Unfuzzying the Fuzzy

Although it seems that there is a “drop in public confidence in religion and religious leadership” as “American religious life has shifted to include more elements defined as spiritual”, the percentage of people that are self rated spiritual and religious in the Forced Sample is 74% and those who are spiritual but not religious is 19% (majority are still S+R). So what really changed? Were people before religious and not spiritual? Probably not, but then spirituality did not differ from religiosity (and if it did, then not as much). As spirituality detached from religion, the definition of what is religious grew narrower: “As spirituality has become differentiated from religiousness, however, it has taken with it some of the elements formally included within religiousness. Therefore, recent definitions of religiousness have become more narrow and less inclusive.” Spirituality became about the individual quest for this “higher”, and religion became the institutional, ritualistic, formalized structure of “goodness”.

What is really interesting though is that those spiritual but not religious place a high emphasis on group experience related to spiritual growth and those who are spiritual and religious consider themselves more spiritual than religious precisely because spirituality is the end that the “personal” has to aspire to and work towards and religiosity as a way to obtain that “higher”. The interdependence of “personal” and “organized” or “collective” is not resolved in either and they don’t differ in their view of the nature of the Divine. They have differed in the spiritual’s unease with the practicalities of religion (or practice) and the nature of the institutional, and the religious apprehension of a “personal” that defies a collective decisive structure and set of rules and in application fails to meet its purpose.

Yet such practicalities (such as: feeling a desirable inner affective state such as comfort, anxiety reduction, security, problem solving, concern for others aimed at obtaining a better world) that illustrate the function of spirituality or religiosity, took a back seat to their common goal of “higher connectedness” or closeness to a “higher being”. So if it takes a back-seat in questionnaires, then why does it not take a back-seat in life? It is because spirituality and religion are thrown into reality in which they have to find their niche and in so become applicable and in so attainable. Is the function of religion or spirituality less important than their goal? If anything, I would say that it is our hope in resolving some of the tension surrounding the meaning of both “religion” + “spirituality”.