The First Baptist Church of Granada Hills

          Every so often some group of researchers conducts a survey of the religious beliefs of Americans.  Generally speaking the results are predictable: most people identify with either Catholicism or one of the thirty-one flavors of Protestantism, a smaller percentage are Jewish, and a handful of people hold to other, generally Eastern, faiths.  But over the last generation or two a new demographic has arisen, a group which apparently warrants its own category: “spiritual but not religious”.

          Those who see themselves as “spiritual but not religious” generally feel that life is a wonderful and somewhat mysterious thing.  This sense of wonder and mystery is such that flat, mechanistic explanations of the world simply fail to convince. As such the minds of these individuals are open to the spiritual, that is, to phenomena and orientations which seem to participate in a larger reality than mere matter in motion. 

          At the same time, people of this sort often feel that there is something of an inherent antagonism between spirituality and religion.  Spirituality is free, it’s open-ended, it’s intensely personally, and largely private.  Religion, on the other hand, is seen as dogmatic, institutional, stale, and authoritarian.  To put it more simply: spirituality is positive while religion is largely negative.

          As a clergyman I confess that I find the above dichotomy rather misses the mark.  The difference between religion and spirituality is not one of kind but of degree.  As such the difference between the two is analogous to the difference between genuine mathematics and a vague appreciation of numbers: the former is simply a refinement, an integration, and even an advance of the latter.  Religion is merely what happens when people come together to discuss spirituality, to bring their experiences and thoughts into relationship with one another.  Religion is where the world-weary pessimism of Ecclesiastes is put into dialogue with the bright-eyed optimism of Proverbs; it’s where the cautiousness of St. James is brought into contact with the freedom of St. Paul; it’s where the fleeting glimpses of that “larger reality” are pieced together to produce a fuller and more reliable picture than any one person could hope to manage alone.

          Of course, there is still the matter of religion’s authoritarian flavor.  But given the above, is that really surprising?  Indeed, is it even necessarily undesirable?  If religion is the piecing together of a definite puzzle then certainly there are better and worse ways to assemble that puzzle.  Or, to continue the mathematics analogy, while all numbers may be equally valid, all equations are not: 2+2=4 certainly seems more reasonable than 2+2=5; would we really want to study under a teacher blind to the distinction?

          With all this said, I’d encourage the “spiritual but not religious” to reconsider institutional faith, to even give it a first-hand investigation.  Perhaps the chapels of your neighborhoods and the well-worn books they preach contain something of worth after all.  Perhaps you’ll find their ministers less overbearing than you assumed.  Who knows, perhaps you’ll even find a home.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Social Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.