religion

The stunning rise of “I’m BOTH spiritual AND religious” in America

May 14, 2012 at 7:00 am by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

A fascinating recent analysis of data on American religiosity today shows the rise of a new ethos in the United States: a stunning 48 percent of Americans now describe themselves as BOTH spiritual AND religious, with another 30 percent preferring the “spiritual, BUT NOT religious” formula.

Now here’s the stunner: only 13 years ago, a majority of 54% of Americans described themselves as religious BUT NOT spiritual. If these surveys are correct, we are witnessing a hidden sea change whereby Americans have now largely accepted a divide between the religious and the spiritual, and the spiritual is winning in spades.

Author Diana Butler Bass sees the day coming when religion in the U.S. will virtually come to an end. In a recent blog post on the Huffington Post, she writes:

In a 2008 survey, Pew research found that one in 10 Americans now considers themselves an ex-Catholic. The situation is so dire that the church launched a PR campaign inviting Catholics to “come home,” to woo back disgruntled members. There was a slight uptick in Catholic membership last year, mostly due to immigrant Catholics. There is no data indicating that Catholics are returning en masse and much anecdotal evidence suggesting that leaving-taking continues. Catholic leaders worry that once the new immigrants become fully part of American society they might leave, too.

She does not talk about the developing world, however, where there are few signs of secularization. After describing the American decline of Protestant denominations as well as Catholic, she continues:

The religious market collapse has happened with astonishing speed. In 1999, when survey takers asked Americans “Do you consider yourself spiritual or religious,” a solid majority of 54 percent responded that they were “religious but not spiritual.” By 2009, only 9 percent of Americans responded that way. In 10 years, those willing to identify themselves primarily as “religious” plummeted by 45 percentage points.

In the last decade, the word “religion” has become equated with institutional or organized religion. Because of crises such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Roman Catholic abuse scandal, Americans now define “religion” in almost exclusively negative terms. These larger events, especially when combined with increasing irrelevance of too much of organized religion, contributed to an overall decline in church membership, and an overall decline of the numbers of Christians, in the United States.

There may be hope, however, regarding the future of faith. Despite worry about the word, “religion,” Americans are extremely warm toward “spiritual but not religious” (30 percent) and, even more interestingly (and perhaps paradoxically), the term “spiritual and religious” (48 percent). While “religion” means institutional religion, “spirituality” means an experience of faith. Large numbers of Americans are hankering for experiential faith whereby they can connect with God, the divine, or wonder as well as with their neighbors and that lead to a more profound sense of meaning in the world. Maybe Americans once called this “religion,” but no more. Americans call it “spirituality.” (Emphasis mine.)

If all this sounds bleak for religion, she does note a silver lining:

Some Americans want to be spiritually left alone, without complications from organized religion. But nearly half of Americans appear to hope for a spiritual reformation — or even revolution — in their faith traditions and denominations. Congregations that exhibit a vibrant spiritual life embodying a living faith in practical ways succeeding, even in the religion bear market. These sorts of communities are models of what might be possible to renew wearied organizations…

Read the whole thing.

The drama in the future of American consciousness will apparently be played out not in a war between the spiritual and the religious, but between those who are BUT NOTs and the BOTH ANDs. World Spirituality must find a way to include and embrace both groups of people. Nevertheless, it’s the BOTH ANDs whose perspective probably holds the greatest promise for the rise of a more Integral worldview, one which recognizes the falsity of the distinction between spiritual and religious, and which works towards the greater integration of today’s theologies with modern and post-modern wisdom, and the revitalization of spiritual and religious organizations.

Filed Under: Belief & Practice Tagged With: religion, religiosity, secularization, sociology, spirituality

Researchers probe relationship between analytical thinking and religiosity

April 30, 2012 at 7:57 am by Joe Perez 1 Comment

According to a story in The Raw Story, a group of Canadian psychologists has concluded that directing test subjects to think “analytically” lowers their level of religious belief. Their research was published in this week’s issue of Science. A look at the study’s methodology, however, reveals misguided assumptions.

Test subjects were given a problem-solving test, shown a picture of Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker,” and given a questionnaire asking participants how much they agreed with statements such as “I believe in God.” When these subjects were compared to control subjects not given problem-solving tasks, and presumably not shown a picture of “The Thinker,” the group subjected to the problem-solving tests were less likely to admit to having religious beliefs.

The Raw Story says:

Psychologists have long believed that humans rely on two different cognitive systems, one “intuitive” and the other “analytical,” and previous research has pointed to a link between intuitive thinking and religious belief.

“Our findings suggest that activating the ‘analytic’ cognitive system in the brain can undermine the ‘intuitive’ support for religious belief, at least temporarily,” study co-author Ara Norenzayan explained.

