Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (review)

Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. By Wade Clark Roof. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999. 367 pp. $24.95.

The first time I read Spiritual Marketplace I found it interesting and informative, although I faulted Roof, Professor of Religion and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for his overly sunny read of the evidence. On a second, closer reading--perhaps, better said, a careful study--I am convinced that this is a seminal study for the sociology of religion. It should be considered indispensable to anyone trying to take the spiritual pulse of America. We may not entirely like what we discover about the spiritual map Roof provides, but we ignore his evidence at our peril.

Roof's earlier book, A Generation of Seekers (1993), looked carefully at the religion of the baby-boom generation (i.e., those born between 1946 and 1964). He follows up that original baby-boom sample, almost a decade later, to see what has been changing in them and, looking through them as a lens, in American religion more generally. Few contemporary sociological books on spirituality can equal Spiritual Marketplace for its swathe of extraordinarily rich and varied data. It is, for example, a decidedly superior book to Robert Wuthnow's, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950's (1998), which generally disappointed me for taking such an overly individualistic perspective.

I usually find it helpful to trace a book's argument through its key concepts or metaphors. For Roof these are (a) a quest culture, (b) spiritual suppliers, (c) the distinction between "spirituality" and "religion," (d) a religiously deregulated and de-monopolized world, and (e) a reflexive spirituality. Before looking at these concepts, it may be helpful to note the three social conditions Roof identifies to illuminate the world in which we now live: "One, the dissociation of symbols from their referents, allowing for the free play of signifiers; two, the de-centering of authority in meaning, discourse and social form; and three, the globalization of culture along with consumerization and the information glut" (141).

In invoking "a quest culture," Roof points to an increasing percentage of Americans who identify with spirituality but not with religion. Both inside and outside of churches, Americans, especially in the baby-boom generation, resonate with language that stresses values such as "journey," "seeking," "growth," "a culture of choice," and "spiritual exploration." Surprising numbers (fifty-four percent) of those who say they are not religious claim nonetheless to be spiritual. Declining denominational loyalties mean that there are now more people moving between churches and in and out of them than ever before. Even the devout and regular churchgoers are in the main quite inclusive in their beliefs that God can and does work through many different (even seemingly incompatible) religious traditions. Thus, forty-eight percent of Roof's sample agreed that "all the religions of the world are equally true and good." Growing numbers of church members are themselves increasingly nontraditional in belief and commitment. A culture of choice and spiritual exploration can be found both inside and outside the religious establishment.

This new quest culture has some resonance with master themes already present in the American Transcendentalist Movement of the nineteenth century: pragmatism, pluralism, and personal experience. It draws on "a vocabulary of religious speech that pervades yet supercedes life inside organized religion" (155). Thus, despite obvious differences, Christian evangelicals and New Age movements within the United States share many themes, including "an emphasis on direct experience, physical and emotional healing, personal and social transformation, the democracy of believers and of followers, expectation of future change, a deeply based quest for wholeness" (154). The close linking of transcendence to the sense of the self is as old as Emerson. But several things are truly new about the new quest culture. First, a new valence has been given...