Bibliofreakblog

Spiritual but Not Religious by Robert C. Fuller

Have I told you guys about the second and last time I ever went to confession?  The first of course, was when I made more first reconciliation in 4th grade.  The second time, I was in 10th grade, on a field trip to Washington D.C.  We were visiting the Church of the Immaculate Conception, and I felt like going to confession.

I have since come to believe this was not actually a priest due to some of the questions he asked me.  Also, he was dressed in street clothes.  But I asked if he knew if anyone was hearing confession and he said he was a priest and he’d be happy to hear my confession and so we sat down and it was awkward at best, and at the end he told me to say some Our Fathers and Hail Marys.  And I told him that I didn’t know the Hail Mary.  And he was already mad I hadn’t made my Confirmation.  

I told him that my Mom had always taught me to just pray from my heart.  And he rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, one of those.”  Rolled his eyes!  About my mother!

By those, he meant an a la carte Catholic.

But then I went off to college and studied Comparative Religion and learned that my mom was not some oddball and neither was I and then some time later I told my sisters about the pervy questions he asked me and they were pretty sure he wasn’t a real priest.  Or maybe he was and he was just wacko.  I’ll never really know.

And the thing that this story has to do with this story is that, like I said, I learned that my mother was not, in fact, an oddball.  At least not as far as Americans go.

As it turns out, and mostly I learned this from Robert Fuller’s Spiritual but not Relious, most people don’t regularly go to church, and while they might classify themselves as belonging to some ism or other, they don’t tend to hold that strongly to its tenants.  

Even 40% of neo-Pagans draw from many different religious practices.

And guess what?  The so-called Spiritual but not Religious are influencing the mainstream.

But, as Fuller shows, that’s nothing really new, in the context of American history:

“In the late 1600s, less than one-third of all adults belonged to a church.  This percentage actually declined over the next hundred years.  By the time of the Revolutionary War, only about 15 percent belonged to any church….This is not to say that colonial Americans were unreligious.  Most early Americans, for example, engaged in a wide array of magical and occult practices.  Astrology, divination, and witchcraft permeated everyday life in the colonies.”

Those of us who frequently peruse the religion section of bookstores and libraries will particularly get a kick out of the concluding chapter, “Barnes & Noble as a Synagogue”.  

 
Buy Spiritual, but not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America from Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

Dakota by Kathleen Norris
Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott
Thou Art That by Joseph Campbell
The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s Founders Really Believed by Alf Mapp
Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion by Wade Clark Roof
The Varieties Of Religious Experience: A Study In Human Nature by William James
After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s by Robert Wuthnow
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation by Wade Clark Roof, Bruce Greer, Mary Johnson and Andrea Leibson
Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality by Leigh Schmidt
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe
Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History by Thomas A. Tweed and Stephen Prothero (editors)
America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln by Mark A Noll
The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, Revised and Expanded Edition by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark
A Religious History of the American People by Sydney E Ahlstrom

Other works by Robert C Fuller:

Spirituality in the Flesh: Bodily Sources of Religious Experiences
Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History
Alternative Medicine and American Religious Life
Ecology of Care: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Self and Moral Obligation
Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls
Americans and the Unconscious
Religion and Wine: A Cultural History of Wine Drinking in the United States
Religious Revolutionaries: The Rebels Who Reshaped American Religion
Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession
Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality
Religion and the Life Cycle