'Spiritual, but not religious': why Americans are abandoning religious institutions to pursue their own paths to the divine

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“SPIRITUAL, BUT NOT RELIGIOUS”: WHY AMERICANS ARE ABANDONING
RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS TO PURSUE THEIR OWN PATHS TO THE DIVINE

by

Jennifer Lois Hahn

________________________________________________________________________

A Project Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Jennifer Lois Hahn
Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Article 1

Abstract

All across America, people are leaving their churches and synagogues to pursue their
own individual paths to the divine. Many of them call themselves “spiritual, but not
religious.” This article explores in detail what they mean by this, the history of
“unchurched” spirituality in America, the ramifications of disaffiliation for traditional
religious bodies, and what these institutions are doing to entice their ex-members back
into their pews.

ii
It’s a breezy spring day in Southern California, a place where ideas about God,
the universe, and transcendence come and go with the wind. But one such idea seems to
have settled here – at least for a while. If you were to ask almost anyone browsing the
shelves of the Bodhi Tree Bookstore about their religious affiliation, they’d likely
respond with some variant of “I’m spiritual, but not religious.”
Andrea Spunt, a 30-year-old writer, is spending her afternoon checking out the
store’s impressive inventory of both spiritual classics such as Ram Dass’s Be Here Now
and current bestsellers including Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.
“I certainly would never presume to understand the mysteries of life,” Spunt says,
explaining what it means to her to be spiritual. “I recognize there's a mystery and whether
the truth of that mystery is something scientific or something spiritual, or whatever the
real story is, I'm certainly in no position to know it. That's why I've never particularly
identified with any religion, because I just can't imagine presuming to think that I know
the story.”
The Bodhi Tree, which has served as a spiritual mecca of sorts in Los Angeles
since opening in 1970, shares a block with the ultra-hip Urth Café on Melrose Avenue.
Just a few streets away on Robertson Blvd, paparazzi stalk starlets flashing red Kabbalah
bracelets and sobriety chips.
But it would be a big mistake to dismiss the “I’m spiritual, but not religious”
phenomenon as one of those hippy-dippy New Age trends that could only take root on
the anything-goes coast of California.

1
Across America, people are leaving their churches and synagogues in droves to
pursue their own unique spiritual paths. A recent survey conducted by the Pew Forum on
Religion & Public Life found that 1 in 10 adults have abandoned their childhood religion
to become part of the 16 percent of Americans currently unaffiliated with any religious
group. In fact, in recent decades, this group, known as the “unchurched,” has grown
faster than any other religious group in the country.
Mostly white, but with a racial and ethnic makeup closely mirroring the overall
population, the unchurched come from all income brackets and are heavily composed of
those under fifty. They have left both Protestant and Catholic churches in roughly equal
numbers and, according to other recent studies, young American Jews are similarly
leaving traditional institutions behind. (More research is needed to determine how this
trend toward disaffiliation is affecting smaller religious groups in the U.S. including
Hindus and Muslims). There is even evidence to suggest that some Americans who
regularly attend traditional religious services identify as “spiritual, but not religious,”
freely mixing their spiritual ideas with those they pick up at church.
What is driving this mass exodus from America’s houses of worship? According
to the Pew survey, the majority of those formerly connected to religious organizations say
these groups “focus too much on rules and not enough on spirituality,” that religious
people are hypocritical, judgmental and insincere, that no single religion has a monopoly
on truth, and that religious leaders are more interested in money and power than truth and
spirituality.

2
But not all of the unaffiliated are atheists – far from it, in fact. Over half of the
unaffiliated polled by Pew were at least fairly certain they believed in God. Forty percent
said they left their former faith because their spiritual needs were not being met – not
because they ceased having them. And according to a recent cross-cultural study of
spirituality, nearly two-thirds of those who had left religious institutions in the United
States said they were “more spiritual than religious.”
Americans’ reasons for leaving traditional religious bodies are no doubt diverse,
but common to all is a waning belief in the authority of religious institutions to determine
spiritual truth.
“Why look to the church? Why look to the pope? Why look to the priests? Why
look to the ministers?” says University of California Santa Barbara professor Wade Clark
Roof, who has studied spiritual seekers, particularly those of the baby boom generation,
for decades. “The scandals within the Catholic Church, the scandals among some
televangelists, especially the kind of sex-related stuff, all of that has led to some level of
distrust of religious institutions. So the counter to that is to turn inward on your own…”
The “spiritual, but not religious” believe that turning inward on your own in
search of the transcendent can actually provide a more intense experience of the divine
than what is available through America’s traditional religious institutions. And some
fairly heavy-weight experts think they’re right.
In the early 1960s, the famous psychologist Abraham H. Maslow noticed that
unchurched religious people seemed to have more transcendent religious experiences,

