New research from Pew shows rapidly rising numbers of the religiously unaffiliated in the United States, and scholars forecast various scenarios for the religious landscape in the future. An underreported aspect about those who check “none” on a religious survey is this: many who don’t belong to an organized religion or consider themselves members of a church, mosque, or synagogue still believe in God, see themselves as “spiritual,” and pray or engage in other spiritual practices.
Don’t assume the rise of the unaffiliated means the rise of secularism, as if atheists and agnostics will now become the norm in the United States. On the contrary, the rise of the unaffiliated points to another phenomenon: the rise of people who seek out spirituality in multiple ways and through multiple avenues. They’re unaffiliated with an already established religion, but they may be forging a spiritual path of their own. And this path is radically personalized.
Intuitional, Remixed Spiritualities
In her book Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton describes the increasing number of people she describes as religiously “remixed.” It’s a shift from institutional religion to intuitional religion:
A religion of emotive intuition, of aestheticized and commodified experience, of self-creation and self-improvement, and yes, selfies. A religion for a new generation . . . raised to think of themselves both as capitalist consumers and as content creators. A religion decoupled from institutions, from creeds, from metaphysical truth-claims about God or the universe of the Way Things Are, but that still seeks—in various and varying ways—to provide us with the pillars of what religion always has: meaning, purpose, community, ritual.
You may not realize it yet, but this description of the religiously unaffiliated is also true of many people in established religious communities. I’m talking about a kind of spiritual fluidity—where many churchgoing Christians believe things that are fundamentally incompatible with orthodox Christian doctrine.
It wasn’t too long ago that a Christian woman I know, someone who believes the Bible and rarely misses a Sunday service, was talking about the spirit of her grandmother in a bird and a butterfly! A church leader gently corrected some of the theology, but still, I’m no longer surprised when men and women who sit under faithful Christian teaching mix and match doctrines and practices from various sources as they work out their own beliefs. The result is, as Burton points out,
The more individualized our religious identities become, the more willing we are to mix and match ideas and practices outside our primary religious affiliation. . . . Each of these intuitional religions is, at its core, a religion of the self. . . . Our desire for personal authenticity and experiential fulfillment takes precedent over our willingness to build coherent ideological systems and functional, sustainable institutions.
Explosion of Pseudoreligions
What does this mean for the church today? Christianity’s “competition” is not primarily other religions or cults—not institutions, but pseudoreligions of the intuitional variety.
Take the gospel of wellness, for example, and the explosion of communities united around working out. Or the options available for people who need new lotions, potions, meditation apps, or whatever is necessary for self-care. Think about the language of energy, toxins, positivity. Even if most of this stuff isn’t built on true science, people are adopting practices or purchasing products or joining communities that have been reenchanted in some way. The battle isn’t about good and evil in the world as much as it’s about pursuing what’s good for you and avoiding what’s bad for you.
We could also point to the resurgence of New Age thought, Wiccan spirituality, and even the pseudoreligious communities adopted by people who base their identity in their sexuality (complete with a “conversion testimony” of sorts in the ritual of “coming out” as well as joining a family in the “LGBT+ community,” etc.). Burton mentions the “religion of social justice” that replicates the cornerstones of traditional religion (meaning, purpose, and community) in a narrative of good versus evil. Others have noted how political involvement functions for many people as a religious substitute, a pseudoreligion of sorts.
Authentic Christianity
Some pastors and church leaders will be tempted to reach the intuitionally spiritual by appealing to their well-formed sense of personal authenticity. But this approach implies Christianity is just another therapeutic source of well-being, not the public truth about the world. What we need are heralds focused more on a different kind of authenticity: the authentic Christian gospel. And authentic Christianity isn’t something we invent; it’s something we discover.
This is the adventure I describe in The Thrill of Orthodoxy. We hear a lot these days about “speaking your truth” or “living your truth,” as if the word “truth” is now just a synonym for “perspective” or “experience.” Surely we should make room for sharing our perspectives and recounting our experiences. But if our tendency is to adorn “truth” with adjectives like my and your, and never the, we’re fundamentally violating the very definition of “truth” to begin with.
A Truth Bigger than Your Heart
Today, many put religion in the category of self-discovery and self-expression, so all our seeking and finding takes place within the caverns of our heart, where we dig down to our deepest desires, incorporate religious beliefs and spiritual practices that resonate with our needs, and then construct an inspirational identity that suits us. When it comes to religion, just like everything else, there’s your truth and my truth.
The church must point to a greater adventure: exploring something beyond the depths of one’s own heart. The greater adventure comes when you find something beyond the realm of my perspective and your experience—truths we didn’t invent or adapt to suit ourselves but truths we discovered, to which we adapt. We must lift up the beauty of orthodoxy and authentic Christianity in a world of intuitional, personalized spiritualities.
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