In the Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change

7. Spiritual Seeking

119 7 Spiritual Seeking Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the proportion of Americans who are unchurched believers, who distance themselves from church and organized religion while still believing in God or a Higher Power (Hout and Fischer 2002; Roof 1999) and adhering to a personal religion that is uncoupled from conventional forms of religiousness (Smith 2002). Although the interest in seeking sacred meaning independent of church participation was accentuated by the cultural changes of the 1960s, spiritual seeking has long been present in American culture, and present even longer in Christianity. The early Gnostics challenged the religious authority of the church and sought revelation through a personal relationship with God (Pagels 1979). In America, the first “spiritual awakening” dates back to the 1830s and 1840s and is associated with the emergence of the transcendentalist movement and such renowned figures as Emerson and Thoreau. The transcendentalist movement was itself indebted to the writings of the eighteenth-century Swede Emanuel Swedenborg and his emphasis on the metaphysical and mystical nature of experience (Fuller 2001: 24–26). For Emerson (Fuller 2001; Miller 1956/1964), the “Over-Soul,” a depersonalized cosmic force, permeated or inhabited the world and was accessible to self-reliant individuals who, forsaking conventional 120 SPIRITUAL SEEKING beliefs and practices, opened themselves to experiencing the underlying spiritual reality.1 Emerson’s ideas were clearly influenced by German romanticism, with its emphasis on the primacy of the unconscious, the importance of undertaking a journey of self-discovery, disdain for conventionality , and pantheism (Fuller 2001; Miller 1956/1964). However, as argued by the distinguished cultural scholar Perry Miller, the yearning for an intimate connection with God, and the conviction that he could be found in the world around us, was far from alien to such paragons of Puritanism as Jonathan Edwards. What differentiated Emerson from Edwards, according to Miller, was not the basic impulse to seek union with the Divine but Emerson’s rejection of the notion of original sin and the resultant belief in the possibility of actually finding the Universal Being in nature (1956/1964: 185). More recently, Leigh Schmidt (2005) argues that, unlike the Puritans before him, Emerson’s and the transcendentalists’ conceptualization of spiritual seeking was not confined to Christianity but was inclusive of other, particularly Eastern, religious traditions. Emerson’s notion of spirituality aligned itself with the liberalism of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham and thus was characterized by rejection of an uncritical submission to scripture as well as recognition of the validity of other faith traditions in ways that were unthinkable, Schmidt argues, to Jonathan Edwards, but which foreshadowed the cultural changes of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Clearly, the major themes found in contemporary spirituality have been present in American and Western culture for a long time. What is new about American spiritual seeking in the post-1960s era is its pervasiveness (Marty 1993). Prior to the 1960s, only a small proportion of Americans attempted to fulfill their spiritual needs outside the domain of denominational religion. Since then, a vastly expanded spiritual marketplace —with its tantalizing mix of Eastern philosophies and practices, alternative ways of thinking about the sacred, and a variety of self-help therapeutic groups and manuals aimed at satisfying the inner needs of Americans (Glock and Bellah 1976; Roof 1993, 1999; Wuthnow 1998)—has produced a growing trend toward uncoupling religion and spirituality (see, e.g., Fuller 2001; Roof 1993; Zinnbauer et al. 1997). THE RELATION BETWEEN SPIRITUAL SEEKING AND RELIGIOUSNESS Not surprisingly, the increased prevalence of a spiritual vocabulary has resulted in a fair amount of ambiguity in how the word spiritual SPIRITUAL SEEKING 121 is used in both popular and scholarly conversation (Wulff 1997). The main source of this ambiguity is the fact that, whereas close to a fifth of Americans define themselves as spiritual but not religious, approximately three-quarters indicate that they are both spiritual and religious (Roof 1999; Zinnbauer et al. 1997).2 More specifically, over two-thirds of Americans who have a religious affiliation describe themselves as both religious and spiritual; by contrast, among those who have no religious preference, 15 percent think of themselves as, at most, moderately religious, but 40 percent describe themselves as spiritual (Hout and Fischer 2002: 176). Clearly, these two groups invoke spirituality to convey different things. Individuals who identify themselves as both religious and spiritual...