Speaking to religion in the twenty-first century is a near-impossible task. For one, there is the long-standing definitional debate over what exactly is meant by “religion.” Surely there is some validity to the oft-noted adage that academics have done much to invent the term. Even so, acclaimed studies on its history and genealogy, surveys of the variety of definitional debates, awareness of its colonialist and orientalist assumptions, and continued use in academic discourse indicate that, properly contextualized and qualified, the term is both useful and impossible to avoid (see Smith 1998). A similar state of affairs exists with respect to the topic of the present essay, that of being “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). At first glance the notion of being SBNR seems unproblematic. After all, while the polling data over the years have evinced some variability, multiple recent surveys indicate that at least 18% of the current U.S. population confess to being SBNR.1 Another study concluded that being SBNR cuts across multiple segments of the American population, noting that this change is taking place “across the religious landscape, affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups. While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults with only a high school education; and among women as well as men” (Richey 2015). But one may ponder further: What exactly is it that constitutes being SBNR? The pollsters seem to take it for granted. But, as with the term “religion,” are we so sure of its definition and scope? Is it clear-cut and easy to identify or is it more like what Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, California, namely, “There is no there there.”To navigate such difficulties one could, of course, begin with the easy: One can say what it is not. It does not refer to those who have definitively settled in a particular religious tradition, believe in its ideological trappings, and consistently observe its services and rituals. If this is the case, then it suggests that being SBNR refers to those who are disillusioned with institutional religion even if they feel that those same traditions contain deep wisdom about the human condition. To say “I'm spiritual but not religious” would then indicate that a person might choose to integrate that wisdom without committing to what are perceived to be the false trappings and mendacity of religious accoutrements of all kinds (i.e., dogma, ideologies, rituals, hierarchies, etc.). Befitting spiritual shoppers in a consumer age, it also speaks to those who canvass multiple religions, mining their spiritual wisdom and introspective techniques in order to foster a spiritual journey tailored to their individual needs.The problem is that such a wide circumscription of what it means to be SBNR is subject to the same critique Clifford Geertz once leveled at a term widely utilized in the academic study of religion, namely, any generic definition of faith (e.g., Paul Tillich's “ultimate concern”)—a critique that, by calling attention to its general character, renders such formulations insipid and thus prescriptively useless (as evinced, for example, in the differences of “being faithful” found between a ritualized Aztec human sacrifice and a meditator in a Zen garden [see Geertz 1973]). In other words, whatever one might initially think being SBNR is, one is more likely than not to be partially right but also, as Humphrey Bogart once said in Casablanca, misinformed.Here a discernable group of studies (historical, psychological, sociological) comes to our aid. Through empirical data, surveys, ethnographic material, and scholarly research, they offer a more precise insight into what constitutes the present nature of being SBNR. For example, most are familiar with Max Weber's ideal type of the Protestant inner-worldly ascetic. Being SBNR, on the other hand, is better captured by his notion of inner-worldly mysticism. Elaborated further by Roland Robertson, the inner-worldly mystic is described as a modern form of adaptation to a culture characterized by the rise of individualism, a pluralistic religious surround, and access to multiple types of introspective techniques. Robertson traces the fermentation of this cultural soil to the baby-boomer generation. Inner-worldly mysticism expresses the need to work “in the world” while striving for wholeness and the actualization of the “self.” Therapy, yoga, meditation, dietary prescriptions, exercise programs, and the individualistic, eclectic supermarket approach to religion are part and parcel of inner-worldly mysticism (Robertson 1978). This portrait fits well with Linda Mercadante's claim that those who profess to being SBNR are heirs to Philip Rieff's “triumph of the therapeutic,” which is to say that their spiritual gradient has been formed by a psychologically saturated cultural soup that valorizes introspection, self-transformation, and, yes, peak experiences (Mercadante 2014). As Rieff once said of this culture, normative institutions like the Church and the Party have given way to the Clinic, the Theater, and the dictum “know thyself” (Rieff 1966). To buttress these observations, Robert Fuller's “big five” psychological portrait of the typical SBNRer sees them as being overall high in intelligence, exhibiting the capacity for self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and a strong valuation of personal intuitions and subjective experience (Fuller 2018).Delving further into other pertinent highlights in the recent scholarly literature, those who profess being SBNR contest any claim to absolute authority and point, with regard to traditional institutional forms of religion, due to their historical role in perpetuating unfair forms of economic, social, and political power. They also tend to valorize individualism, free creative choice and expression, egalitarianism, progressivism, and a seeker/quester/consumer mentality. They are more apt to see humans as basically good (hence rejecting the stronger claims of “original sin”), are in favor of participating in multiple, diverse, yet entangled institutional forms (think the local Jung institute, the local Zen center, and, yes, even the Catholic mass), are on the whole pantheistic/monistic in outlook, affirm a liberative ethic, and are more likely to endorse the possibility of reincarnation (Zinnbauer et al. 1997; Bender 2010; Mercadante 2014; Heelas 2012).Even so, those who profess to being SBNR have been further subject to what, as we will see in the next section (“Contemporary Framings”), seem to be alternate if not incompatible narratives. Before attending to the latter, we may backtrack for a moment and note that being SBNR did not emerge out of nothing. It has a context and history, which we would do well to consult. Indeed, one of the ways to go about getting to know a bit more about what being spiritual but not religious means today is to go back into history: when it started and how it developed. Here, recourse to the genealogies of the cousin terms “mysticism” and “spirituality,” both of which have been used to describe central aspects of being SBNR, is productive.The linguistic root of the term “mysticism” is to be found in the West, being first employed in the Greek Mystery religions. At first “mystikos,” derived from the verb muo (to close), lacked any direct reference to the transcendent, referring only to the hidden or secret elements of ritualistic activities. However, picked up by the early Church Fathers, it migrated in a new direction, being defined with respect to three interrelated contexts: biblical, liturgical, spiritual. To be sure, implicit in the Christian terms “mystical theology” and “mystical contemplation” was the notion that mystical experience brought one into contact with a transcendent reality. However, it is important to note that such experiences could be accessed only through the auspices of church and tradition, a total religious matrix. For them, mystical experience was not indicative of an innate, generic religious consciousness but signified the presence of a Reality above and beyond the wholly subjective. Mysticism was “the experience of an invisible objective world: the world whose coming the Scriptures reveal to us in Jesus Christ, the world into which we enter, ontologically, through the liturgy” (Bouyer 1980, 52–53). To this day theologians are engaged in the task of articulating “mystical theology,” an enterprise in which personal religious experience is acknowledged as valuable but fully embedded in and subservient to scripture and church tradition. From this perspective there is no “raw” or basic substratum of experience that exists “apart from,” “beneath,” or “before” its complicity in a total religious matrix. In that “churched” sense, then, it is more proper to speak of “mysticisms” (Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sufi, etc), versus “mysticism.” Moreover, insofar as mysticism is a Western term frought with cultural assumptions, its unqualified cross-cultural application is contested, even if ultimately useful as a “term of art” (Parsons 2019).It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that one finds the emergence of mysticism as a substantive (la mystique), the delineation of the topic in terms of a subjective “experience” divorced from church and tradition, and, subsequently, the investigation and interpretation of such experiences from a psychological perspective, notably in the early psychologists of religion like Jean-Martin Charcot, Ferdinand Morel, and Theodore Flournoy. The view of the divine as “God” became increasingly replaced by the generic term “the Absolute,” now framed “as an obscure, universal dimension of man, perceived or experienced as a reality [un réel] hidden beneath a diversity of institutions, religions, and doctrines” (de Certeau 1992, 14). In the centuries that followed, numerous factors, notably liberal Protestant thought, secured the widespread use of the substantive “mysticism” and its “modern” form and usage, now understood as “ahistorical, poetic, essential, intuitive, and universal” (Schmidt 2003, 268). Mystical experiences, now conceived of as an innate part of human equipment, became associated with a laundry list of generic terms (e.g., peak experiences, joy, bliss, transcendence of space and time, sense of immortality). No better example of this can be found than in William James, the recipient of something akin to mystical epiphanies in his encounters with nature as well as drug-based (nitrous oxide) mystical experiences, who framed mysticism in a way diametrically opposed to that found in the early Church Fathers. James states that in his Varieties he is “treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study,” defining religion, of which mysticism for him was clearly the deepest form, as “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (James 1929, 31–32). Passivity, noesis, ineffability, transiency, and unity: These were the basic “marks” of mysticism. Tradition and its accoutrements, by which James meant theology, philosophy, liturgy, ritual, and the various aspects of church organizations, all crucial for access to the “presence of God” for the Church Fathers, were understood by James as secondary phenomena, derived from the primary experiential matrix as located in the individual, and thus unessential for access to the divine. In short, we have a significant shift: the unmorring of mysticism from its total religious matrix in the service of its democratization and individualization.Spirituality, from the Latin term spiritualitas, followed a similar historical trajectory. The Pauline pneuma (rendered as spiritus in the Latin translation of his letters) characterized a person guided by the spirit of God (versus the carnal man who turned toward materiality). It was growth in the spirit, which included the development of virtues, dispositions, and ideals in the striving toward Christian perfection, which was emphasized (Wulff 1997). To be sure, through the centuries there were deviations along the way (at one point spirituality came to denote ecclesiastical property and persons who exercised ecclesiastical jurisdiction), but in the main spirituality held fast to its moral, psychological, and religious meanings (Principe 1983). Adhering to its Biblical roots, much of current spirituality in theological literature refers to religious growth within a particular tradition (e.g., the “spirituality” of St. Teresa of Avila). In this way “classic spirituality” (as some refer to it) and what we referred to above as the project of articulating a “mystical theology” are commensurate: They both refer to growth and mystical experiences within a total religious matrix. Mystical theology and classic spirituality were inexorably allied. As Bernard McGinn observes, the two terms (mysticism, spirituality) are intertwined and, more, that “if we take spirituality as a broad term signifying the whole range of beliefs and practices by which the Christian church strives to live out its commitment to the Spirit present in the Risen Christ (1 Cor. 6:14–20; 2 Cor. 3:17), then we can understand mysticism as the inner and hidden realization of spirituality through a transforming consciousness of God's immediate presence. Mysticism, or more precisely, the mystical element within Christian spirituality, is the goal to which spiritual practices aim.” Importantly, McGinn goes on to add that while the appropriation is personal, it is “not an individualistic one, because it is rooted in the life of the Christian community and the grace mediated through that community and its sacraments and rituals” (McGinn 2008, 44).However, alongside this classical spirituality one finds a form of Western modern spirituality that, like modern mysticism, is unchurched (MacDonald 2005). As with modern mysticism, similar historical and cultural forces colluded to produce this recent variant of spirituality. It was once again those pesky liberal traditions (e.g., Transcendentalists, Unitarians, Quakers, Spiritualists, Theosophists), their values (e.g., individuality, solitude, inner silence and meditation, ethical reforms, creative self-expression, appreciation of religious variety), and their consummate figures (e.g., Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, James, Howard Thurman, Rufus Jones, Margaret Fuller, Sarah Farmer) that marked a specifically American version of spirituality. Walt Whitman spoke for this movement when, by way of signaling an unchurched, nontraditional, even anti-institutional orientation toward the divine, he said: “Only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion come forth at all” (Schmidt 2003, 4).Given the above, one can see how “modern” mysticism and “modern” spirituality have become interchangeable terms (mystical experiences are seen as integral to, if not the denouement of, the spiritual path). More specifically, if these forces colluded to authorize an unchurched form of modern mysticism and spirituality, then the extensions of these and additional forces (as described in the following paragraph) subsequently gave shape to its specific variant, being SBNR. One of the earliest (if not the earliest) references to SBNR was in 1926 (in a journal called The American Mercury) where, of all people, the then President of the Rotary Club described his organization as inclusive, nonsectarian, and, notably, as spiritual but not religious. While sporadic references followed (e.g., in 1934 in the Washington Post, in an article about the great Lusitania shipwreck, one finds described various models for memorializing the lives lost as “spiritual but not religious”), it was the force of a therapeutic system, that of Bill Wilson and his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) program, that became the major force behind the popular dissemination of the term. Wilson, inspired by the writings of William James, developed a metaphysical rationale for a form of spirituality that was individualistic, progressivist, and couched in the “therapeutic” language of self-actualization. As early as 1940, A.A. was deemed as “Not religious, but spiritual” and later as “a spiritual rather than a religious program” (Fuller and Parsons 2018). Both terms stressed a felt connection with a “Higher Power” outside the province of the churches (Kurtz 1979). Once disseminated into culture at large, the term became widely used. So it is we find Ellen Burstyn's character in the 1980 movie “Resurrection”—a character who has a near-death experience and subsequently gains paranormal powers—being described as “spiritual but not religious”; Norman Lear, in 1985, describing himself as a “spiritual but not religious Jew”; and a 1989 LA Times personals ad finds a woman describing herself as a “Lovely Eurasian woman . . . spiritual but not religious. Believes love is the highest representation of the human experience” (see Fuller and Parsons 2018). In 1999, when the moniker was taken up by the Gallup Poll, becoming one of three options for describing ones beliefs—religious, SBNR or neither (with 30% choosing SBNR)—being SBNR was here to stay (Newport 1999).To complicate matters further (in returning to the “additional forces” mentioned in the preceding paragraph), this genealogy must be supplemented by the numerous cultural strands that contributed to enabling the option of being SBNR. What we are looking for are those forces that might cause not just a few individuals but, as Weber would have it, “whole groups of peoples” to become suspicious of and to withdraw from the traditional ways in which institutional religion asks us to demonstrate our commitment to the divine. Of course this is difficult, and the operative factors are too many to fully catalog here. Nevertheless, at the risk of offering but a laundry list of items, each deserving further unpacking and analysis, there are a few markers that deserve mention. As prelude, taking into consideration the studies by Takahashi (2020) and Elaine Ecklund and Di Di (2018), the Western term “spirituality” is not found in many areas of the world, and when it is, it is culturally variable, being embedded in often unique sociohistorical and religious configurations. As a result, one cannot say that being SBNR is a global phenomenon and one must be careful to avoid essentialism and colonialist adventures through an unreflexive use of such a term. Restricting ourselves to Western countries and the United States in particular, then, one can point to the American penchant for ecelcticism or what Albanese refers to as “combinativeness” alongsde transcendentalism, harmonial spirituality, and the countercultture of the 1960s as cultural feeders authorizing the emergence of being SBNR. So too are the important enablers of the separation of church and state, the valorization of individualism, pluralism, capitalism, the contestestation of the strict identities often valorized by religious doctrine (e.g., the LGBT movement, feminism, civil rights), and those social spaces (e.g., the coffehouse, art, film and social media) geared toward disillusionment and critique. With respect to the latter, as Peter Homans (Parsons 1991) has argued, university departments of religion stand at the forefront. Religious intellectuals and their students operate in a social space committed to an objective, secular, pluralistic, and critical study of religious phenomena (Religionwissenschaft). This requires a bracketing of one's religious convictions. To be deprived of naive idealization is, sooner or later, to be met with an experience of disillusionment and loss, which in turn generates an injunction to mourn. Every creative work in departments of religious studies, then, reveals “a bit of mourning and a bit of individuation . . . new theories of religion . . . are therefore the creation of meaning, the result of a special instance of mourning and individuation” (Parsons 1991, 5). This observation is commensurate with those who see the creative output of university-based departments of religion as undermining traditional religion expressions, perhaps even furthering new, nontraditional religious forms like being SBNR.As mentioned earlier, the social space of the psychological clinic is similarly crucial. No one exemplifies the effect of this culture on the SBNR better than the theologian Linda Mercadante. Her theology of culture project, evinced in her Belief Beyond Borders, has amassed definitive sociological data (both qualitative and quantitative) on the unarticulated ethical and metaphysical horizons of meaning that characterize SBNR views with respect to transcendence (“metaphysics”), human nature (“theological anthropology”), community, and the afterlife. In surveying her respondents’ views on human nature, she notes that they look inward to the self for their source of authority, proclaiming that human nature is good if not divine, utilizing psychological explanations for behavior, and seeing “self-fulfillment” as the path of spirituality (Mercadante 2014). They are conversant with nomenclature like “individuation,” “self-realization,” and “peak experiences,” all of which are the result of the impact of psychological theories, further being utilized in the expression of that which constitutes the process of becoming more spiritual. Again, in her survey of the SBNR take on God and the divine, Mercadante notes that some of her respondents objected to gendered “Father” characterizations of God, casting traditional forms of belief as regressive and childish (Freud) while alternately conceiving of the divine as needing humans to evolve and come to self-awareness (Jung).The impact of this therapeutic culture tallies with our genealogy. Cited in the latter is the research of Michel de Certeau, who, in tracking the historical emergence of the substantive “mysticism,” makes note of what he calls a “significant debate,” namely, that between the French professor, social activist, and novelist Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud, over the nature of the “oceanic feeling”—a debate played out in the opening chapter of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. De Certeau thinks it significant, for it is here that he finds, in Rolland's efforts to secure a “mystical psychoanalysis,” the trend toward a noninstitutional form of mysticism and (psycho)spirituality. This trend eventually led to the fact that for many in contemporary culture, psychological formulations have been utilized for the purposes of organizing, monitoring, and expressing the need for wholeness, numinous experiences, and individuation. Such systems, which later included “inner-worldly” psychospiritualities like those of Jung (archetypical), Maslow (humanistic), and Wilber/Ferrer (transpersonal), have enabled those who seek a modern, unchurched way of mapping religious proclivities. In other words, psychospirituality is not only a cultural strand or feeder of being SBNR but also a de-idealized and “mourned” cultural product of classical “churched” mysticism, which is to say, of “mystical theology” (Fitzpatrick and Parsons 2018).The preceding list, which is anything but complete, is not a search for “causes.” Any attempt at cultural analysis seeking to track any sociohistorical manifestation such as the SBNR must do away with the concept of cause in favor of a Weberian elective affinity. Indeed, the latter is further complicated not only because of the degree of difficulty involved in isolating and naming the multiplicity of such cultural strands but also because of the degree of impossibility involved in tracking how they morph through their interaction. What is offered here (and the additional factors mentioned in the following) is but an approximation, in the hope that it engenders further investigation and informs more than it obscures (see also Fuller and Parsons 2018).Returning to the further, alternate, even incompatible ways in which those who profess being SBNR have been characterized in contemporary culture, it is hard not to notice the depictions of who and what they are in popular media outlets. Laura Dern's character in Enlightened is a classic case, insofar as she is initially disillusioned, then spends $50,000 on a Hawaii spiritual retreat where she meditates, practices yoga, undergoes therapy, achieves a level of enlightenment, then returns to her corporate job in an effort to change her friends, family, and the world (Mercadante 2012). One could also consult the television show Madmen, where one might recall the final episode where Don Draper, on retreat at that famous “religion of no religion” (Kripal 2007) California retreat center known as Esalen, comes up with a new advertising jingle (“I'd like to buy the world a Coke”)—a jingle that, in real life, was recorded by a group known as the New Seekers, the underlying meaning of its lyrics being to bring love and harmony to the inhabitants of Earth. Or, to go to the farthest, unflattering extreme, one might view a recent YouTube video (admittedly entertaining) that unabashedly parodies the “church” of the SBNR as narcissistic, vague, and vacuous.2Such examples invariably link being SBNR to neoliberal capitalism, pop media, and its consumer culture. It is this depiction that has in many ways ruled the day, helped in no small part, at least as far as academia is concerned, by the now de facto lens offered by Carrette and King's Selling Spirituality (2005). Their genealogy of being SBNR siphons through two major historical movements: (1) that which echoes the enlightenment stress on the privatization of religion and focus on the individual; (2) the subsequent 20th-century “corporatization of spirituality” in which neoliberalism has tailored individual desires for self-fulfillment for the purpose of continuously reproducing the capitalistic ethos of growth, industrial efficiency, profitability and success. Their critique, as one might imagine, highlights the economic and cultural problematic offered by Marx and Foucault. But their narrative is hardly devoid of psychological elements. In fact, they see psychology as a major cultural strand in the formation of both modern spirituality and its myopic focus on the individual. In particular, it is James, who both privatized and democratized religious experience, and then Maslow and his humanistic psychology—one in which a person's basic needs and the valorization of peak experiences reflects, supports, and reproduces neoliberal capitalism—that evoke their ire. Their analysis is commensurate with a sociology of knowledge approach, insofar as one could say that Maslow's psychology fits neo-liberal capitalism to the extent that, by way of modeling culture as an organism, its invention was all but assured.In unpacking their argument, Carrette and King evoke Robert Bellah's articulation of Sheilaism (a term denoting the myopic individualism of being SBNR), as well as the thesis, promoted by Christopher Lasch in his The Culture of Narcissism, that social shifts have led to a culture beset by narcissistic personality disorders. As remedy, Carrette and King evince a nostalgia for the communal solidarity and ethos of service found in past traditional forms of religion, despite acknowledging the value of a Ricoeurian hermeneutics of suspicion vis-à-vis the same. While it is harder to discern in the pages of Selling Spirituality, they also leave space for a socially engaged, altruistic form of modern spirituality that is oriented toward social justice (exemplified by, among others, David Loy, whose comments grace the back cover, and his socially engaged ecological movement). That said, their focus is less on articulating a more positive form of modern spirituality than it is in critiquing its complicity in reproducing a steroidal neoliberal capitalism.While there is certainly some truth in their analysis, they missed an opportunity, for Lasch's thesis is entirely dependent on Heinz Kohut, who articulated a developmental line of narcissism (a value-neutral clinical term and not a pejorative evaluative one) that offers resources that, properly applied, balance the one-sided thesis that dominates Selling Spirituality. If Carrette and King had fully utilized object-relations theory to make their argument, they could have distinguished between a form of spiritual narcissism driven by archaic narcissistic structures that fits well with neoliberal capitalism and a more mature, socially engaged spirituality indicative of a “transformed” narcissism.To expand on this a bit, Lasch's diagnosis (through Kohut) is that modern culture is ruled by a form of archaic, fragmented narcissism in which narcissistic rage, eruptions of grandiosity, the need to be seen, mirrored, and admired, the inability to care for the Other, and a lack of empathy reign. His task is to sift through and trace its social, economic, political, and familial causes, and to point to the attendant social forms that have issued forth as a result. In the hands of Carrette and King, that means calling attention to a modern, private, corporate form of spirituality and how such a system foments spiritual narcissism. But neither Lasch nor Carrette and King acknowledge that Kohut's psychology calls for more: a transformed narcissism that eventuates in the capacity for empathy, creativity, humor, object-love, psychologically informed wisdom, and the ability to tolerate transience. Properly disseminated, Kohut thought such transformed narcissism could produce a new “unchurched” religion (to which we will attend in the following).To buttress this line of argument, Selling Spiritualit
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