I recently talked to some students about the term ‘Spiritual But Not Religious ‘ and my notes may, or may not, be of interest.. They are below. You may notice that I take a much more measured tone than in the book..

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We began by wondering: 

Who are the SBNR?

*         We don’t wholly know.. But..

*         New Age..

*         Agnostics

*         Disillusioned with institutions

*         Spiritual self-selecter

*         Anxious Buddhists (for example)

Why claim to be SBNR?

*         Rejection / discomfort with authority..

*         Sense of something bigger, but a (postmodern) suspicion of ‘grand narratives’

*         A Socio-cultural guess?

People wish to disassociate from the type of belief which is tainted by religious extremism and fundamentalism. Nonetheless, they want to identify not as a shallow egotist (with a mere mechanistic world-view) but as someone with depth and sensitivity.

Studies / evidence?

*         Most important: http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx

*         What does Pew Forum report say on this?

*         Well – they tweeted the detailed stats in a table :

*         https://twitter.com/pewforum/status/256397579892449280

*         Also for some interesting analysis of this data see http://irritually.org/2012/10/11/belonging-to-a-religion-without-being-religious/

*         So – of  those who described themselves as SBNR – 39% also called themselves Protestant..

*         See aforementioned analysis blog – but tells us that religious (or spiritual) identification is complex: people may feel affiliated with a tradition in some senses, but perhaps want to distance themselves from the ‘toxicity’ associated with being religious – in some ways..

*         But then there was more – in January this year: we saw a rash of headlines:

Mental Health?

*         http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/09/the-spiritual-but-not-religious-likely-to-face-mental-health-issues-drug-use-study-says/

*         http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2013/jan/09/spiritual-but-not-religious-dangerous-mix

*         http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2013/01/mental-health-problems-more-common-among-spiritual-but-not-religious.html

*         http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unique-everybody-else/201301/troubled-souls-spirituality-mental-health-hazard

*         All based on this study:

*         http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/202/1/68#BIBL

BUT

*         This study is based on interviews from a study:

*         https://catalogue.ic.nhs.uk/publications/mental-health/surveys/adul-psyc-morb-res-hou-sur-eng-2007/adul-psyc-morb-res-hou-sur-eng-2007-apx.pdf

*         Dig into appendix d for the questions on religion, and things get much less clear..

*         Surveys? I asked a psychologist who knows about these things to look at the data.. He blogs about ‘spiritual intelligence’, etc – http://jonathanschips.blogspot.co.uk/ so I knew he’d be interested..

The Actual Question:

By ‘religion’, we mean the actual practice of a faith, e.g. going to a temple, mosque, church or synagogue. Some people do not follow a religion but do have spiritual beliefs or experiences. Some people make sense of their lives without any religious or spiritual beliefs.

 Would you say that you have a religious or a spiritual understanding of your life?
CODE ALL THAT APPLY
1 Religious
2 Spiritual
3 Neither

*         SO: they can be Religious, Spiritual, Both, Neither.

*         Seems fair – but: IF the person says only option 2: survey treats them as not religious. They haven’t said they are – but they haven’t said that they really aren’t either.

*         This is not that big an issue in original study, but when new study then uses this data – correlates with mental health and religiosity: it sees that those who said option 2 (only) have higher incidence of issues.

*         Then we get news stories.. But these people may well be religious, but identified as spiritual. They may have implied SBNR by answers : BUT they never actually identifed using the term ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’…

*         As my psychologist friend put it: “Their responses have been framed by the questions asked, they have not chosen to self identify as spiritual but not religious.”

Conclusions

*         The mental health stories generated huge comment: be it pagans insisting they were religious, people disputing the claims / inclusions – they were very active..

*         The video had “Why I Love Jesus, but Hate Religion” has had 23 Million views – maybe, whatever we think of it, it may give us some clues:

*         http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IAhDGYlpqY&noredirect=1