Groucho Grace
Radbam May 4th, 2009
‘Tis the season—for surveys of religious identification, and for the media to embrace each new exercise in national navel-gazing as if we are learning something radical and innovative from the deadening corridors of demographic analysis. Since my book launch in mid March, there have been three major studies of American religious affiliation published and publicized. And while my publisher is singing songs of serendipity, I have been as surprised as pleased by the confluence of my passion and the preoccupation of academia. But the vigor with which the popular press has picked up these stories seems to reflect a struck chord in the national soul.
Maybe it’s the economy (there are no atheists when the 401K statement is opened) or the uncertainty of a new presidential administration. Whatever the cause, the spiritual equivalent of a self-inflicted prostate examine is all the rage.
A key finding emerges repeatedly in the reports: The fastest growing religious group is the “nones”—those whose habit of throwing off the faith monkey (a theological oxymoron?) is as basic and dualistically black and white as the garb of their sisters in homonym. A brief dip into the torrents of culture, a discussion with a college student or an imprisoned chat with a guilt-ridden baby-boomer on an interminable flight bears this finding out. But there was a fun sur-prize hidden deep in the tasty crackerjack statistics of a recent Pew poll.
The regrettably named but never malodorous Pew survey released this week was a follow up and deeper excavation into the dangling digits of last year’s report. That study revealed that %15 of Americans identify as having no religious identity and/or affiliation. Last week’s heralded analysis delved into the dark, confusing and paradoxical heart of those whom sociologists describe as “secular but spiritual.”
One intriguing finding, cited in a recent Charles Blow Times op-ed, revealed that the unaffiliated possess the lowest retention rate of any religious group. You can raise kids in a spiritual vacuum, but they are likely to fill it sometime in some way. And the other finding: the unaffiliated seek a faith life out of seemingly innate spiritual longings, and are inspired most by uplifting, meaningful worship services.
While provoking much talk and hopeful soul-searching amongst those faith institutions and leaders who seek to maintain gainful employment through the end of Obama’s first term, the study affirms a key component of my vision for an embracing, inclusive spirituality that I lay out in Good God.
In reference to findings of neuro-theology which document distinct brain activity associated with faith states of consciousness:
“This would partly explain the dissonance of those who pursue spiritual experience on the one hand, but are skeptical about established religious order on the other. We are driven to seek spiritual experiences, and when we are unable to find them around us in convenient or relevant forms, the entrepreneurial spirit steps in to fill the vacuum. Or we are left in a limbo of unrequited apathy that, if left unabated, descends into a cynicism infecting other aspects of our lives, sickening our sense of self and self in the world…”
And the implications…
“To borrow, with far better intentions, the paranoid words of Richard Nixon, spiritual seekers and others like them represent a “silent majority” of people who long for a fulfilling faith life and supportive faith community but cannot find a place for these feelings or an object for this search…these frustrated and disappointed walk amongst a large and growing congregation of the lost and longing. It is perhaps the largest community of faith in our nation. Its numbers swell by the day…
In a Woody Allen-circa-Annie Hall-with-the-help-of-Marshall-McLuhan kind of way, a rare moment of broader vindication of personal conviction. Or in a twist on the spirit of Groucho Marx, many of us will only seek membership in a club that we would never join.
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