3
what he called “peak-experiences,” than the traditionally religious. Maslow came to the
radical conclusion that “the degree of religious organization may correlate negatively
with the frequency of ‘religious’ experiences.”
“[F]or most people a conventional religion, while strongly religionizing one part
of life, thereby also strongly ‘dereligionizes’ the rest of life,” he wrote. “The experiences
of the holy, the sacred, the divine, of awe, of creatureliness, of surrender, of mystery, of
piety, thanksgiving, gratitude, self-dedication, if they happen at all, tend to be confined to
a single day of the week...”
Traditional religious leaders, of course, vehemently disagree with Maslow’s
characterization of organized religion as somehow denying, rather than inspiring,
religious experiences. In response to such criticisms, they have initiated campaigns to
convince their lost flocks that religion can in fact enhance spirituality. Whether
Americans will continue their egress from traditional religious bodies is anyone’s guess,
but without a doubt, the “spiritual, but not religious” phenomenon will have a lasting
impact on religion in America.
***
At just 17, Herb K. gave up the worldly enticements of youth to become a monk
in a Catholic monastery. For seven years he studied to be a priest, but three years shy of
ordination he decided it was not for him. Free of the confines of the monastery, he began
drinking, eventually spiraling into alcoholism. In 1984, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous
(AA) (according to AA tradition, members speak anonymously to the press). Early on in

4
his recovery, Herb reconnected with the church, attending mass every day, and even
becoming a director of liturgy. But four years into his sobriety, he came to the realization
that for all his religious commitment to Catholicism, he had failed to find a connection to
God that was truly transformative.
“I finally understood as the result of doing the steps in AA what spirituality is,
which is a personal relationship with God that translates into behavior changes, where
you begin operating on principles, you begin acting correctly, not because you’re afraid
of getting caught or there are rules and ethics imposed from the outside,” he recalls.
“These are principles that come from the inside as the result of a connection with a higher
power, the source of principles. And that began my spiritual journey for the very first
time.”
Today, at 69, Herb works with a therapist, an AA sponsor, and a “spiritual
director,” to maintain his relationship with this higher power. He also leads “Big Book”
workshops for hundreds of recovering addicts, walking them through the 12 steps as laid
out in AA’s foundational text. The goal is to help them achieve a spiritual connection
with a higher power of their own understanding – a connection that members of 12-step
groups believe is crucial to maintaining abstinence from alcohol or other addictive
substances and behaviors.
Though Herb found his relationship with God outside of a religious institution,
and his workshops enable hundreds to do the same, he still believes traditional religious
bodies have the potential to lead people to the divine, provided they avoid certain all-too-
common pitfalls.
5
“In fact, religion’s purpose is to lead one into authentic spirituality, to give
somebody a medium in which they can be formed to have a relationship with God and
then have the fellowship and the methods to support that,” he says. “Unfortunately,
because of the human influence, they become membership clubs with rules and they
become very exclusive and judgmental and restricting and very punishing and very
narrow in scope.”
In contrast, Herb says, AA has always been inclusive, open to all people, and free
of rules and dogma.
But is important not to condemn all religious institutions for the sins of the many,
says Jim Burklo, a minister in the very liberal United Church of Christ (UCC). He
believes much of the responsibility for Americans’ turn away from religious institutions
can be laid at the feet of evangelical Christianity.
“There’s this idea out there in the culture that’s overwhelmingly pervasive that
religion is about belief, and it’s about dogma… that you’ve got to believe that somebody
is your savior or else,” says Burklo, who now serves as the associate dean of religious life
at University of Southern California. “That is entirely a product of American evangelical
Christian dogma which says that there is one way, Jesus is the only way, everybody else
is going to hell. It’s all or nothing.”
Burklo believes it is this all-or-nothing imperative that many Americans
incorrectly associate with all organized religion, causing them to steer clear of any
church, no matter how accepting or open-minded it actually is.