Philip Ball, Ph.D., a freelance science writer, responds in Nature, noting that the study uses an inadequate definition of religion. Ball:

The authors state that they “focused primarily on belief in and commitment to religiously endorsed supernatural agents” — they examined beliefs in God, the devil and angels. That, of course, already assumes a Judaeo-Christian context, but there are plenty of devout believers who have no need of angels or the devil, and some who perhaps have no need of a belief in God in a traditional or Christian sense (Max Planck was one such example).

This hints at the key problem, which is (or ought to be) as much a quandary for religion itself as for scientific studies of it. Almost all of the questions in Gervais and Norenzayan’s study related to religion as a literalist folk tradition — an aspect of lifestyle. This is how it manifests in most cultures, but that barely touches on religion as articulated by its leading intellectuals: for Christianity, say, philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. The idea that the beliefs of those individuals would have vanished had they been more analytical is, if nothing else, amusing. Gervais and Norenzayan’s findings should help to combat religion as an indolent obstacle to better explanations of the natural world. But it can’t really engage with the rich tradition of religious thought.

Ball’s point is a good one, though from a wider perspective even his objections don’t fully identify the limitations of the study. For starters, there is not only the problem that belief in God is a “Judeo-Christian” belief as opposed to, say, Buddhists; there is the issue that there are many different levels of belief in God, or many different stations of life in which belief in God expresses itself. There are child-like forms of religious belief, mature and immature adult forms. Ball notes that religion is filled with intellectuals with highly refined analytical skills (he doesn’t take this a step further to note that there are different structure-stages of religious expression that ought to be considered separately).

Another issue with the study is that while the authors may only publish narrow findings about the difference between analytical and intuitive psychological types, their study is likely to be interpreted narrowly as a test of whether religious people are stupider than non-religious people, and to reinforce the idea that spirituality is dumb. I’m not quite sure why this study is considered non-offensive when a study examining whether people of different races or socio-economic statuses are more analytical or intuitive.

Spirituality expresses itself in a myriad of ways, and an Integral perspective includes both intuitive and analytical types, and has room for believers with a philosophical or non-philosophical bent. Tests seemingly designed to show that spiritual people are dumb are insulting.

Filed Under: Belief & Practice Tagged With: analytical, intuitive, psychology, religion, science, spirituality

Loss of religion linked to worrisome social trends

April 13, 2012 at 9:48 am by Joe Perez Leave a Comment

By Joe Perez

As religion declines in the U.S. and Europe, weighty issues arise about our collective human future. In “Protestant Ethic 2.0,” Joel Kotkin, executive editor of NewGeography.com, describes key aspects of the sociological significance of religiosity.

First, without a healthy religious base to a society, economic growth as we have known it may not be possible. He writes:

[I]n reality, the religious connection with economic growth may be still far more important than is commonly supposed.

Many in the pundit class identify religion as something of a regressive tendency, embraced by the less enlightened, the less skilled, intelligent and educated. Yet some scholars, such as Charles Murray, point out that religious affiliation is weakening most not among the middle and upper classes but among the poorer and less educated who traditionally looked to churches for succor and moral instruction. Secularism may have not hurt the uber-rich or the academic overclass so far, but it appears to have helped expand our lumpenproleteriat.

Some might be surprised to learn that religious affiliation grows with education levels. A new University of Nebraska study finds that with each additional year of education, the odds of attending religious services increased by 15%. The educated, the study found, may not be eschewing religion, as social science has long maintained, even if their spiritual views tend to be less narrow, and less overtly tied to politics, than among the less schooled.

The decline of religion may also be associated with losing benefits of cohesive groups, which can encourage communal values, charity, and a strong value on education. Joel writes:

Overall the most cohesive religious groups — such as Mormons and Jews — still outperform their religious counterparts both in educational achievement and income. Both Jews and Mormons focus on helping their co-religionists, providing a leg up on those who depend solely on the charity of others or the state. In countries with a substantial historical Protestant influence such as Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands continue to outperform economic the heavily Catholic nations like Italy, Ireland and Spain, according to a recent European study. The difference, they speculate, may be in Protestant traditions of self-help, frugality and emphasis on education. None of this, of course, would have been surprising to Max Weber.

Religious people also tend to live longer and suffer less disabilities with old age, as author Murray notes. Researchers at Harvard, looking at dozens of countries over the past 40 years, demonstrated that religion reinforces the patterns of personal virtue, social trust and willingness to defer gratification long associated with business success.

Thirdly, Kotkin targets the connection between lower religiosity and the rise of individualistic materialism and the decline of an ethos of personal responsibility.

