25AR30-24

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AR 30:24 - Can we measure the cultural force called "spirituality?"

In this issue:

AMERICAN RELIGION - why "spirituality" is more like a language than a denomination

ASLAN, REZA - oh, the irony of the lion-name connection

DOUTHAT, ROSS - and, when "maybe only dark and disruptive grace will persuade"

Apologia Report 30:24 (1,713)
July 5, 2025

AMERICAN RELIGION

"Why Studying Spirituality Is Harder Than You Think" by Kelsey Dallas (Deseret News, May 9 '25) -- opens: "Sociologist Christian Smith <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-C-Smith> studies American religion, but his research doesn't take him to many churches these days. ...

   "Smith, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, is on a mission to understand what he calls the culture of re-enchantment, a loosely connected web of conventions, shops, content creators and community groups that promote some form of spirituality, but not religion." A pull-quote by Smith follows, emphasizing that spirituality "is not like a denomination. It's a language people use to describe themselves and the practices of others. It includes a lot of internal ambiguity and diversity."

   Smith "didn't plan on stumbling onto so many spiritual practices that are separate from religion, let alone concluding that spirituality, when broadly defined, is a significant cultural force on its own. ...

   He "sees the label as an entry point into a conversation about finding meaning in spiritual activities like energy healing or manifesting, which are often associated with the 1960s but are newly relevant today."

   After University of Minnesota sociologist Penny Edgell noted that "nearly 9 in 10 U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to a physical body," she "criticized those who insist that high rates of spirituality 'don't mean anything.' ...

   Pew's May 2025 report, "Believing in Spirits and Life After Death Is Common Around the World," <www.tinyurl.com/y5c3a3t9> led some religion specialists to suggest that "churches should start pitching themselves as spiritual centers in addition to religious institutions to draw in spiritual seekers. 

   "But others essentially scoffed at the spirituality data, dismissing the idea that spiritual practices can be a source of meaning outside of religion, as Smith once did. ...

   "Smith agrees that more specific questions are needed, but he sympathizes with Pew and other research firms. 

   "Spirituality has multiple meanings and expressions — and they don't all overlap. 

   "It's not like a denomination. It's a language people use to describe themselves and the practices of others. It includes a lot of internal ambiguity and diversity," he said. ...

   "Moving forward, researchers will have to experiment with more specific questions about spirituality....

   "They'll continue exploring what it means to be spiritual but not religious and what types of spiritual institutions are comparable to more familiar religious ones. 

   "We've become really good at measuring traditional religion, but spirituality is relatively new. We have to figure out what it means and what kinds of questions to ask. How people out in the world think about it," Smith said. ...

   "'Finding the right questions to ask was a complicated and lengthy process, and it took a lot of care,' said Jonathan Evans, a senior researcher at Pew and the lead author of the new report."

   Dallas concludes: "Pew showed that, at least for some, embracing spiritual concepts has little or nothing to do with religion." <www.tinyurl.com/bdhkrycm>

   This idea might also prove difficult, but imagine a Pew study focused on the role of humility within this new emphasis on spirituality. Next, follow it with a study on the primacy of worship in the context of non-religious spirituality, then measure the degree of consensus related to these findings. Last, compare all of those findings with a concluding study evaluating humility's broad connection to worship and separately, meaning, within both religious and spiritual communities. (Please let us know what you find.)

 ---

ASLAN, REZA

Guess who wrote "When Myth Is the Message" for the New York Times' Jun 13 '25 edition? It begins: "We in the modern world tend to understand the word 'myth' as a synonym for 'falsehood.' But that is not how our ancestors understood it. Indeed, the ancient mind did not draw the same line between myth and fact that we do.

   "Whether we are speaking of Zeus forcing his father to vomit up his siblings or Jesus being born in a manger, these tales were never meant to be read as factual reports. ...

   "Scripture deals in what might be called 'sacred history,' a narrative realm that blends fact and fiction to convey timeless truths. The authors and transmitters of these sacred texts were not seeking facts; they were seeking meaning. ...

   "To read the story of Jesus's birth in Bethlehem or Muhammad's revelation in the cave of Hira as if they were modern biographies is not only to misunderstand them, it is to rob them of their purpose. For the writers of the Gospels or the early Islamic tradition, the question was never, 'Did this story happen exactly as described?' but 'What does this story mean for us now?' ...

   "Why do we have this impulse to impose modern categories of evidence and objectivity onto ancient spiritual narratives? ...