6
Prior to his job at USC, Burklo worked as the minister of a UCC church in San
Mateo in Northern California, an area he calls the “bible shoestring of America,” the
country’s “most spiritual and non-religious place.” Part of his task as a minister was to
convince those who had fled traditional churches that the UCC had something different
and better to offer them.
Christianity’s wealth of tradition and rituals – including music, liturgy, art, and
even the bible – have much to offer spiritual seekers, if properly interpreted, Burklo says.
And he says that much of the mysticism and meditation that the “spiritual, but not
religious” are drawn to, has been present in Christianity all along.
But Michael Smith, who sometimes attended Burklo’s church, felt he had to
venture beyond a Christian institution to find the spiritual connection he craved. Growing
up in a small Texas town, Smith’s grandparents had taken him to a fundamentalist
Church of Christ (not to be confused with Burklo’s United Church of Christ, an entirely
separate denomination) until a combination of “teenage hormonal problems” and
religious doubts caused him to leave the church his freshman year of college. He spent 14
years outside of any religious institution, but when his first child was born, he and his
wife joined The Disciples of Christ, a more mainline offshoot of his childhood church.
For the next twenty years he was very active in his congregation, until in 1998, at the age
of 52, he resigned after realizing that he had been “trying to convince myself that I
believed in something I simply didn’t,” he says. “I felt like I was living a lie.”

7
Asked what it was he found so difficult to believe, Smith says, “That there is
some being somewhere who’s in charge of things and running the show. I mean, I just
don’t see any evidence for that.”
Like many of the “spiritual, but not religious,” Smith found refuge in Asian
religious teachings and practices, particularly meditation. Around the same time he left
the church, Smith started attending a Buddhist reading group in Dallas, where he
currently resides. Smith says he is drawn to Buddhism, particularly Zen, because of its
lack of emphasis on God. It is “non-theistic,” he says. “Not atheistic. But just non-
theistic.”
Smith believes that much of the pull traditional religious bodies still retain comes
from the fear they are able to inspire in their members through the notion of a judgmental
God.
“If the Pope came out tomorrow and said, ‘There is no heaven, there is no hell,” I
think most of the people would leave the Catholic church…” he says. “I spent most of my
religious life just being terrified of this being that I thought was going to get me if I didn’t
behave correctly. So my religion all those years was mostly fear-based and that’s not
really religion, that’s just some kind of terror.”
***
On a radiant Sunday evening, one hundred and seventy one summers ago, Ralph
Waldo Emerson stood before the senior class of the Harvard Divinity College in
Cambridge, Massachusetts and challenged the young ministers to radically rethink their
approach to preaching the divine.
8
“In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man-made sensible
that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is
drinking forever the soul of God?” he asked. “[T]he priest’s Sabbath has lost the splendor
of nature; it is unlovely; we are glad when it is done; we can make, we do make, even
sitting in our pews, a far better, holier, sweeter, for ourselves.”
Emerson’s Divinity School Address was a devastating condemnation of his era’s
religious institutions. In the speech, he recounted once sitting in a church during a
snowstorm listening to a “preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church
no more.” Emerson could not understand why anyone had shown up for the sermon. “It
seemed as if their houses were very unentertaining, that they should prefer this
thoughtless clamor,” he said.
Emerson is just one of the many prophets of unchurched American spirituality. In
fact, the modern “spiritual, but not religious” movement is heir to a long tradition of non-
institutional spirituality that some scholars believe has played just as influential a role on
the American religious scene as evangelical Christianity.
The story of unchurched religion in the U.S. goes back to the Enlightenment,
which led many educated Westerners to embrace rationalism over faith, radically
challenging traditional Christian dogma. In the 1830s, German scholars provided
compelling evidence that the bible was written by anonymous human sources that
perhaps weren’t so reliable. Then, in perhaps the most significant blow to biblical
religion, Darwin announced his theory of evolution in 1860, which implied that man had

