The large sign in Detroit Metropolitan Airport reads: “Religious Reflections Room.” Noted religion scholar Diana Butler Bass used this sign as her starting point while presenting a talk to a recent adult forum at San Jose’s Good Samaritan Episcopal Church.
While even London’s Heathrow Airport still calls these rooms “interfaith chapels” (with prayer rugs reverently stored in the corners along with Bibles and prayer books), this sign in Detroit goes even further, posing a question: What does it mean to be a church in North American in the 21st century?
Butler, with a Ph.D. in religious studies from Duke University and the author of eight books, seems well qualified to explore this question. A former professor at the U.C. Santa Barbara, she is now an independent scholar who writes for several publications, blogs and spends some 150 days a year on the lecture circuit.
On this day she focused on some national statistics taken from polls in 1999 and 2009. People were asked to place themselves into one of four categories:
• Spiritual, not religious
• Religious, not spiritual
• Spiritual and religious
• Neither
While the first and last categories remained relatively stable, there was a huge shift in the other two: “Religious not spiritual” dropped from 54 percent to 16 percent, while “Spiritual and religious” increased from 6 percent to 48 percent.
As she discusses these figures with groups across the country, she has discovered that “religion” has become a negative term. Over and over the consensus is that religion deals with organizations, rules, confessions, doctrine. One man said, “I’ve been a Presbyterian for 30 years, and there’s nothing spiritual about that.” On the other hand, the connotation of “spiritual” includes things like “based on personal experience, deeper sense of self, personal connection with the divine, authority from within.”
Bass feels that the old models of religion (top-down authority, written doctrines, rules and regulations) are becoming increasingly unimportant to people of faith. More and more they are looking for the sense of divine in their own lives, seeking out others who are open to figuring out what God is in this time.
“Religious and spiritual”? Perhaps that model can be symbolized by a friend of hers who attends Sunday worship services out of a sense of obligation, but who really meets his longing for spirituality during a weekly yoga class.
According to Bass, recent data makes clear that “American religion has changed in remarkable ways in the last decade, revealing an erosion of belief, practice, and identity in nearly every denomination, almost all congregations and most every religious institution or organization.”
Recent studies indicate the group within the United States growing most rapidly is “the unaffiliated, those who claim no membership in a traditional church or faith group … That number now stands at around 20 percent.”
Bass suggests it is time to look at the religious institutions that people are leaving. Perhaps it is time for a “different kind of church or a new kind of Christianity.” In her Huffington Post blog, she says “the end of conventional church isn’t necessarily a bad thing” and that Christianity after religion, “a faith renewed by God’s spirit, is closer to what Jesus hoped for his followers than scandalous division, politics and enmity that we have now.” She hopes that it will bring more spiritual depth and greater ethical integrity than existing churches offer now.
Chuck Flagg is a retired teacher with a passion for religion. Reach him at [email protected].
