Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America's Nones by Elizabeth Drescher (review)

It can't just be my coming of age in the 1990s that makes me hear the title of Elizabeth Drescher's book as a rhymed response to R.E.M.'s song "Losing My Religion." At its heart, Choosing Our Religion argues that U.S. "Nones" (that is, Americans who identify as "none of the above" on surveys of religious affiliation) are not isolated individuals who outgrow or reject religion, but rather socially-engaged cosmopolitans who consciously and creatively engage in extra-institutional religiosities that primarily locate spirituality in caring relationships, particularly among family and friends. By showing how social relationships lie at the heart of the spiritual lives of the religiously unaffiliated, Drescher's rich qualitative data suggest that Philip Rieff, Robert Bellah, Robert Putnam, and others needlessly worried that decreased participation in religious institutions will lead to narcissistic individualism and the downfall of American society. Rather, Drescher documents, the everyday lives of her unaffiliated interlocutors are suffused with types of lived religiosity no less rich and other-oriented than those of affiliated Americans. Drescher's study is based on two research instruments: a survey of 1,166 Americans (22% Nones and 78% "Somes," or, those who claim a religious affiliation) and interviews with 103 American Nones. Both achieved impressive regional diversity, but over-represented white, urban or suburban, upper-middle class Americans of Christian background. Still, Drescher's qualitative interviews exhibit remarkable breadth, highlighting the None category's internal diversity and complexity by containing nonbelievers and skeptics who attend religious services (whether out of devotion, curiosity, or obligation) and self-described "Jesus followers" critical of Christian institutions and their ideologies. Drescher's conversations with these Nones reveal central concerns with authenticity as they "narrate" their selves, profound ethics of care and cosmopolitanism, and commitments (even by non-believers) to concepts of transcendence, salvation, and eternity to make sense and meaning of human life. Qualitative work like Drescher's is invaluable for fleshing out and nuancing quantitative polls by Gallup and Harris and surveys by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Dresher found that media coverage of "the rise of the Nones" prompted by these polls have helped Nones identify with this category (30–31).

Interestingly, while Somes and Nones tend to be characterized as polar opposites—finding spiritual fulfillment in religious organizations and in individualistic pursuits, respectively—Drescher's survey found fairly similar patterns in respondents' "most spiritually fulfilling practices," regardless of whether they claimed a religious affiliation. From a list of twenty-five spiritually fulfilling practices developed with a series of focus groups, American Somes and Nones chose the same top five responses (in descending order): "enjoying time with family," "enjoying time with friends," "enjoying time with pets and other animals," "preparing or sharing food," and "prayer." Interestingly, Somes and Nones also chose "studying sacred scriptures" and "attending worship" least frequently out of the twenty-five options. As the latter is among the most common sociological measures of religiosity, this alone is a significant finding. Her chapters focus on how Americans "become None," how they find spirituality in their relationships, how they engage in prayer, and how they navigate morality for themselves and their children in a pluralistic society.

While Drescher sagely posits a continuum between affiliated Somes and unaffiliated Nones, recognizing that the affiliational identities of "religious Nones" and "Nones-in-Some's-Clothing" are complex, strategic, and context-specific (10–13, 21–22, 31–33), her predilection for broad generalizations often undermines these nuanced insights. For example, despite Somes and Nones similar reports of finding everyday relationships to be the most spiritually rewarding, Drescher does not question Nancy Ammerman's conclusion that Somes' everyday spirituality is an extension of their religious community into their households, rather than it possibly being the other way around (155–156).

Similarly, while she establishes that Nones' religious lives are entangled in various social organizations that exist somewhere on a spectrum of institutionalism...