9
descended from apes, rather than from Adam and Eve. The scientific challenges to a
fundamentalist account of our universe have kept coming, making it difficult for some to
continue believing in the God of the bible and of ancient institutions.
But life is hard, the universe vast and cold, and many yearn for some kind of
higher, more meaningful, reality to believe in. Unchurched spiritual traditions have long
attempted to reconcile this cherished concept of rationalism with some kind of belief in
transcendence.
As early as the colonial period, Americans were experimenting with non-
traditional ideas of God, with only 15 percent of them attending church regularly. The
founding fathers are famous for their deism, or the belief that God created the universe
and its laws, but is now utterly uninterested in it. Since the likes of Thomas Jefferson and
Benjamin Franklin successfully fought against providing the new union with an official
state church, religious experimentation became and continues to be a fundamental feature
of American religion.
The growth of Spiritualism in the 19
th
century first brought metaphysics – or the
belief in some kind of transcendent reality outside of church doctrine – to a popular
audience in the U.S. Spiritualists believed that they could contact the dead and higher
spiritual beings through séances and mediums. Some developed a complex cosmology, or
blueprint of the material and spiritual universe, that consisted of multiple spheres of
reality, each one step closer to the purely divine. Spiritualists believed this divinity was
able to “influx” into lower dimensions, and that if an individual was in proper harmony
with these spheres, he or she could harness its power.
10
The 19
th
century also saw the emergence of Emerson’s Transcendentalism, which
held that both humanity and nature were infused with the divine and that accessing this
truth required no institutional interpretation, just a quiet attention to one’s inner self and
natural surroundings. Many credit Transcendentalists – who believed that the bible was
only one of many texts containing religious truth – with first introducing Americans to
the Eastern religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism. This Eastern influence,
reinterpreted to serve American interests and concerns, has played a tremendous role in
shaping unchurched religious thought in this country.
The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, was also an important player in
introducing Americans to Eastern religious practices and ideas. Founded by a Russian
immigrant named Helena Blavatsy and an American lawyer named Henry Steel Olcott,
Theosophy attempted to unearth a universal spirituality apart from the doctrines and
creeds of institutions. Through trance channeling, Madame Blavatsky (as she came to be
known) claimed to be in touch with spiritually evolved Tibetan mahatmas, who told her
that Hinduism and Buddhism did the best job of expressing the metaphysical core of all
the world’s religions.
Around the same time, Phineas Quimby, a clockmaker from Maine, began
treating the ill with his “mind cure” philosophy. Quimby and his followers, which
included the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, believed that all sickness
was generated in the mind, through destructive beliefs that blocked proper attunement to
spiritual forces. The New Thought movement that Quimby spawned played a large role in

11
the development of the self-help and alternative medicine aspect of many of today’s
spiritual ideas and practices.
The work of pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James also
provided an important launching ground for modern unchurched spirituality. James was
intimately acquainted with Emerson, a friend of his father’s, who often visited his
childhood home. Like Madame Blavatsky, James believed that at their core all religions
were really about a direct experience of the divine, rather than adherence to abstract
beliefs. Such experiences, he argued, occurred in higher states of consciousness. Bridging
his interest in science and spirituality, James set out to study such experiences
empirically, resulting in one of the first modern psychological theories of religion.
Carl Jung, James’ Swiss colleague, likewise believed that individuals could tap
into the divine – what he called the “collective unconscious” – through higher
psychological states. Jung is considered a founding influence on the recovery group
Alcoholics Anonymous, which is likely responsible for the emergence of the phrase “I’m
spiritual, but not religious” in contemporary culture. In 1934, Bill Wilson, a chronic
alcoholic, had a spiritual experience that convinced him that the alcoholic’s only hope for
recovery was to forge a deep connection with a higher power. In founding AA, Wilson
was careful not to require that this higher power be Jesus, Yahweh, or any other specific
deity, but encouraged his fellow drunks to find a God “of [their] own understanding.”
After all, he said, AA was “a spiritual rather than a religious program.” In just a decade,
AA’s membership had grown exponentially, spawning sister groups such as Overeaters
Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous aimed at providing recovery from other
12
addictions. Today, over two million people worldwide belong to 12-step groups and are
actively engaged in seeking out a higher power that makes sense to them. Many of them
count themselves among the “spiritual, but not religious.”
While the Asian influence on American religion goes back to the days of
Transcendentalism and Theosophy, a new wave of Asian inspiration landed on American
shores with the arrival of many Buddhist and Hindu teachers in the 60s and 70s. Beat
poets such as Alan Ginsberg are also widely credited with popularizing Asian religious
teachings. Scholars stress, however, that it is important to realize that Americanized
Eastern religious beliefs and practices are often very different from their indigenous
counterparts.
The dominant paradigm for unchurched America prior to the “spiritual, but not
religious” phenomenon was the New Age movement, which was generally focused more
on paranormal beliefs and activities such as trance-channeling, the power of crystals, and
the religious meaning of near-death experiences.
Roof, a sociologist, says he first started hearing people identify as “spiritual, but
not religious” in the 1990s. What probably started out as the protest of a few against
institutional religion, now pervades our culture. The phrase even has its own Facebook
page and online dating sites list it as an option for religious identification. And to the
chagrin of many religious fundamentalists, Oprah Winfrey has disseminated some of
unchurched spirituality’s key themes to millions, most recently through a partnership
with spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle.

