Written by: gfesadmin on February 28, 2013

I recently heard Diana Butler-Bass talk at a conference on spirituality called Spiritual Climate Change. Diana convincing expressed what many of us either knew or suspected about the U.S. spiritual environment. We have dramatically shifted in adherence to church. What is shifted is the amount of people who claim no religious affiliation, which is about 25%. This attitude has effected not only church attendance, but also the recent presidential elections. When evaluating who voted, it was clear the Republican Party is out of step with younger voters. For instance 35% of 18-29 year old voters claimed no religious affiliation. Of those who voted for Obama 25% claimed no affiliation. Of the Romney voters only 7% were of no affiliation. What does that tell us? The younger unaffiliated voters are going to be around for a long time and they are increasingly not religious. The anti-religious climate is growing.

Diana does not see current trends as discouraging. Although people are not claiming any religious organization as their own, they do claim to be spiritual. More people are claiming to be spiritual than religious. Compared to the 60s, where more people claimed to be religious, but not spiritual. The trend is reversed. She cites this as a call to the church to attend to the language of spirituality rather than religion. People today desire deeply experiential encounters with God. She says that we need to create new forms of old systems.

She confessed a personal dilemma. She attends church and desires for her child to know the faith, but struggles herself with organized religion. She gave a metaphor of standing with one foot in a boat and one foot on the shore. The shore is institutional and traditional faith and the boat is her liberal spiritual leanings. When asked about the next generation and how they will find any mooring in the spiritual climate, she confessed she did not know. Those who have had an experience in a church have a framework from which to go spiritually, either away from it or return to it. The younger generation has no such framework. They have no mooring. Many children are following their parent’s drift from the faith of their youth. Because of this trend, I do not share her optimism here. Where will the younger generations find their “shore”? Will they just be adrift in Spiritual Climate change?

Even though, Dr. Butler-Bass would not fit into the Evangelical camp, her words echo the reaction that Evangelicals have had in the past to the established church. Her theology would be different, but her spiritual expression would be surprisingly similar. Evangelicals have had a history of unmoorings from previous religious practices. The Evangelical movement has existed in England since the 1730s according to David Bebbington. It was a response to past Christian church practices like all movements. It was an attempt to become what was called a more “primitive” expression of Christianity. (p.36) There was an emphasis for conversion to be an experiential event in a person’s life. People desired to sense God’s supernatural work in them. The Evangelicals and the mystics both desired to experience God. (38) This sounds familiar to the modern trend in spirituality.

What is alarming is how the social environment influences our religious outlook. Early Evangelicalism was an adaptation to the Enlightenment. (53-57) It was an appeal to rational cause/effect ways of view religion. Religious life was shaped by natural laws of the universe. Evangelicals began to see their faith as an experimental religion. Romanticism shifted the religious to a place of feeling and intuition in human perception. (p.80). “If it is felt, then it is true.” The supernatural can found experiencing nature. Then, more fundamentalist Evangelicals reacted to the perceived corruption in the world. Bebbington states, “Their proposal were regularly for the elimination of what was wrong, not for the achievement of some alternative goal. Their goals were often explicitly ‘anti’.” (p.135) The holiness movement too had a tremendous influence in Evangelical circles away from denominational churches. (176). The Charismatic movement, as well, focused on individual expression and a search for an idealized community. (233)

Anti-denominational, experiential, experimental and a desire for a more pure form of Christian community are all part of our Evangelical history. This sounds so familiar with the spiritual climate that Dr. Butler-Bass spoke about. So is Diana as independent of her religious upbringing as she states? Are Evangelical movements more effected by the social trends of the time than a pure “primitive” spirituality? There is more in common with liberal and evangelical spiritual life than we realize. We both can reflect on how we have been shaped by our culture and evangelical past. We are not so innovative as we think. Instead our cultural past has shaped us for good or for ill. We both need a re-mooring to our faith roots. To stand in both the boat and the shore may be dangerous for future generations. But for me the metaphor breaks down. We need to be “comfortable” in the tension between our faith and the culture. It is not either/or. Instead of being pessimistically “anti” we can be realistically engaged. I agree that we may need “new forms of old systems”. But we may also need old forms for new systems. What those new forms will be and how to reflect on their value to spiritual formation will be tough questions for the future.

http://publicreligion.org/research/2012/11/american-values-post-election-survey-2012/

David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, Grand Rapids: Baker Books,1989.

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