Spiritual but Not Religious but Religiously Political

A few weeks ago I went to a masterclass with Simon Glendenning about what he called the “Three Cultures of Atheism.” You’ve got the Movement Atheists (think Richard Dawkins) who are strongly anti-religious; then there’s people within religions traditions, who aren’t sure they believe but go to church anyway; and then there’s this last group, who don’t believe in God but also don’t reject the idea of God with the conviction of Movement Atheists. These people are part of a growing group that religious studies has all kinds of great words to describe – the “Nones” (people who mark “none” when asked on a survey what their religion is,) believers in “Sheliaism” (an individualistic approach to faith) or “ietsism” (a great Dutch word for “well I believe in something…”), or the ever-popular “I’m spiritual but not religious.”

Keep these folks in mind for a minute.

Last week I went to a panel discussion with Jose Casanova and some of the professors in my department, titled “How ‘Modern’ are we? Religion, Secularism, and Multiple Modernities in Europe.” In the discussion, there were two strands that came up about religious experience and identity.

One was that secularism and modernity have changed how people do religion. One professor talked about how “religion” might not even be the best word anymore for researching the meaningful and spiritual in people’s lives; another talked about how new kinds of religion have developed out of our secular, modern understandings of religion, things like Wicca and modern shamanism that are often highly individualistic and don’t fit into conventional, Christianity-based understandings of what religion is.

The other was that religion – organized, institutional religion – remains a powerful force politically. Think of the press Pope Francis gets when he comments on income inequality, for example.

I find this combination – the political power of Religion as such and the changing ways of doing spirituality that are less organized and more individualistic – really fascinating, and I wonder if it’s going to lead to changes to how religion works in the political sphere down the line. I think you can see the tension a little bit within Unitarian Universalism. One example might be the discussions around the new rebranding campaign. Another, which I like better, is the way UU ministers use the clerical collar. UUs wearing the collar is a source of some debate – it can be seen as stealing a symbol from Christians that we don’t have a right to, or as trying to claim legitimacy by misrepresenting ourselves as a more “traditional” religion. But UU ministers also often wear the collar at social witness events (that’s UU speak for “political rallies”), in order to show, in a visual way and symbolically powerful, religious support for whatever issue they’re supporting. It’s a way of harnessing that continued political power of religion.

So that’s a really interesting conflict. Unitarian Universalism is often home to those “spiritual but not religious” types – it has a perpetual authority problem and a decidedly “modern” way of addressing spiritual issues. But despite this discomfort with traditional religion, it still deploys those symbols because they’re powerful. So we’re “spiritual but not religious but religious when it’s politically expedient,” essentially.

(That’s a bit of an oversimplification that’s not fair to UUism’s complicated relationship with religious symbols, but I think the point stands. Roll with me here.)

I wonder if this tension is something that we might see more of if the “nones” continue to grow demographically, and as churches try to accommodate changing spiritualities. Or maybe we’ll come up with new symbols and ways of talking about religion that can become politically salient while fitting “modern” spirituality, or the meaning of religious symbols will start to shift.