13
***
Of course, traditional religious institutions are not content to stand idly by as their
members file out of their pews in search of internal vistas for spiritual fulfillment. Many
are mounting vigorous campaigns, some very high profile, to convince people that church
can provide something no amount of individual questing can.
The United Methodist Church, for instance, just launched its $20 million “Rethink
Church” campaign, with slick ads on national television, radio, and in popular magazines.
Sporting the tagline “What if church was a verb?” the campaign seeks to show the
Methodist Church as actively involved in making a better world. One of the print ads
running in the left-wing magazine Good pictures two hands cupping dirt and asks, “What
if church considered ecology part of theology?” A television spot focused on global
health asks “What if church wasn’t just a building, but thousands of doors each of them
opening up to a journey that could actually change the world?” accompanied by shots of
the church’s missionary work fighting HIV, AIDS, and malaria in distant parts of the
world.
“[P]eople are looking for ways to change the world, they are looking for meaning
and purpose, they are looking for a community experience…that will be supportive of
them, but they do not see the institution as the place where that can happen,” Reverend
Larry Hollon, who leads the church’s communications team, acknowledges. “Part of what
we have said in this campaign is that we are looking for doorways that people can enter
and engage with the people of the United Methodist Church, not necessarily with the
institution.”
14
The Catholic Church is also keenly aware that it is losing members to the
“spiritual, but not religious” movement. They too have set out to do something about it,
says Monsignor Anthony F. Sherman, director of the Secretariat of Divine Worship for
the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops. Like the Methodists, the non-profit
group Catholics Come Home, Inc., has developed an ad campaign and a web site to “help
fill empty churches across the globe.”
Msrg. Sherman thinks that such outreach can make a difference, but that
ultimately people need to realize that “something more is demanded” from them to
ensure a proper connection to God. It is such responsibility that the monsignor believes
makes people “a little nervous” about Catholicism.
“Somebody once made the comment that [the Eucharist] is ‘Deadly, bloody
serious’…and that’s scary,” Msrg. Sherman admits. But, he says, it is only through
“dying to oneself,” experiencing Christ, and becoming a part of a Christian community
that Catholics can truly fulfill their duty to God.
“It’s very difficult in a society where the emphasis is ‘I do what I want, when I
want to do it, how I want to do it,’ to suddenly then say ‘I'm going to join a community
that's going to give praise and worship to God in a particular way,’” the monsignor
acknowledges.
Burklo, whose own United Church of Christ mounted a similar campaign to the
Methodists’ and Catholics’ called “God Is Still Speaking” beginning in 2004, is
somewhat skeptical of such efforts to recall those lost to institutionalized Christianity.
“I think that those campaigns are trying to put new clothes on dinosaurs,” he says. “I
15
think it’s generally doomed to failure because the whole idea of denomination in America
is dead. People don’t know how to spell Presbyterian, much less know what it means.”
Jewish organizations are also brainstorming new ways to engage their
community, particularly young adults who maintain a Jewish identity but have grown
increasingly distant from traditional institutions. In 2003, the organization Reboot
released a report entitled, “Grande Soy Vanilla Latte with Cinnamon, No Foam: Jewish
Identity and Community in a Time of Unlimited Choices,” comparing the Starbucks-
driven “have it your way” coffee culture to the way that young Jews are assembling their
religious identities. Reboot hopes to continue the centuries-old American Jewish tradition
of reinventing Judaism to make it more relevant to the concerns of the day.
A few years ago, Hillel, the largest Jewish group on U.S. college campuses, began
a massive research project with similar goals. They found that half of the young Jews
they surveyed did not identify with any Jewish denomination, “reject[ing] labels and
valu[ing] permeable boundaries.” Ultimately the report stressed the importance of
“putting to rest the idea that [students] are either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of a firm Jewish community
with tight boundaries.”
Like the Protestant campaigns, many Jewish efforts to re-engage people with
institutions have focused on service to the wider community. The Progressive Jewish
Alliance, for instance, seeks “to ‘bring back’ to Jewish communal life many individuals
who would be otherwise disconnected” through social justice campaigns such as fighting
for a living wage, reforming the criminal justice system, and working to promote
Muslim-Jewish dialogue.
16
This trend of institutions emphasizing their value in terms of bettering the world
is no coincidence. Service, or “works” in the Christian parlance, is a very of-the-moment
concern for people of faith. As President Obama repeatedly quoted from the book of
James during last year’s campaign, “Faith without works is dead,” a sentiment
contemporary religious and spiritual people seem to share.
But the individually spiritual are often criticized for their lack of concern about
others by those who believe that focusing on one’s own private connection to the
transcendent diminishes interest in social activism.
Steven Philp, a 21-year-old spiritual college student, thinks it is entirely unfair
and inaccurate to accuse the “spiritual, but not religious” of neglecting those in need.
“It’s convenient and easy to say that because people who are part of an organized
religion are exactly what it implies, organized,” says Philp. “[S]o of course their impact
in the world is much easier to not only see but to analyze statistically…With spiritual
people there is just as much a call to service or to helping others but they’re probably not
in an organization that’s religiously affiliated. They’re probably in Greenpeace or
Amnesty International or something like that. Or they’re involved in a different way that
I think is a little less quantifiable.”
Peter Gabel, associate editor of the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun and a
leading member of The Network of Spiritual Progressives, believes spirituality, not
religion, is exactly what is needed to make today’s social movements more truly
transformative.

