party today is so widely identified as being “friendly” to organized religion. The data I analyzed bear this hypothesis out: SBNR respondents were significantly more Democratic in their party identification and liberal in their ideological orientation than their religious counterparts. Following the work of George Lakoff, we might also hypothesize the SBNR individual to be less authoritarian than one who is traditionally religious. The data support this assertion as well: SBNR survey respondents were significantly less likely than religious respondents to agree with the statement, “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good hard spanking.” On a related note, definitions of morality might also be hypothesized to differ between religious and SBNR Americans, and, again, the data show that the two groups do differ significantly. Religious survey respondents are more likely to define “moral values” as “social issues, such as abortion or gay marriage,” “family values, such as trying to protect children from sex and violence on TV and the Internet,” and “compassion and concern for the sick and needy,” while SBNR Americans are more likely to define moral values as “social justice, such as preventing human rights abuses or discrimination,” and “personal values, such as honesty and responsibility.”

The small descriptive analysis presented here scarcely scratches the surface of the empirical work that will need to be done to achieve even a modest understanding of SBNR Americans and politics. Which issues, if any, do they prioritize? Do they take part in organized political action, and if so, around which causes? Do they wish to affect political outcomes or not? In closing, I wish to note an additional way in which SBNR survey respondents differ from religious respondents: SBNR respondents are significantly more likely to report being unhappy with their “life in general [. . .] on the whole.” If mobilization efforts were to succeed, perhaps it is this dissatisfaction that could give rise to meaningful political advocacy by Americans who identify as “spiritual but not religious.” The difficulty inherent in such a mobilization effort, however, cannot be overstated.

In a likely reference to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s monumental 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, Maher notes that 16 percent of Americans classify themselves as what we might call “religious nones,” as they are unaffiliated with any organized religious body. Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar’s 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) finds this figure to be even higher: 22 percent, according to their survey, are religiously unaffiliated. Self-styled atheists and agnostics are included in this category, but the overwhelming majority of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated state simply that they have no ties to organized religion. Over several decades, the percentage of Americans who classify themselves as “nones” has increased dramatically. This fact is a clear manifestation of the growing cultural acceptability of eschewing religious life altogether.

Of course there have always been Americans who have questioned or opted out of religion (Thomas Jefferson is among the most prominent religious doubters in American history), but the more widespread rejection of religion we see today is a rather recent phenomenon. Scholars have correctly noted that the real explosion in the number of religious “nones” occurred in the 1990s, when the percentage doubled.  However, in my mind the real roots of this phenomenon lie in the 1960s-era repudiation of traditional cultural values and institutions. Not only did the counterculture dabble visibly in non-Western religious traditions, many adherents also discarded religion altogether because they saw it as an anti-egalitarian, overly conformist relic of days gone by. I would contend that the counterculture of the 1960s pushed existent cultural limits just far enough to lay the groundwork for later growth in the social acceptability of opting out of religious life.

The sweeping changes of the 1960s also contributed in meaningful ways to the growth of evangelical Protestantism and the emergence of the religious Right, both of which are anathema to most of today’s religious “nones.” Evangelical Protestantism’s vitality owes much to its willingness to offer clear moral standards and answers to life’s most confounding questions in a broader American cultural context that can be alienating and confusing; the religiously unaffiliated prefer to travel with their own compasses rather than taking direction from traditional religious authorities. The religious Right burst onto the political scene in the 1980s as a reaction against many of the egalitarian impulses and policies that were born of the 1960s; the political tension between the religious Right and those who are not engaged in religious life goes without saying.

What characteristics, if any, do today’s “religious nones” share in common? Much like the ARIS survey, the Pew Forum survey reveals that the religiously unaffiliated are younger (nearly a third were under the age of 30), more likely to be male, and less likely to be married than the average American. They are scattered across the United States, with slightly fewer living in the South and slightly more living in the West than national averages would predict. In terms of education, income, and race/ethnicity, however, the unaffiliated almost exactly mirror the U.S. population. There also is no appreciable difference between the average American and the religiously unaffiliated in terms of how many children one has in the home.

Like the ARIS survey, the Pew Forum survey finds many religiously unaffiliated Americans expressing somewhat surprising points of view on religious matters. Six in ten are at least “fairly certain” of the existence of “God or a universal spirit,” while four in ten say religion is at least somewhat important in their lives and more than a third say they pray at least once a week. In short, many of the religiously unaffiliated seem best classified as religious skeptics, as asserted by Kosmin and Keysar, because many of them have not abandoned religion altogether.

Politically speaking, the religiously unaffiliated share a good deal in common. The Pew Forum survey reveals them to be more Democratic in their party affiliation, more liberal ideologically, more supportive of abortion rights and gay rights, and more concerned about environmental protection than national averages would suggest. James Davison Hunter argues in his classic 1991 book Culture Wars that Americans who are skeptical of religious influences on politics and public policy comprise much of the progressive side of our intractable battles over socio-moral issues. Such apparent political uniformity should suggest that religious “nones” could be mobilized for political action with relative ease. Yet, as Maher notes, this is not the case. Why, despite their many commonalities, are the religiously unaffiliated not a force with which to be reckoned in American politics?

First, it must be said that religious “nones” are not without political significance. Because the Democratic Party knows this constituency is by and large on its side, Democratic candidates have taken great care not to overdo religious rhetoric on the campaign trail. In recent elections, Democrats’ reluctance to “do religion” has given the Republicans a powerful strategic advantage among religious constituencies—an advantage upon which George W. Bush based the bulk of his 2004 reelection campaign. Democrats today are edging their way toward greater engagement of religious themes and constituencies, but they know they must tread lightly to avoid alienating their secular supporters. Moreover, prominent interest groups, such as Americans United for the Separation of Church and State give voice to some of the religious establishment-related concerns shared by many unaffiliated Americans.

But why is it the case that religious “nones” are not better mobilized? I would argue that the primary obstacle is the fact that the unaffiliated share no institutional mechanism in common (like a congregation) that puts them in the same physical place at the same time. Religious people are relatively easy to mobilize because they are easy to find. The unaffiliated are distinguished instead by their lack of ties to a particular institutional form. Moreover, the fact that many young people and unmarried people count themselves among the ranks of the unaffiliated is a political challenge. Age and marital status are empirically related to political participation, with older people and married people being more engaged in politics. Perhaps as the religious “nones” age—and as various political entities discover creative ways of mobilizing them—they will become a more potent force in American politics. For the moment, they are a growing constituency just waiting to be tapped. Whether they will respond to Bill Maher’s request that they “end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves” remains to be seen.