Introduction

Jan Willis describes a remarkable spiritual journey in her memoir Dreaming Me. Raised in Alabama as part of an African American Baptist family, Willis travelled to India and Nepal while in college. She spent several months in a Buddhist monastery being mentored by Lama Yeshe, a Tibetan monk, and ultimately adopted a Buddhist identity and practice. Later in life, Willis returned to the Baptist congregation of her father, finally able and ready to recognize and reclaim the dimensions of her Baptist heritage that had shaped her identity and which resonated with her Buddhist practice. She identifies herself as a “Black Baptist-Buddhist.” Near the end of her memoir, Willis describes her responses in the midst of a harrowing flight experience: she found herself calling upon both her guru and Jesus for blessing. Willis finds it significant that in the midst of fear and threat, when circumstances evoke expressions that rise up from the core of her self, “I call on both traditions. It is a deep response.” Willis frames her spiritual identity this way: “in my deepest core I am a human being, graced by the eternal truths espoused both by Baptists and Buddhists.”¹

Willis is part of a growing population of persons described by Ursula King as “spiritually multi-lingual.”² Scholars of religion have coined various terms to name the phenomenon of which Willis is a part: “multiple-religious belonging;” “multiple-religious identities;” “hyphenated-religious identity;” “religious hybridity,” and “spiritual hybridity.”³ Recent studies indicate that increasing numbers of Americans make distinctions between being “spiritual” and being “religious.”⁴ One important finding of these studies is that persons who consider themselves spiritual are “involved in intentional, active seeking that does not limit itself to one source.”⁵ This is true not only of those who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” but also of persons who locate themselves firmly within the Christian tradition, whose spiritualities are grounded in and shaped by the classic narratives, rituals, symbols, and doctrines of Christian faith, and who are drawing on the sources and engaging in the rites and practices of other-than-Christian traditions as part of their lived religious experience. As Catherine Cornille puts it, in our contemporary religiously plural context “the idea of belonging exclusively to one religious tradition or of drawing from only one set of spiritual, symbolic, or ritual resources is no longer self-evident.”⁶

Buddha.

Courtesy of Nelson Vieira da Silva

The religious hybridity in which scholars are now interested occurs along a spectrum and takes various forms. On one end of this spectrum are people like Jan Willis who identify completely with more than one tradition as contributing to their core religious identities. Jan Willis’ memoir is an example of this.⁷ Another expression of spiritual hybridity might take the form of adopting a practice from one tradition as a way of deepening one’s participation in or identification with one’s “home” faith tradition. For instance, a committed Roman Catholic might adopt Zen meditation as a way of deepening her contemplative practice. It can also take the form of participating in rites or devotional practices with others as a way of honoring, respecting, and nurturing relationships. For instance, many Christian congregations across the U.S. denominational spectrum participate in interreligious community Thanksgiving “worship” services with Jewish, Muslim, and other faith communities. Still another form of being spiritually multi-lingual is shown in the increasing number of couples who marry across religious lines, not only negotiating not only their own religious lives in relation to one another, but also choosing to raise their children in multiple religious communities and traditions.⁸

What does the increasing commonality of multiple-religious identities mean for the study and practice of Christian spirituality? Are such hyphenated spiritualities, as Peter Phan ponders, “a thoughtful and coherent response to the contemporary situation of religious pluralism or a self-indulgent, free-floating, cafeteria-style potpourri of mutually incompatible spiritualities?”⁹ However one answers Phan’s question, the “hybrid nature of spiritual journeys” (Cornille’s term) presents both opportunities and challenges for scholars and practitioners...