17
“[Spiritually-informed] activism isn’t just to achieve an external or material goal,
but is rather to bring into being a new kind of understanding,” Gabel says. “For example,
health care would not be about insuring each other’s bodies, it [would be] about caring
for each other…Environmentalism is not just about global warming and holes in the
ozone layer, but it’s about the recovery of the sacredness of the natural world…All social
policies can be re-understood in terms of their most significant spiritual elements and if
that were incorporated into the movement it would make a more powerful movement.”
***
Like Herb K. and Michael Smith, Steven Philp has journeyed away from his
childhood faith to an eclectic spirituality that he feels brings him closer to the
transcendent.
As a child, Philp often declared his desire to be a father when he grew up.
Charmed by her son’s seeming paternal instinct, it was only later that his mother realized
what he meant – he wanted to be a priest.
But toward the end of middle school, after a childhood of devout Catholicism,
Philp began a “tough transition” away from the church and toward what he calls “inter-
spirituality.”
His puberty-driven realization that he was gay played a large role in his falling out
with Catholicism, Philp says. But coming to terms with his sexual identity did not
diminish his profound hunger for the divine, which he began exploring through other
traditions – first Hinduism, then Paganism, and finally in the Episcopal church, which he
eventually left to pursue his own unique spiritual path.
18
“Eventually, through many circuitous routes, I came to not really identify myself
with any particular religious background,” he says. “I see myself as more of a spiritual
person…I’m not spiritual [like] some people [who] just kind of acknowledge the fact that
there is some sort of divine aspect to life and move on from that and tend to be very
private about it. I really enjoy the different traditions of different faiths.”
But like many spiritual people, the idea of a personal, remote, all-powerful God
does not resonate with Steven.
“I generally stay away from the word God,” Philp says. “It invests too much in
this tradition we have of God as man. What I often kind of jokingly say is ‘God made in
man’s image’ – and really man as in men, mostly wealthy white powerful men… [I] try
to move away from those images and really more towards a divine presence that I really
believe is inherent in all things and people at all times.”
This notion of God as an immanent presence that exists in the world and not apart
from it is common among spiritual people, says Robert C. Fuller, a professor of religion
at Bradley University whose book Spiritual, But Not Religious: Understanding
Unchurched America was one of the first works to specifically explore this movement.
“In traditional Judeo-Christian tradition it is a God who has power over our
universe, a transcendent power from above,” Fuller says. “But the ‘spiritual, but not
religious’…tend to stress God as an impersonal energy. I always have to tell my students,
‘Thank God for the movie Star Wars.’ It’s the concept of the force that allows them to
know instantly what I’m talking about.”