   "Did ancient storytellers intend their myths to reveal hidden truths? Or have these stories simply evolved over time into something we now recognize as myth? The honest answer is: both."

   Nearing his conclusion, Aslan <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-R-Aslan> finds that "To fully appreciate religion's power, we must learn to see with both eyes: one trained on the demands of evidence, the other on the pull of meaning." <www.archive.ph/kN4RE>

   Aslan is consistently controversial. In 2014 First Things magazine accused him <www.tinyurl.com/4ryud888> of misrepresenting his credentials: "None of his degrees is in history, so Aslan's repeated claims that he has 'a Ph.D. in the history of religions' and that he is 'a historian' are false."

   Also see evangelical theologian David Wenham's helpful response to Aslan's 2013 book "Zealot," <www.tinyurl.com/5d2xs4f3> Aslan's bestselling book about Jesus, at Solas: <www.tinyurl.com/5n777y42>

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DOUTHAT, ROSS

"Ross Douthat and the New Theism" by Catholic researcher Mary Eberstadt (Free Beacon, May 11 '25) -- Twenty years after the new atheism coursed triumphantly across the West, its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar is upon us." What's more, "tempo, that great imponderable, [now] seems uncannily aligned on the side of the faithful these days, at least in the United States.

   "Consider some signposts: Post-pandemic, homeschooling and classical Christian-minded academies have grown explosively. Their superiority can only mean that in a generation, believers will be represented disproportionately in leadership and scholarship. Higher education, even in the Ivies, is now home to a slew of new religious initiatives...." Eberstadt <www.tinyurl.com/37u4papw> lists several and continues.

   "High-profile converts, intellectuals among them, are no longer unicorns in the Anglosphere (J.D. Vance, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, A.N. Wilson, Paul Kingsnorth). ... Even the data on plunging birth and marriage rates throw momentum toward the believers, as people ordered to be fruitful and multiply try to, and humans without God continue to morph into humans without kids. Contrary to what most would have predicted two decades ago, we live in an unexpectedly auspicious moment for men and women of faith—one might almost say, for a new theism.

   "Ross Douthat's latest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, <www.tinyurl.com/msffm34e> is a manifesto for this moment, as archetypal of the new theism as Christopher Hitchens was to its opposite. ... The book's quintessentially Burkean argument is that '[r]eason still points godward, and you don't have to be a great philosopher or a brilliant textual interpreter to follow its directions. Ordinary intelligence and common sense together are enough.'

   "Refreshingly, the author dismisses from the outset an argument that's become common among some: that faith should be embraced for its earthly outcomes alone." She names some. "The book's touchstone is not sociology but truth, and how we know it when we see it. The benefits of churchgoing, he observes, 'accrue precisely because religious perspectives are closer to the truth about existence than purely secular worldviews.'"

   "Believe is vintage Douthat" writes Eberstadt as she briefly calls out these characteristics. Further, "'The Fashioned Universe,' a chapter summarizing the argument that science points toward God, sweeps through modern physics to remind us that the conditions required for reality as we know it are almost unimaginably peculiar. ... Another chapter, 'The Mind and the Cosmos,' deploys philosophy and new science to attack materialist accounts of consciousness, demonstrating again that the place in which humanity finds itself is 'strangely suited to both our bodies and our minds.' ...

   "Douthat's authorial affability does mean pulling punches here and there. In a discussion of theodicy, for example, he gently makes the point that 'there is no good evidence that religion has been a special source of violence in human history.' ...

   "Though it suggests that 'no one can agree on precisely when' religious belief went over a cliff, this is not quite right. Sociologists broadly agree that religiosity—which was in notable revival across the United States, Europe, Canada, and the antipodes after World War II—began its steep descent beginning around 1963. I have argued elsewhere (in How the West Really Lost God, <www.tinyurl.com/yc6wtv34> 2013) that the hinge moment is the widespread adoption of effective contraception. ... This double whammy [risk-taking for sex without consequences / disrupted homes], far more than Copernicus or Darwin, is what has been emptying churches from the mid-1960s onward. ...

   "'The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive,' observed Flannery O'Connor. The truth is that the world needs some of both. In his own review of Believe, George Packer, one of the more incisive writers on the liberal side, doubled down as unconvinced: 'The universe remains random, empty, cold. We're alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end.' <www.tinyurl.com/mswca6bv> For a reader with that kind of conviction, maybe only dark and disruptive grace will persuade." <www.tinyurl.com/mrxe45wn>

   For more, also see <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-Douthat>

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