Faith Seeking Understanding

First the Nones, now the Spirituals Sep 26, 2013

Mark Silk – Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and director of the college’s Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. – See more at: http://marksilk.religionnews.com/2013/09/26/first-the-nones-now-the-spirituals/#sthash.exdzjnb1.dpuf

“I am spiritual but not religious” is one of the common refrains of our time, especially if you happen to spend a lot of time around college kids taking religion courses. You assume that it signifies a religious sensibility combined with a dislike of religious institutions. But is there anything more to these spiritual people than that?

Earlier this year, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, my colleagues over at Trinity’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, decided to find out. In an email survey of nearly 2,000 students at 38 colleges and universities across the country, they asked, “In general would you describe yourself more as a religious, spiritual or secular person? Select One.”

The results, cross-tabulated with a series of other questions, is a portrait of a collective identity distinctly different from both the religious and the secular, representing (along with each of the others) roughly one-third of the college population. So who are those collegians who identify themselves as “spiritual” in America today?

1. They’re more likely to be female than male. In fact, while equal proportions of the young men and women call themselves religious, the former identify as secular versus spiritual by a ratio of over three to two; the latter, as spiritual versus secular by nearly two to one.

2. They are much more likely to believe in God than the Seculars, but the deity in question is more frequently a “higher power” than a personal God.

3. Unlike the Seculars, 70 percent of whom consider themselves Nones, fewer than one-third of the Spirituals do. Indeed, they identify across the spectrum of institutional American religion: 22 percent evangelicals, 12 percent Catholic, eight percent mainline Protestants, four-and-a-half percent each Jews and Eastern religions. Only Mormons and Muslims claim less than one percent.

5. Spirituals believe in miracles and life after death much more than the Seculars, but considerably less so than the Religious. However, they are more likely to believe in ghosts and spirits, in karma and reincarnation than both the Religious and the Seculars. The same goes for homeopathy, faith healing, numerology, astrology, amulets, and the like. But Spirituals are somewhat less likely to believe in faith healing than the religious, and a good deal less likely to believe in the efficacy of prayer.

6. On hot-button social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, Spirituals line up far more closely with the Seculars rather than the Religious. Democrats outnumber Republicans among Spirituals 49 percent to 13 percent, whereas Republicans outnumber Democrats among the Religious 39 percent 28 percent. Democrats outnumber Republicans among Seculars by 57 percent to five percent.

7. They are more than twice as likely as the Religious to see religion as a source of conflict, but considerably less so than the Seculars.

Overall, the Spirituals are closer to the Religious when it comes to the supernatural but closer to the Seculars when it comes to the social and political. Most claim an institutional religious identity. They are closest to the tradition that the American religious historian Catherine Albanese calls Metaphysical in her magisterial volume, A Republic of Mind and Spirit.

While Kosmin and Keysar’s survey is not a random sample of college students in a statistically strict sense, the range and size of their sample is more than sufficient to make a strong provisional claim. A dozen years ago, they transformed the world of American religious demography when they discovered that the proportion of Nones had doubled in the 1990s. The rise of the Spirituals may be next.

Unbelief is now the world’s third-largest ‘religion’

Kimberly Winston Religion News Service  |  Dec. 19, 2012

A new report on global religious identity shows that while Christians and Muslims make up the two largest groups, those with no religious affiliation — including atheists and agnostics — are now the third-largest “religious” group in the world.

The study, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, found that more than eight in 10 (84 percent) of the world’s 7 billion people adheres to some form of religion. Christians make up the largest group, with 2.2 billion adherents, or 32 percent worldwide, followed by Muslims, with 1.6 billion adherents, or 23 percent worldwide.

Close behind are the “nones” — those who say they have no religious affiliation or say they do not believe in God — at 1. 1 billion, or 16 percent. That means that about the same number of people who identify as Catholics worldwide say they have no religion. “One out of six people does not have a religious identity,” said Conrad Hackett, a primary researcher and demographer on the study. “But it is also striking that that overwhelming majority of the world does have some type of religious identity. So I think people will be surprised by either way of looking at it.”

The next largest groups, the report finds, are Hindus (1 billion people, or 15 percent), Buddhists (500 million people, or 7 percent) and Jews (14 million people, or 0.2 percent). More than 400 million people — 6 percent — practice folk traditions from African, Chinese, Native American or Australian aboriginal cultures.

An additional 58 million people — slightly less than 1 percent of the global population — belong to “other” religions, such as the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca and Zoroastrianism.

In addition to the numbers of adherents, the study also looks at where they live. Christians are the most evenly distributed, while Jews are fairly evenly divided between North America and the Middle East. The United States has the highest number of Christians of any nation, at more than 243 million, or 78 percent of the total U.S. population.

Meanwhile, the majority of the world’s religiously unaffiliated — 76 percent — live in the Asia-Pacific region, with 700 million in China alone, where religion was stifled during the Cultural Revolution.

The report found nearly 51 million religiously unaffiliated Americans, or about 16.4 percent of the U.S. population. That number is smaller than the 19 percent of Americans Pew reported earlier this year. Researchers attribute this discrepancy to the fact that their 2012 report was based on information from adults only, and the newest report includes the religious adherence of children, which tends to be higher than that of adults.

And while the number of the religiously unaffiliated is high, researchers are careful to point out that they are by no means homogeneous. Surveys considered in this report show that 7 percent of unaffiliated Chinese report a belief in God or some other high power, while that number among the unaffiliated French is 30 percent, and among Americans it climbs to 68 percent. In China, 44 percent of unaffiliated adults say they have worshiped at a graveside or tomb in the past year.

The report covers 230 countries and is drawn from more than 2,500 censuses, surveys and population records accrued through 2010. It marks the first attempt to pin down a global religious landscape using such records, Hackett said.

Other findings include:

                About three-quarters (73 percent) of the world’s people live in countries where their religion is in the majority, mostly Christians and Hindus.

                The religiously unaffiliated are in the majority in six nations: China, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan and North Korea.

                 The unaffiliated, Buddhists and Jews have the highest median age (34, 34 and 36 respectively) while Muslims, Hindus and Christians have the lowest (23, 26 and 30 respectively). Median age is a predictor of how religious groups will grow, as those with a younger age have more women of child-bearing age.

Ryan Cragun, a religion sociologist at the University of Tampa who studies the nonreligious, said the numbers on the unaffiliated are not surprising. But he cautions that surveys that rely on secondary data, such as censuses, and self-reporting often over calculates some groups, such as Christians. “The real question is whether or not the nonreligious are outpacing the religious when it comes to growth,” he said. That and other issues, such as migration, age range and mortality will be covered in future reports, Pew researchers said. A more in-depth report on the religiously unaffiliated is planned for 2013.