What Americans Really Believe

11 Spirituality: Religion and Spirituality Are Not Mutually Exclusive

87 sPirituality Religion and Spirituality Are Not Mutually Exclusive 11 “I have always been a spiritual person. I was once a very confused Catholic spiritual person, but I quickly discovered that my true spiritual happiness lies not in the organization and foundation of religion, but in the wide acceptance and tolerance afforded by the mixing of philosophies and beliefs.” These words, expressed by a female in her twenties, present a fashionable but unfortunate contrast. Spirituality—expressed in personal, mystical, experiential terms—is pitted against religiousness , understood as institutionalized beliefs and practices including church membership, church attendance, and commitment to organizationally sanctioned doctrines.1 There seem to be many Americans who, like the young woman quoted above, have come to separate spirituality and religiousness , and by the 1990s this gave rise to the belief that spirituality is displacing religiosity. Consequently, scholars rushed to enumerate the growing proportions of spiritual Americans and to profile who they are. It soon was discovered that spirituality and religiousness are not separate constructs in the minds of many, perhaps most, Americans. They regard being spiritual as an integral part of being religious. Nevertheless, it was suggested that 18–20 percent of Americans did fit the description of spiritual, Stark Americans final.indd 87 9/9/08 10:06:32 AM 88 / Spirituality but not religious.2 Most of these studies, however, employed nonprobability samples, and some utilized forced choices that did not give respondents an option to choose both spiritual and religious to describe themselves. One of the few studies to make use of nationally representative survey data, drawing on the 1998 General Social Survey, discovered the estimate of spiritual-but not-religious people to be just 10 percent.3 Despite sampling limitations, a fair amount is now known about who these spiritual Americans are. In his book Spiritual, but Not Religious, Robert C. Fuller summarizes spiritual-but-notreligious people as “more likely than other Americans to have a college education, to belong to a white-collar profession, to be liberal in their political views, to have parents who attended church less frequently, and to be more independent in the sense of having weaker social relationships.”4 Other studies likewise find the spiritual-but-not-religious category to be related to age, ethnicity , region, marital status, education, income, service attendance, prayer, and parents’ level of religious attendance when a respondent was a child.5 In all research, the quality of the data determines a lot about the quality of conclusions that emerge. Limited samples and surveys with limited religious content have hampered research on spirituality and religiousness. Our contribution is to use new national religion data to probe popular understandings of spirituality and religiousness. We offer a new look at the extent and implications of American spirituality. The 2007 Baylor Religion Survey verifies that the terms “spiritual” and “religious” are both commonly used in the United States. Two-thirds of Americans (66%) say that the term “spiritual ” describes them as very or somewhat well and three-fourths of Americans (74%) report that they are very or somewhat religious . When these self-assessed labels are combined, the results are these: Spiritual, but not religious 10% Spiritual and religious 57% Stark Americans final.indd 88 9/9/08 10:06:32 AM Religion and Spirituality Are Not Mutually Exclusive / 89 Religious, but not spiritual 17% Neither 16% 100% These data show that, far from being mutually exclusive categories , spirituality and religiousness tend to largely overlap in the minds of Americans. In fact, more than half of American adults (57%) say they are both spiritual and religious. A much smaller minority, just 10 percent, are spiritual but not religious. These two percentages match up closely with estimates from other nationally representative samples. Using the 1998 General Social Survey (GSS), Shahabi and a team of colleagues calculated the spiritual and religious group to be 52 percent and the spiritualonly group to be 10 percent.6 Who are the Americans who say they are spiritual, but not religious? • Gender: Although women are more likely than men to be religious (see chapter 7) the genders are equally likely to claim to be spiritual, but not religious. • Race: Whites and African Americans are equally likely to say they are spiritual, but not religious. • Age: Age has a strong effect: 18 percent of Americans under thirty say they are spiritual, but not religious, compared with 16 percent of those 30–49, 6...