If ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ People Are Not Religious What Difference Do They Make?

Abstract

Modernity's project of secularisation may be challenged by the resurgence of religion in the public sphere (indicated most dramatically by religiously motivated conflicts but also in more everyday contexts). The rising profile of spirituality in healthcare and business training programmes may offer other challenges. Classically, spirituality has been differentiated from religion along seemingly Cartesian lines: the former being the fully interiorised and privatised form of putatively communal and institutionalised religion. This paper questions whether this division works. Taking a relational or personalist approach to the topic, it considers what interactions and commitments are helpfully labelled and theorised as spirituality. It seeks to make sense of the difference the ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR) phenomenon makes to scholarly debates about ways of re-assembling human and larger-than-human acts in the everyday world. The paper is based on a keynote presentation given at the Annual Conference of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality in May 2016 which addressed the question ‘Can spirituality transform our world?’.

KEYWORDS:

• secularism
• modernity
• indigeneity
• animism
• shamans
• individualism

Acknowledgement

I am grateful for the invitation to present at the 2016 Conference of the British Association for the Study of Spirituality, and for discussions which have resulted in this different version of my thinking. I am also grateful to my Open University colleagues Marion Bowman, Paul Tremlett, Mika Lassander and Claire Wanless for provoking (in diverse contexts and media) these and other thoughts about religion and spirituality.

Notes

1 One of the largest indigenous ethnic groups in North America, mainly in the region of the Great Lakes.

2 See also Hornborg's (2012) comparison of Mi'kmaq notions of spirituality with those of the 'new spirituality' in northern Europe.

3 A British comedy film and religious satire (1979) starring and written by a group of comedians known as 'Monty Python'. The film tells the story of 'Brian', a young Jewish man who was born on the same day as, and next door to, Jesus Christ, and who is subsequently mistaken for the Messiah.

4 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY (accessed 05/09/2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Graham Harvey

Graham Harvey is Professor of Religious Studies at The Open University, UK, and author of Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (2013). His research largely focuses on rituals and festivals among indigenous peoples and animists.