Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America

Abstract

The purpose of this book is to ex plore the his tory and present sta - tus of un churched religion in the United States. This is not an easy task. It is one thing to acknowledge the ex istence of un churched reli- gion. To de fine, cat e go rize, and un der stand it is con sid er ably more difficult. We can with some precision de termine how many people regularly at tend church and how many al most never do. But many in - di vid u als fall some where in be tween. To com pli cate mat ters, some church at tenders are very lib eral in their be liefs and find themselves attracted to a wide va riety of un orthodox ideas and practices. Mean- while, many who don’t at tend church continue to draw on their reli- gious backgrounds when they find them selves praying or when they construct stories about their own per sonal spir itual jour neys. One so cio log i cal study doc u mented how freely Amer i cans com bine tra di - tional and non tra di tional el e ments in their per sonal spir i tual prac- tice.2 Among those in terviewed in this study was a thirty-eight-year- old teacher who was raised Roman Cath olic but now at tends Mass only a few times a year. De spite her spotty church at tendance, she considers herself a deeply spir itual per son. She daily sets aside at least an hour for med itation. She has a home al tar that symbolizes her per - sonal spir itual beliefs. On this al tar are eighteen can dles, an am ulet attached to a photo of her grand mother, am ethyst crystals used in healing med itations, ori ental in cense, a Tibetan prayer bell, a repre- sentation of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and some other traditional Catholic items. This one woman’s eclec tic ap proach to per sonal spir i- tuality conveys how dif ficult it is to de fine or categorize un churched spirituality. Al though we know that between 38 to 40 percent of the adult pop ulation in the United States have no formal religious af filia- tion, we have much to learn about the role of un churched religion in Amer i cans’ per sonal spir i tual lives.