But perhaps the most important difference over time may be the impact of religion on family formation, with weighty fiscal implications. In virtually every part of the world, religious people tend to have more children than those who are unaffiliated. In Europe, this often means Islamic families as opposed to increasingly post-Christian natives. Decline in religious affiliation — not just Christian but also Buddhist and Confucian — seems to correlate with the perilously low birthrates in both Europe and many East Asian countries.

Singapore-based pastor Andrew Ong sees a direct connection between low birthrates and weakened religious ties in advanced Asian countries. As religious ideas about the primacy of family fade, including those rooted in Confucianism, they are generally supplanted by more materialist, individualistic values. “People don’t value family like they used to,” he suggests. “The values are not there. The old values suggested that you grow up. The media today encourages people not to grow up and take responsibility. They don’t want to stop being cool. When you have kids, you usually are less cool.”

It is going ahead of the evidence to suggest that the decline of religion will result in a destruction of personal ethics, cohesive families, collective cultures which value education, and economic vitality. But it is worth taking note of worrisome trends and asking: what role will the rise of World Spirituality play in ameliorating rather than compounding the potential pitfalls of secularism?

Also, how can leaders today, foreseeing the long-term destructive potential of a fully secular society, advance a World Spirituality that can attract a new generation of young people and families?

Many secular humanists and folks who check “none of the above” on surveys of religiosity are attracted to World Spirituality when they are presented with its affirmative, hopeful, and value-driven message. They see the embrace of the best wisdom of pre-modern, modern, and post-modern systems of knowing as a way of reclaiming what they lose by leaving their religion, and find in new enlightenment teachings a path forward to creating a world with a rejuvenated spirit.

Photo Credit: David Boyle

Filed Under: Belief & Practice, Learning & Work, Love, Sex & Ethics Tagged With: economic growth, morality, religion, religiosity, secularization, sociology, spiritual not religious, world spirituality

Faithful, expansive perspectives on Easter as a super-natural event

April 11, 2012 at 11:52 pm by Joe Perez 2 Comments

By Joe Perez

On the If Darwin Prayed blog, Bruce Sanguin asks himself good, tough questions about belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He says:

Recently, I heard biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris, offer a great analogy that helps me to interpret the Easter story. Noting that physicists talk about sound vibrations at various frequencies as constitutive of the universe, she employs the image of a cosmic keyboard. Science deals with the low and mid-range frequencies, matter and electro-magnetic energy. Religion plays on the higher part of the keyboard in the realm of Spirit. Spiritual folk tend to make sense of the world by starting at the top end and working their way down, while scientists tend to start at the low-end and work their way up. But for decades science and religion got stuck, playing only one part of the keyboard and making the claim that only the music that came from their part of the keyboard was legitimate. To dance well and sing on key, we need to hear the music of the the whole keyboard.

But the “key” point is that there is only one cosmic keyboard. Nature is One. Reality is a single-story universe of infinite depth and height. The Easter story is not the story of a supernatural God, who intervened in Jerusalem 2000 years, suspending the laws of nature with a supernatural miracle. Rather, it is a story that encapsulates and catalyzes the story of a resurrection impulse that is active at all levels of creation, cosmological, biological, social and spiritual. Science is particularly focused on the first three. The spiritual frequency is a dimension of Nature/Reality that eludes easy measurement. If you intend to hear it, you need to spend time training the ear of your heart.

Read the whole thing, including Bruce’s answer to the question, “Do I believe that an iPhone camera pointed at Jesus on Easter morning would have captured him rising up?”

If Bruce’s question sounds familiar to my readers, it’s because I give three different answers to this question at different stages in my spiritual autobiographical chronicle Soulfully Gay (three different answers at three distinct periods of time). Without spoiling too much of the book’s surprise ending, I will add that my final response is different than Bruce’s, although we both affirm a belief in Christ’s resurrection. My belief was grounded on an actual physical visitation of a spiritual being who I came to identify with the Christ, and of which the book is eyewitness testimony.

Today, my belief in the resurrection is not dependent on assent to any particular notion of the transmigration of souls or belief in the Hindu tales of gurus who reappear to their flock following death. World Spirituality does not throw out the baby (abiding mysteries of Spirit, uniquely and irreplaceably expressed in religious gnosis) with the bathwater (superstitious or uncritical belief) in making space for pre-modern traditional knowledge.

Instead, it is grounded in my experience of a Unique Self which exists beyond the distinctions of space, time, and thought. From this abiding personal essence, I know of an awareness of a Self existing beyond the boundary of death, however imperfectly I am able to express this belief in words such as “resurrection of Christ.”