Spiritual But Not Religious: Why More Are Arriving At a Similar Conclusion About Faith
Weekly message for 08/01/22 on the Social Gospel Blog with Author Rev. Paul J. Bern
Spiritual, Not Religious: The Message of the Social Gospel Grows As More Become Disenchanted With Traditional Religion
Still, Believers in a Higher Power Keep Searching for Answers
by Pastor Paul J. Bern
So-called “experts” call them “unaffiliated,” as in a recent Pew poll, or “nones” – or even just 'not very religious.' A 2013 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute divided these groups further into “unattached,” “atheists”, “agnostics,” and “seculars.” That was nine years ago. One thing is for sure; this ever-growing cohort of non-Church Americans made up, at 23 percent, the single largest segment of Barack Obama’s “religious coalition” that helped him win reelection in 2012. As a result of this, the unaffiliated clearly had their moment. Media analysis, however, did not go very deep – there was a story that went beyond these names and numbers.
My Intense Desire to Be a Good Servant to You All
I have began to understand as time rolls along who these current crop of unaffiliated people are, what they believe in, and who or what inspires them. This is the group I am targeting to spread my good news about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but it is outside of the church environment. Yet we have precious little historical understanding of this critical and rapidly growing demographic. What are their roots? What religious, cultural, economic, demographic, and political processes shaped their sensibilities, habits, and makeup? In order to understand these still-believing but nonreligious, unaffiliated, agnostic believers, we need to understand that much of the religious dynamism in the United States happens outside the church walls. Moreover, this has been ongoing for quite some time now. It’s time we woke up and smelled the coffee.
In Order to be Close to God, Invite Jesus to Live Within Your Heart
The “rise of the non-religious believers” is but the latest phase in the long transformation of religion into what we now commonly call “spirituality.” In my case and that of my peers, it is Christianity and the strongly held belief in Jesus Christ that propels me. The one true God is not a distant and mysterious god, but the Son of God who we can develop a relationship with on a personal level. So if you want to get closer to God, just get one-on-one with Jesus. How do we accomplish that? By asking Him into your hearts, to come and dwell there forever. There is truly no other way to get to know him. By the same token, spirituality can mean many things to many people. The language of spirituality is used by traditional religious adherents as well as the religiously unaffiliated. But only the “nonreligious” have made it into a cliche: “spiritual but not religious.” Don’t forget that God loves them too.
Maintaining Spiritual Health
The history of American spirituality reveals that our commonplace understanding of spirituality — as the individual, experiential dimension of human encounter with the sacred — arose from the clash of American Protestantism with the forces of modern life back in the seventeenth century. While religious conservatives fought to stem the tide, giving rise to fundamentalism, religious Progressives like myself have adapted their faith to the 21st century, often by discarding orthodoxies (such as my strict Catholic upbringing) in favor of maintaining one's spiritual health just as anyone would do for a physical ailment, combined with or as a supplement to a personal relationship with our risen Savior.
How the Nonreligious Get Their Religion
Today’s unaffiliated and nonreligious, like the liberals of previous generations, typically shun dogma and creed in favor of a faith that is truthful, genuine, practical, psychologically attuned, ecumenical and ethically oriented. Of course, Americans of all religious varieties have allowed themselves to be deeply influenced by consumerism, but media and markets are shaping the religious lives of those without formal institutional or community ties. The religiously unaffiliated might not attend services, but they “get” their religion in many other ways: they watch faith-based TV and listen to it on the radio; find inspiration on the Web; they attend retreats, seminars, workshops, and classes; they buy faith-based candles, bumper stickers and yoga pants; take spiritually motivated trips; and, perhaps most significantly, buy and read books. Books have been the most important conduit for spreading the 'spiritual but not religious' gospel.
Organized Religion and the US Marketplace
This dependency on the consumer marketplace, and especially books, has had significant consequences for the religious lives of all Americans, especially the unaffiliated. First, it has enhanced the tendencies within American religion toward a therapeutic understanding of life from a spiritual vantage point. The profit-oriented commercial presses that came to dominate religious publishing naturally pursued the largest market possible for their goods. They seized on the nondenominational, nonsectarian, and psychologically modern forms of faith advanced by the religious left as a common American Christian belief system.
Belief in the Pure Salvation of Christ Is Replacing Organized Religion
These trends have only accelerated from the 1920s to the present, so that now the line between religion and self-help sometimes disappears in the spirituality section of Amazon. Second, spiritual consumerism has fostered books that allow some readers entry into religious worlds to which they have not been previously exposed. Since the invention of the printing press, the lines of denomination and tradition have gradually mattered less and less. This process has accelerated greatly with the relatively recent invention of the Internet.
When People Replace Denominations With a Call to Service
Progressive Christianity and the Social Gospel's rise, combined with liberal Protestantism’s decline has been accompanied by and is in part arguably the consequence of the fact that the Republican party has recently won the Senate and parts of the House of Representatives as well. The cultural victory that is the anti-Trump backlash is happening now because more Americans have been driven away by conservatism in light of the Trump presidency. In other words, leftist religious values and sensibilities became more and more normalized, culturally speaking. Even as religious affiliations continue to decline, on-line churches combined with Christian but nondenominational book sales and TV shows are continuing to proliferate. In the process, Christianity is becoming as interconnected as the rest of the world, which can only result in more rapid growth. This is very encouraging news for people like me who wish to spread the Gospel as widely and effectively as we can.
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