Spirituality Up, Religion Down - By D. Patrick Miller

[whimsicaldeb]

I found this latest by D. Patrick Miller fascinating. While I haven't double checked his data; it appears accurate to me based upon my own personal discoveries from both personal experience and researches I've done around the internet on other, related topics. ~ Deb

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http://www.fearlessbooks.com/

A FEARLESS BULLETIN
Spirituality Up, Religion Down - by D. Patrick Miller
JULY 2005:

It may surprise many Americans to learn that the number of Christians in our country is steadily declining — and that evangelical Christians in particular represent only 7% of the populace, with no increase in their numbers over the last decade. Meanwhile, a full third of American adults now say they are “spiritual but not religious.” What does that mean exactly? And why aren’t these numbers making news?

Journalists have largely missed the story of America’s turn in recent decades toward a deeply felt, personal spirituality that is pursued independently of religious customs and institutions. One of the earliest significant markers of this trend appeared in the January 1988 issue of BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS, when the magazine published a report on “Religion, Spirituality, and American Families,” based on a survey it had conducted among its eight million readers a few months before. The survey was returned by 80,000 people — more than two and a half times the response expected by the editors, and far more people than are usually sampled in public opinion polls — and provided the following information:

“Some results suggest that respondents’ spirituality is strongest on a personal level. The largest group (62%) say that in recent years they have begun or intensified personal spiritual study and activities (compared to 23% who say they have become closer to a religious organization). 68% say that when faced with a spiritual dilemma, prayer/meditation guides them most (compared to 14% who say the clergy guides them most during such times) . . . .”

While such results were revealing in themselves, it’s also worth noting that the title of a major mainstream survey of the late 1980s already drew a distinction between religion and spirituality. The difference would probably have been lost on anyone but theologians just a few decades earlier. A noticeable divergence between the social conventions of religion and the individual pursuit of spirituality most likely took root in the 1960s and has only widened since the late 80s, as evidenced by more recent data from a variety of sources:

* In January 2002, a USA TODAY/Gallup poll showed that almost half of American adults do not consider themselves religious. In 1999, 54% said they considered themselves religious; that number had shrunk to 50% in 2002. A full third (33%) described themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” an increase of 3% over three years. Ten percent said they regarded themselves as neither spiritual nor religious.

* According to an American Religious Identification Survey conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001, the most dramatic demographic shift in religious identification is the number of Americans saying they do not follow any organized religion, increasing from 8% (about 14.3 million people) in 1990 to 14.1% (29.4 million) in 2001. During the same period, the number of Americans identifying themselves as Christians shrank from 86.2% to 76.5%, a reduction of nearly 10 percent. If the trend holds, Christians will be outnumbered by non-Christians in America by 2042.

* The Barna Group, a Christian polling and research organization, commented in an April 2005 report that “Despite the media frenzy surrounding the influence of evangelical Christians during the 2004 presidential election, the new study indicates that evangelicals remain just 7% of the adult population. That number has not changed since the Barna Group began measuring the size of the evangelical public in 1994.”

The fact that evangelical Christians are heavily outnumbered by Americans declaring no religious affiliation may come as a shock, considering the prominence of evangelical activists in the press and their recent influence on society. After the last presidential election, some analysts attributed the winning edge of President Bush’s victory to the mobilization of evangelical voters in the so-called “red states.” (Bush’s final popular vote margin over John Kerry was 2.5%.) Their social perspectives and political agenda also get substantial and continuing coverage in the media, particularly in regard to such hot-button issues as abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, and the teaching of creationism vs. evolution in the public schools. Yet as the data above suggest, the actual number of evangelicals is small and has been constant for over a decade, even as the overall number of Christians steadily declines and a substantial and growing proportion of the population prefers to be identified as “spiritual but not religious.”

There are at least three major factors contributing to this dramatic disparity between popular perceptions of America's spiritual evolution and what is really going on. First is the media’s failure to pay attention to the actual shifts of belief that are occurring quietly behind the more easily reported controversies that involve religion. The second factor is simply that evangelicals have a mission to spread their creed. Over the last decade or so they have done an increasingly effective job of enhancing their media profile and their political clout, even if the effect on the number of people espousing their cause is negligible.

Third, the “mission” of people who are turning away from organized religion toward a more individual style of spiritual practice could well be described as the polar opposite of evangelism. Instead of trying to convert others to their beliefs, the new spiritualists are questioning their own beliefs, and privately experimenting with new perspectives. Rather than feeling the evangelicals’ need to persuade others to endorse a traditional vision of absolute truth, the new spiritualists are bent on experiencing deep truths by their own direct experience, and then drawing their moral decisions from what they have learned by such experience. Many of these people are interested in so-called “alternative” religions (some of which actually predate Christianity) and others are fashioning eclectic spiritual practices drawing from many traditions and teachings. But make no mistake about it — the rise in personal spirituality is the major religion story of our time. And it’s long past time for the press to be treating it as such. — D. Patrick Miller

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For more details, see ReligiousTolerance.org. For commentary on how the press covers spiritual subject matter, see the Fearless Books title News of a New Human Nature.


