Sociologist Christian Smith studies American religion, but his research doesn’t take him to many churches these days.
Instead, he’s been to a vampire ball in Chicago and a paranormal convention in Milwaukee. He’s visited esoteric shops near his home in Michigan and spent a weekend at a pagan retreat in southern Indiana.
Smith, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, is on a mission to understand what he calls the culture of re-enchantment, a loosely connected web of conventions, shops, content creators and community groups that promote some form of spirituality, but not religion.
Smith believes studying this spiritual landscape is key to offering a fuller explanation for organized religion’s recent decline and grasping where the country is headed.
And he’s not alone. Recent studies showing that young people are just as spiritual as older adults despite being less religious have prompted many scholars to give spirituality a deeper look.
Spirituality “is not like a denomination. It’s a language people use to describe themselves and the practices of others. It includes a lot of internal ambiguity and diversity.”
— Christian Smith
But these scholars are staring down a big challenge: Spirituality is a broad concept that’s not easily quantified.
To find the answers they’re seeking, researchers will have to come up with new questions — and maybe attend a few vampire balls.
“If we take our old frameworks, our old lenses and impose them on re-enchanted culture, it will reveal some things but blind us to a whole lot of other things. We need a new toolkit to properly understand,” Smith said.
Skeptical of spirituality
Smith’s current work on re-enchantment grew out of his recently released book on organized religion.
Going into that book project, he knew spirituality would be part of the story, since most people of faith hold both spiritual and religious beliefs.
But he didn’t plan on stumbling onto so many spiritual practices that are separate from religion, let alone concluding that spirituality, when broadly defined, is a significant cultural force on its own.
“I had to change my mind and understanding of what it was and what was going on,” he said.
In the past, Smith didn’t put much stock into someone calling themself a spiritual person. He figured they thought it sounded good or preferred saying spiritual instead of religious.
Now, he sees the label as an entry point into a conversation about finding meaning in spiritual activities like energy healing or manifesting, which are often associated with the 1960s but are newly relevant today.
“For some people, the term ‘spiritual’ is pretty superficial. It doesn’t mean much at all. But not for everybody,” Smith said. “For some, it’s the source of relationships and communities.”
Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, made a similar point during a Feb. 19 press briefing on Pew Research Center’s latest Religious Landscape Study.
After noting that nearly 9 in 10 U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to a physical body, Edgell criticized those who insist that high rates of spirituality “don’t mean anything.”
“I have colleagues who say that without a commitment to a religious institution, spiritual commitments will decline. I think that’s the wrong take,” she said. “There are plenty of places now where spiritual practices are being maintained outside of religious institutions, and that should be studied on its own terms.”
The challenges of studying spirituality
As Edgell predicted during the press briefing, Pew’s Religious Landscape Study sparked debates over spirituality’s role in American life.
The study showed that support for spiritual concepts has remained high and even grown amid a broad-based decline in religious engagement.
Today, 83% of U.S. adults believe in God or a universal spirit, and 79% say there’s something spiritual beyond the natural world, Pew found.
A smaller share of Americans — 64% — say religion is “somewhat” or “very” important in their lives, and just 33% go to church at least monthly.
Half of U.S. adults say they’re both spiritual and religious, but an additional 21% say they’re only spiritual. (By comparison, just 5% of U.S. adults describe themselves as religious but not spiritual.)
Those figures and others from Pew’s report led some religion experts to suggest that churches should start pitching themselves as spiritual centers in addition to religious institutions to draw in spiritual seekers.
But others essentially scoffed at the spirituality data, dismissing the idea that spiritual practices can be a source of meaning outside of religion, as Smith once did.
A key issue for the skeptics, according to Smith, was that Pew’s survey involved general, rather than specific, questions. If it’s not controversial to say you believe in souls or a spiritual world, then how much do you actually learn from people saying yes?
Smith agrees that more specific questions are needed, but he sympathizes with Pew and other research firms.
Spirituality has multiple meanings and expressions — and they don’t all overlap.
“It’s not like a denomination. It’s a language people use to describe themselves and the practices of others. It includes a lot of internal ambiguity and diversity,” he said.
Future spirituality research
Moving forward, researchers will have to experiment with more specific questions about spirituality, including about practices (Do you collect crystals? Do you read tarot cards?) and social groups (Do you belong to a spiritual club?).
They’ll continue exploring what it means to be spiritual but not religious and what types of spiritual institutions are comparable to more familiar religious ones.
“We’ve become really good at measuring traditional religion, but spirituality is relatively new. We have to figure out what it means and what kinds of questions to ask. How people out in the world think about it,” Smith said.
Just this week, Pew released a new report on spirituality around the world, sharing what researchers learned when they took questions on spiritual beliefs and practices from past projects in the U.S. and Asia and fielded them in other regions for the first time.
“Finding the right questions to ask was a complicated and lengthy process, and it took a lot of care,” said Jonathan Evans, a senior researcher at Pew and the lead author of the new report. “We wanted to give people a chance to say what they do and what they believe.”
With questions about life after death, animal spirits, the spiritual energy of nature and other topics, Pew showed that, at least for some, embracing spiritual concepts has little or nothing to do with religion.
“While there is no clear and widely accepted dividing line between religion and spirituality, these questions show that even in countries where comparatively few people view religion as very important, many do hold beliefs in spirits and/or life after death,” researchers wrote.
Like the Religious Landscape Study, the new survey also found that the age gap in religious engagement doesn’t show up with spirituality-focused questions.
“Previous research has shown pretty consistently that older adults tend to be more religious than younger adults. ... But when we get to newer questions, the youngest adults are sometimes as likely and in a few cases more likely than older adults” to agree with spiritual claims, Evans said.
Evans confirmed that his team hopes to field the same questions about spirituality and religion in a few years in order to start identifying trend lines.
“The future is fun to think about,” he said.