19
Like Smith, Jem Jebbia, a college student, has found Zen Buddhism more
spiritually profound than her Christian upbringing.
“I definitely think that we’re here for a reason, I don’t think that we’re created for
nothing, and I do think there’s something common in all of us,” says Jebbia, 21. “I’ve
always kind of felt like it doesn’t really matter if there’s a God. In Zen Buddhism we kind
of believe we should focus on now and not the past or the future. It’s kind of like living
every day like it would be your last, because we really don’t know what’s going to
happen after we die.”
A certain agnosticism about the existence of God is common to many spiritual
people, but that doesn’t mean they don’t experience something transcendent, something
beyond ordinary reality, something that gives their lives meaning.
Burklo, the UCC minister and a board member of The Center for Progressive
Christianity, likes to shock people by declaring that he does not believe in God.
“When I tell people I don’t believe in God, that freaks them out,” he says,
amused. “’How can you be a minster and not believe in God?’ I say, ‘I don’t believe in
God, I experience God.’ I have an experience, which I call the God experience.”
For Burklo, this God experience occurs through contemplation, meditation, and
writing, when he is able to step back from the onslaught of thoughts in his head and
become the witness of his own experience.
“To have a belief about God, for me, is blasphemy,” Burklo says. “That would
suggest that I have a clue about the nature of this thing that I worship and experience.”

20
In addition to a common agnosticism about the nature, or even existence of God,
the “spiritual, but not religious” also share a markedly different concept of sin than the
institutionally religious.
“There isn’t a notion that humans are inherently depraved or in the need to repent
and to plead for forgiveness,” says Fuller of the “spiritual, but not religious.” “Evil is the
lack of good. It comes from limited understanding of ourselves and our connection with
higher powers. It’s finally a self-imposed problem.”
Just open up your daily newspaper and you’ll find at least a handful of horrors to
make you doubt the existence of God. The “problem of evil,” as philosophers of religion
call it, has long served as a powerful barrier for many to a belief in God or any moral
order to the universe. The argument goes like this: if God is an all-knowing, all-powerful,
and all-good entity – as most of the world’s major religious traditions contend – why
would he, she, or it allow heinous things to happen, like the murder of a child, the death
of hundreds of thousands in a Tsunami, or the attack on the World Trade Center? A lot of
people attempt to answer this riddle with the argument that what we perceive as evil
actually serves a higher good, that God can only teach us the lessons we need to learn in
our human lives through evil, or that evil it is a necessary result of God’s gift of free will.
As any good logician will point out, if God is really all-powerful, couldn’t God have
created a universe in which we didn’t need to have horrible things happen to us in order
to bring about whatever higher good imaginable?
Many philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people have spent lifetimes
attempting to figure out a way to reconcile God’s omniscience with the presence of evil
21
in the world. The spiritual, but not religious are no exception. Their agnosticism about
God’s existence certainly provides a loophole to the problem of evil. So too does the
concept of God as an impersonal presence that is perhaps not all-powerful.
Still, some spiritual people have faced the accusation that their notion of God as a
goodness that permeates all thing ignores the darker side of life.
“The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light
of good is splendid as long as it will work,” William James wrote in 1902 in his famous
work The Varieties of Religious Experience. “But it breaks down impotently as soon as
melancholy comes;…the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a
genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best keys to life’s significance,
and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”
But Fuller believes it is unfair to accuse all, or even most, spiritual people of
being unwilling to confront the horrors inherent in life. In fact, he says, many of the
“spiritual, but not religious,” believe that profound insight and growth can come from
accepting, rather than trying to deny, suffering.
“I actually think most of these people understand that and they’re trying to give us
the best possible way of recovering from those experiences and still telling us that we
always have the power to determine our attitudes towards these events,” Fuller says.
“And it’s our attitudes towards them that will make our ability to progress and cope and
grow spiritually through them.”