---end article

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear Deb:


Thanks for posting this article.

Church attendance in Europe is down dramatically.

Some researchers claim that "secularization" is even more pervasive in Europe than in the United States.

This article:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ ... _114090210


details, with many facts and figures gleaned from various surveys and research, the comparison between the US and several other countries in that respect.

You may find it interesting; it seems rather calm and not polemical in tone.



Zlatko

[stilltrucking]

Calm is good. Why is a super power a stupid power. Yeah calm is good. Like a script from a bad hollywood movie. Why are we such sheep? Our president of good and evil. They say the last refuge of a scoundrel is patriotism, it maybe that religion is the last resort of liars. Secular Europe, is that so odd? They shipped their true believers off to the colonies a couple hundred years ago, took them out of the gene pool. I was just thinking about your post about Morro Bay and the seven sisters, nothing to do with this.
but there you are
so pardon ramble

[e_dog]

spiritualism is simply internalized and recombined religion, so that it is no longer recognizable to the superficial glance.

new age spiritualism is the postmodern religion. there is no "independence" of the spiritual from the religious except in a comparative sense.

[whimsicaldeb]

Hi e-dog. I think I understand what your saying. That for some, they've taken and made a label called "Spiritualism" and some have slapped it over their same old religion. (A rose, or weed, by any other name...) and I certainly don't deny that this isn't being done by some.

What seems to happen (over & over again) is this; someone has an experience that moves them in some way; they talk/write about it; it becomes known ~ and over time a 'religion' forms around the experience. But there has always been a difference between having a personal spiritual experience, and religion.

For me, the person who helped me understand this; put it in a clearer perspective, was author Karen Armstrong in her book “A History of God; The 4,000 – Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” (1993).

I'll post an excerpt from the introduction. It's long (I'm sorry, it's necessary), but it's also self-explanatory and (imo) explains well why we have religion form spirituality; as well as what she's saying fits what is happening now concering our religious views, and why. -- Deb

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art of poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God – not all religions, or course are theistic. Our secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.

When I began to research this history of the idea and experience of God in the three related monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires. I thought that “he” would mirror the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. My predictions were not entirely unjustified, but I have been extremely surprised by some of my findings, and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to her – from eminent monotheists in all three faiths – that instead of waiting for God to descent from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other rabbis, priests and sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was – in any sense – a reality “out there”; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist – and yet that “he” was the most important reality in the world.

This book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him from Abraham to the present day. The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at various points of time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another. Indeed, the statement “I believe in God,” has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community. Consequently there is no one unchanging idea contained in the word “God”; instead, the word contains a whole spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the greatest human ideas. When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experience their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of “God”: each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. The same is true of atheism. The statement “I do not believe in God” has meant something slightly different at each period of history. The people who have been dubbed “atheists” over the years have always denied a particular conception of the divine. Is the “God” who is rejected by atheists today, the God of the patriarchs, the God of the prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God of the mystics or the God of the eighteenth-century deists? All these deities have been venerated as the God of the Bible and the Koran by Jews, Christians and Muslims at various points of their history. We shall see that they are very different from one another. Atheism has often been a transitional state: thus Jews, Christians and Muslims were all called “atheists” by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. Is modern atheism a similar denial of a “God” which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?

Despite its otherworldliness, religion is highly pragmatic. We shall see that it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound. As soon as it ceases to be effective it will be changed – sometimes for something radically different. This did not disturb most monotheists before our own day because they were quite clear that their ideas about God were not sacrosanct but could only be provisional. They were entirely man-made – they could be nothing else – and quite separate from the indescribable Reality they symbolized.

–end excerpt

[hester_prynne]

I find that being in the moment is pretty much all the spirituality or religion I need.......

It's when I start trying to figure it out via history that I get all confused and scared.

It's when someone else tells me to believe what they believe, that I get rebellious or apathetic.

In the moment, before anyone tells me about it, the possibilities are endless. That's where I feel most hopeful.

In the moment, opinionless, is the hardest place to be, but by far the best.

The rest is just history.
History can make me aware, but it ain't the script to mystory.
That's a work in progress.......always.
Who knows anything for sure in the present moment?
That's exactly what's cool about it!

Selah,
H

[knip]

any studying i've done of religion has revealed they form primarily out of a basic human need to understand that which is not understandable

why is the sun here? no science yet to explain it? well, it's the sun-god , of course