I'll try not to repeat this every time they're mentioned but it's my firm understanding that yoga, meditation and even tarot aren't viewed as spiritual by the vast majority of people who do them these days. Headspace is a hugely popular meditation app and is specifically non-religious (https://help.headspace.com/hc/en-us/articles/218394158-What-kind-of-meditation-is-Headspace). Also my wife uses tarot in the writing workshops she organises as story prompts.
> "For Burton, this is part of a larger movement toward “expressive individualism.”
I'm not familiar with this work but the nature of US Christianity --while placing importance on adhering to a community-- seems more focused on the acts and thoughts of the individual for its modern history. I'm not sure what kind of movement Burton describes but it's difficult for me to imagine the US Christians moving even more in the direction of "expressive individualism" than it already is. Maybe Burton is describing a thread in the narrative of moving away from organizations altogether?
I applaud you for taking on the challenge of analyzing and writing about this. And I really like the four categories of "Nones" that you've created. I have known members of each, and I think you are correct in considering them separately. But I think you are misunderstanding in one very important way what people mean when they say they are "Spiritual but not Religious". I have spent the most recent 26 years of my 70 year life moving about from firmly to mostly in this camp (after spending the previous 24 moving about between the "Dones" and the "Zealous"), and moving about from one form of interacting with other SBNRs to another. And I have never met an SBNR who thinks that spirituality has anything whatsoever to do with "practices". "Practices" are one important aspect (though not the entirety) of the "Religion" part that is being rejected. This is not to say that a self-described "spiritual" person HAS no "practices" - but they are not what one defines as the basis of one's spirituality, nor an essential and inseparable part of it. Spirituality is all about belief, feeling, and the like. Religion is at least in pertinent part about "practice". Someone wise (and I wish I could remember who, but I can't...) once said that a Religion is what happens when the beliefs of a great spiritual teacher get ossified into a set of practices to be followed by others. To be SBNR is to literally be saying "I care deeply about what I feel and believe about the unknowable, but, while I may have practices I follow, they are NOT central to my personal system.
This looks like an interesting topic, but please clearly define your acronyms clearly at the beginning of the article. Or even better don’t use acronyms at all. They make it much harder to read.
Ryan, the color-coding on the graph about "activity in the previous 30 days" isn't clear to me. Is the red color indicating male, like the previous graph on "gender distribution"? That would mean that 17% of men participated in Yoga in the last 30 days. Thanks for clarifying.
PS: If you were to survey, by average Sunday attendance, the 100 largest congregations in the USA today, probably 90 of them are passionately Christian - but do not identify as either Roman Catholic or Protestant. They alone may account for the rapid statistical growth if the Nones.
The "hardening of the categories" has generated wildly inaccurate understandings of American church participation.
It seems like the analysis of this analysis is crying out for definitions. The etymology of the word "religion" connotes a sense of duty, required reverence and binding obligations. Spirituality connotes a source of comfort and meaning but without any sense of binding obligations. People like a source of comfort and meaning but they like it on their own terms without binding obligations.
Those survey questions seem to present a narrow idea of what being spiritual can mean. Sure, some spiritual folks are into New Age, but some of us (& apparently quite a few of us) feel there is likely something larger than us but do not align it with a particular dogma. Maybe that power is pure energy or love or something we don't have words for but inventing a name or worship practice for it just doesn't matter. So we might commune with it through prayer or being still or living our lives as best we can to our morals but we don't do it while needing a religious text or yoga or crystals or astrology to guide us.
Also, the sexism from your friend is disappointing though not surprising.
"Spiritual but not religious" immediately calls to mind the amazing Webb and Mitchell "Bad Vicar" sketch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVn_2urtDu8 - which includes some NSFW language. One of their all-time best (along with "Are We the Baddies?").
Great analysis and info... as a former longtime SNBR.
I'll try not to repeat this every time they're mentioned but it's my firm understanding that yoga, meditation and even tarot aren't viewed as spiritual by the vast majority of people who do them these days. Headspace is a hugely popular meditation app and is specifically non-religious (https://help.headspace.com/hc/en-us/articles/218394158-What-kind-of-meditation-is-Headspace). Also my wife uses tarot in the writing workshops she organises as story prompts.
> "For Burton, this is part of a larger movement toward “expressive individualism.”
I'm not familiar with this work but the nature of US Christianity --while placing importance on adhering to a community-- seems more focused on the acts and thoughts of the individual for its modern history. I'm not sure what kind of movement Burton describes but it's difficult for me to imagine the US Christians moving even more in the direction of "expressive individualism" than it already is. Maybe Burton is describing a thread in the narrative of moving away from organizations altogether?
I applaud you for taking on the challenge of analyzing and writing about this. And I really like the four categories of "Nones" that you've created. I have known members of each, and I think you are correct in considering them separately. But I think you are misunderstanding in one very important way what people mean when they say they are "Spiritual but not Religious". I have spent the most recent 26 years of my 70 year life moving about from firmly to mostly in this camp (after spending the previous 24 moving about between the "Dones" and the "Zealous"), and moving about from one form of interacting with other SBNRs to another. And I have never met an SBNR who thinks that spirituality has anything whatsoever to do with "practices". "Practices" are one important aspect (though not the entirety) of the "Religion" part that is being rejected. This is not to say that a self-described "spiritual" person HAS no "practices" - but they are not what one defines as the basis of one's spirituality, nor an essential and inseparable part of it. Spirituality is all about belief, feeling, and the like. Religion is at least in pertinent part about "practice". Someone wise (and I wish I could remember who, but I can't...) once said that a Religion is what happens when the beliefs of a great spiritual teacher get ossified into a set of practices to be followed by others. To be SBNR is to literally be saying "I care deeply about what I feel and believe about the unknowable, but, while I may have practices I follow, they are NOT central to my personal system.
This looks like an interesting topic, but please clearly define your acronyms clearly at the beginning of the article. Or even better don’t use acronyms at all. They make it much harder to read.
Ryan, the color-coding on the graph about "activity in the previous 30 days" isn't clear to me. Is the red color indicating male, like the previous graph on "gender distribution"? That would mean that 17% of men participated in Yoga in the last 30 days. Thanks for clarifying.
No that graph is comparing SBNR vs Other Nones. The labels are across the bottom row.
PS: If you were to survey, by average Sunday attendance, the 100 largest congregations in the USA today, probably 90 of them are passionately Christian - but do not identify as either Roman Catholic or Protestant. They alone may account for the rapid statistical growth if the Nones.
The "hardening of the categories" has generated wildly inaccurate understandings of American church participation.
It seems like the analysis of this analysis is crying out for definitions. The etymology of the word "religion" connotes a sense of duty, required reverence and binding obligations. Spirituality connotes a source of comfort and meaning but without any sense of binding obligations. People like a source of comfort and meaning but they like it on their own terms without binding obligations.
Those survey questions seem to present a narrow idea of what being spiritual can mean. Sure, some spiritual folks are into New Age, but some of us (& apparently quite a few of us) feel there is likely something larger than us but do not align it with a particular dogma. Maybe that power is pure energy or love or something we don't have words for but inventing a name or worship practice for it just doesn't matter. So we might commune with it through prayer or being still or living our lives as best we can to our morals but we don't do it while needing a religious text or yoga or crystals or astrology to guide us.
Also, the sexism from your friend is disappointing though not surprising.
"Spiritual but not religious" immediately calls to mind the amazing Webb and Mitchell "Bad Vicar" sketch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVn_2urtDu8 - which includes some NSFW language. One of their all-time best (along with "Are We the Baddies?").