22
***
“I need some herbs,” says a familiar voice to The Bodhi Tree’s cashier, who
directs the customer to the used bookstore and herb emporium next store. “That was
Whoopee Goldberg,” shoppers whisper to one another, set atwitter by this major celebrity
sighting, a sort of post-modern transcendent experience.
For anyone wanting to criticize the spiritual, but not religious movement for
shallowness or consumerism, the Bodhi Tree is an easy target.
“Work[ing] at the Bodhi Tree you sort of become really cynical because of the
people that come in here and because of the stuff that they buy,” the clerk who ends up
helping Whoopee find her herbs tells me. She recounts the story of a frequent costumer
who oozed New Age bliss until a homeless man entered the shop whose loud voice
interrupted her bookstore questing.
But traditional religious people are known for their shallowness and hypocrisy
too, a point not lost on Roof of UC Santa Barbara.
“Everything can be put on a gradient,” says Roof. “Religion is shallow for a lot of
people – it’s just a Christmas and Easter kind of thing… Spiritual quests are no different.
Some are shallow, go nowhere, they flit around, others lead [people] to greater insights
about themselves that may lead to religious affiliations, that may lead to retreat center
events, they may lead who knows where.”
Jeremy Carrette and Richard King don’t believe spiritual quests, one the whole,
lead very far. In their book Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, they
argue that it’s time we extend the kind of Marxist “opiate of the masses” critique of
23
religion to include spirituality as well. In fact, they argue, it is through spirituality that
capitalism best co-opts our religious impulses, converting them into trinkets, decorative
yoga mats, and self-help books that can be bought and sold.
“What is being sold to us as radical, trendy, and transformative spirituality in fact
produces little in the way of a significant change in one’s lifestyle or fundamental
behavior patterns,” these scholars write.
Arguments like this unfairly pick on spirituality for its consumerism, Roof says,
while ignoring the fact that all aspects of American culture are steeped in capitalist
ideology.
“What isn’t enmeshed with capitalism in this country?” he says. “But I
understand the frustration. That’s why I think progressive religious institutions have to …
be self-aware of the extent to which we live in that kind cultural ethos and with those
kinds of economic factors.”
But consumerism does not necessarily rule out authentic spiritual experience, as
Kenny W. can readily attest. Kenny has come to the Bodhi Tree with his girlfriend and
her brother to browse through the store’s alternative spiritual offerings.
Sober now from alcohol and drugs for six years, Kenny, an electrician, believes
his relationship to a higher power, which he developed outside of any church, has saved
his life.
“It’s the best thing in my life,” he says, of the spirituality he cultivated through
Alcoholics Anonymous. “I never thought I’d ever be able to live again. And all of a
sudden I found this great life.”
24
***
Religious reform movements are nothing new. After all, Buddhism was an
attempt to reform Hinduism. Christianity an attempt to reform Judaism. Protestantism an
attempt to reform Catholicism. In each of these cases, small groups of people broke away
from the institutions of their day in order to enhance their connection to the transcendent.
Without exception, though, over the years these small groups formed institutions of their
own, which later groups saw as barriers to accessing the divine. And so the cycle
continues.
But will the spiritual, but not religious, defining themselves so emphatically as
non-institutional, also end up coalescing into new institutions?
So far, that’s unclear. Regardless, though, the great number of Americans that
now identify as unaffiliated with any religious institution are bound to have a radical
impact, at least in the short term, not just on religion in this country, but also on other
aspects of our society, particularly politics.
“Affiliation turns out to be a very important way that people are politicized,” says
John Green, a senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum. “As
people move away from affiliation for whatever reason then it becomes harder to
politicize them.”
Disaffiliation could have an effect on both Democrats and Republicans since both
parties enjoy historical ties to certain religious groups, Green says. As people leave their
religious communities, they become less likely to follow the politics of those around
25
them. They become “political, but not partisan,” if you will. Or, more accurately, they
become less likely to be strongly partisan.
But Green is not convinced that disaffiliation is a permanent trend in our society.
It’s quite possible, he says, that in the future people will start going back to religious
bodies.
“[It] could be that we’re in a transition and that the religious communities have
essentially not adjusted to the change that’s going on and they may some day,” he says.
If they do, and Americans begin returning to church, it will be a church greatly
changed by the personal, untraditional, and creative seeking of the “spiritual, but not
religious.”

26

Abstract (if available)

Abstract All across America, people are leaving their churches and synagogues to pursue their own individual paths to the divine. Many of them call themselves “spiritual, but not religious.” This article explores in detail what they mean by this, the history of “unchurched” spirituality in America, the ramifications of disaffiliation for traditional religious bodies, and what these institutions are doing to entice their ex-members back into their pews.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Hahn, Jennifer Lois (author)

Core Title 'Spiritual, but not religious': why Americans are abandoning religious institutions to pursue their own paths to the divine

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Print Journalism)

Publication Date 01/23/2010

Defense Date 07/01/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Catholic,church,Methodist,New Age,OAI-PMH Harvest,Religion,seekers,Spirituality,unaffiliated,unchurched

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Winston, Diane (committee chair), Cole, K.C. (committee member), Iwamura, Jane Naomi (committee member)

Creator Email hahnj@usc.edu,jenniferlhahn@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2386

Unique identifier UC1281708

Identifier etd-Hahn-3127 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-404928 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2386 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Hahn-3127.pdf

Dmrecord 404928

Document Type Project

Rights Hahn, Jennifer Lois

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu