Curmudgeon’s Corner
In the United States, there are currently twelve major Christian religions (together a large Christian majority) and significant numbers of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists and Agnostics. Studies show that notwithstanding peoples’ tendency to self-report allegiance to Christian churches, there may be almost 20 percent “unchurched” (recent studies suggest over 30 percent) – who Robert Fuller in Spiritual, But Not Religious (2001) reports are pursuing spirituality without religion or are not actually committed to religious activity.
According to Fuller, “Genuine spirituality, they believe, has to do with personal efforts to achieve greater harmony with the sacred. For them spirituality has to do with private reflection and private experience – not public ritual…Those who are ‘spiritual, but not religious’ tend to agree with Abraham Maslow’s belief that there is a potential antagonism between the private realm of religious experience and the public realm of formal religious practice.”
Furthermore, Fuller reports: “One survey showed that as much as 54 percent of the population has come to believe ‘that churches and synagogues have lost the real spiritual part of religion.” And, “One out of every three adults interviewed in this survey endorsed the still more radical conclusion that “people have God within them, so churches aren’t really necessary.” To be spiritual, but not religious appears to connote a desire to personally connect with a power or reality larger than oneself in a manner that makes rational sense to those involved; in contrast to simply adhering to the formal rituals, dogma, and often coercive official denominational doctrines of religious organizations.
The private versus public aspect of this evolving dichotomy is particularly noteworthy in that this trend is symbiotic with the founders of the American Constitution emphasis on enforcing a separation between church and state. Authors Issac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore write in The Godless Constitution (1996) that: “Deism was, as we shall see, a powerful force among the intellectuals of the founding generation, even among many of the delegates in Philadelphia. A non-doctrinaire religion, deism rejected a supernatural faith built around an anthropomorphic God who intervened in human affairs, either in answer to prayer or for other, inscrutable reasons. Instead, it posited a naturalistic religion with a God understood as a supreme intelligence who after creating the world destined it to operate forever after according to natural, rational, and scientific laws…Until 1787, ‘there was never a nation in the world whose government was not circumscribed by religion.” (p.34) The publisher of the Carlisle Pennsylvania “Aristocrotis” stated bluntly that: “…the new Constitution, disdains…belief of a deity, the immortality of the soul, or the resurrection of the body, a day of judgment, or a future state of rewards and punishments, because its authors are committed to a natural religion that is deistic non-religion.” (p.35)
[Editor’s Note: Why then, do so many of the so-called “faithful or evangelicals” feel the need to castigate the beliefs and feelings of the so-called “non-spiritual or unchurched” among us when it is patently clear that the American founders purposely declared the separation of church and state?
How can America achieve its unifying potential when the dominant Christian religions seek to impose their beliefs on significant minorities whether those smaller groups are other religions or even spiritual secularists? Maybe the “common good” can only be achieved by respecting and enforcing the separation between church and state. Even better, maybe humankind will learn to take responsibility for its combined successes and failures, and avoid pinning current and future experiences on divisive, self-serving religious dogma.]