in 2009 in answer to survey question "are you spiritual or religious?" :
- 30% spiritual
- 48% spiritual and religious
- 9% religious
- 9% neither
In 1999 only 10 years earlier, this is how people responded:
- 30% spiritual
- 6% spiritual and religious
- 54% religious
- 9% neither
Did you catch that???? We went from 54% of the population who identified themselves primarily as religious (identifying primarily with the organization or institution, where spiritual meant identifying primarily with experience) to 9%.
What's going on? That group is aging and dying, said Diana Butler Bass (who writes on the intersection of religion, church, culture, political life) They may still be in our churches, but they are growing fewer every day.
I spent the day with Diana and a group of faith-based coaches, consultants, spiritual directors and denominational leaders from 5 denominations in Balitmore at a 3 day networking/learning/resource sharing event.
The group that's growing? The percentage of people who say they are spiritual AND religious.
Now, that's not to say that those two happen in the same place for most people. Often spiritual happens in the Thursday morning yoga class or the Tuesday evening meditation circle and the religious part happens in the once-every-couple-of-months church service a person attends. Religious is their church part. Spiritual is their circle of support or their art journal group or their woodworking or..... Often things that have no connection with the church they're affiliated with.
"Show us the AND!" is what folks in our churches are saying. "Give us a structured way to experience the transcendent and a way to talk about it with each other." Historically, that's what renewal movements have always been about, whether it was the Franciscans or the Methodists, or today the emergent church and neo-monastic movements (among others)
When Diana speaks to groups she's been running an exercise where the group lists words they associate with religious and with spiritual. She has them make lists, take off the loaded, judgement laden words, and then note the words that are on both lists. After running this exercise with lots of groups from lots of faith traditions here are some of the words she finds on both lists: community, justice, liturgy, singing, worship, theology.
That, she says, is our to-do list.
Now....what is our stop doing list?
