From Atheist to Spiritual But Not Religious: A Punctuated Continuum of Identities among the Second Generation of Post-1970 Immigrants in Canada

Abstract

Based on an analysis of 300 in-depth interviews with the adult children of post-1970 immigrants to Canada, this paper examines that subsample in which people straddle the boundaries of clear religious identity, conceiving themselves as anything from atheist and ‘apatheist’ to ‘spiritual but not religious’ and mildly or ‘culturally’ religious. The data show that, in the lived experience and understanding of persons who identify themselves using such categories, there are rarely distinct lines that separate the clearly atheist from the clearly spiritual/religious. A great many people are in a grey zone which is neither non-religious nor religious, but rather occasionally, mildly, or somewhat atheist/spiritual/religious. The analysis suggests that one can understand this variation on the basis of a ‘punctuated continuum’, one ranging from expressly atheist and anti-religion, to the ardently and exclusively religious, but with other categories of understanding, such as spirituality or culture, cutting across this simple continuum to generate a more multi-dimensional complexity.