While a growing number of Americans say they feel alienated from organized religion, a sizeable and increasing number are also expressing a desire for spiritual sustenance outside of traditional religious denominations. This trend suggests that even though many Americans are turning away from conventional religious affiliation, a sizeable proportion of us also appear to be rejecting secular materialism, the primary alternative to traditional religion, as an option.
For example, according to a 2018 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), 27% of Americans now describe themselves as being “spiritual but not religious” – or SBNRs for short — a segment of the population which has increased eight percentage points in only five years. Meanwhile, according to the Pew Research Center, the number of Americans who “do not identify with any religion” – a category demographers have labelled “Nones” – grew from 15% in 2007 to 23% in 2017 and that number continues to grow.
This means that the religiously unaffiliated now account for the same proportion of the U.S. population as either Catholics or Evangelical Christians. Moreover, while only 17 percent of Baby Boomers describes themselves as “Nones,” that category currently accounts for a whopping 35 percent of Millennials. Equally interesting is data from Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life which finds that many of the country’s 46 million unaffiliated adults nevertheless embrace spirituality in some way. For example, two-thirds of them say they believe in God, while more than half say they often feel a spiritual connection with nature and the earth.
That said, despite this growing split between people who describe themselves as religious versus those who think of themselves as spiritual, I believe we may need to rethink the distinction between these two ways of describing our relationship to the sacred. For example, many people find the word “religion” problematical because of its associations with dogmas, fundamentalism, and sectarian conflict. On the other hand, while the word “spirituality” clearly appeals to a growing segment of the population as an alternative to “religion,” it often connotes a rather nebulous relationship to the sacred which tells us very little about its significance as an aspect of our lived experience. Religions, on the other hand, are inherently frameworks and perspectives for ongoing meaning-making, systems that offer a cohesive orientation to answering life’s most profound and persistent questions, questions connected to the meaning and purpose human life.
For this reason, a small but growing number of writers and teachers are offering an alternative to the idea of spirituality as a substitute for organized religion, an option called “personal religion.” This development mirrors a shift in our understanding of the term “myth.” While myth always derived from a collective, communal, or tribal perspective until the early part of the last century, today we speak of people having “personal myths.” That said, while our personal myths are an expression of the unique mythic dimension of the stories of each of our particular lives, they also reflect many of the universal and perennial symbols, images, and themes of collective mythologies.
Similarly, personal religion is an expression of a deeply individual relationship to the sacred which freely draws sustenance from the teachings, theological perspectives, symbols, stories, and rituals of the world’s many religious traditions. In addition to incorporating elements from these traditions, personal religion can also include content from many other domains of human experience, including nature, music, art, literature, and cinema. Beyond that, personal religion can draw upon our own life stories, experiences, dreams, and mystical encounters. Indeed, personal religion can be inspired by any and all the many ways humans experience inspiration, transcendence, wonder, awe, mystery, and a sense of the sublime.
A key trend which is encouraging this emerging approach to religion is a growing interest in connecting to the sacred in ways that feel deeply and personally experiential. As religious studies scholar Duane Bidwell puts it, today’s SBNRs and religious “nones” are more concerned with “being and becoming” rather than “believing, belonging, and behaving,” with the latter three being viewed as the primary concerns of organized religion. We can also see this emphasis on an experiential approach in William James’ distinction between “firsthand” and “secondhand” religion. For James, firsthand religion is always based on direct, personal experience of the sacred in one’s life, while secondhand religion is based on a collective and traditional adherence to a canon of dogmatic precepts about the nature of the sacred.
Another important development contributing to the rise of personal religion is the increasing commonness of Americans simultaneously practicing multiple forms of faith drawn from a global storehouse of religious and spiritual traditions. One can see evidence of this growing trend toward mixing sacred traditions in the large numbers of Jews and Christians drawn to Buddhist theology and practice, of Christian women engaged in Goddess worship, of African-American Christians practicing Yoruba and other indigenous African traditions, and of Irish Catholics pondering ancient Celtic and contemporary Wiccan beliefs and practices. Bidwell, who describes himself as a devout Buddhist Catholic, recently published a book entitled When One Religion Isn’t Enough, in which he describes people who identify with more than one religious tradition as “religiously fluid.”
As someone with a rich, profound, and complex personal religion, I find both the trend toward a more experiential approach to religion and the growing appreciation of the value of religious fluidity deeply encouraging. Both are essential to rise of personal religion as an alternative to the twin perils of fundamentalist religion and material secularism. This is also critically important because, while a personal mythology offers a powerful psychological framework for understanding ourselves, it remains incomplete without a without an equally personal framework for actively engaging the sacred dimension of our lives, in other words a religion of one’s own.