(RNS) — A new Pew Research Center survey finds that 37% of Americans now say religion is gaining influence in public life, the highest percentage since 2002, up 19 points in just two years. And no group is more alarmed than the spiritual-but-not-religious.
Among the religiously unaffiliated, 46% view religion’s growing influence negatively, the survey found. That’s more than double the rate of the general public.
Here’s the thing, though. I think we are partly to blame. We helped create a void in public life that is now being filled in ways we didn’t anticipate and frankly don’t like.
I know because I’m one of the spiritual-but-not-religious Americans who have been trying to find alternatives to organized religion. I’m also a religion scholar and I study this stuff for a living: yoga studios, mindfulness apps, sound baths, ayahuasca retreats and the vague but sincere conviction that you can be deeply spiritual without identifying with any particular tradition. We’re not cynics. We’re seekers. We just decided to seek on our own terms.
The spiritual-but-not-religious crowd has been extraordinarily good at one thing: individual transformation. The practices we’ve adopted — many of them from Asian religions, Indigenous traditions and New Age spirituality — we often experience as powerfully meaningful. I’ve experienced it myself. Mindfulness really can reduce anxiety. A sound bath really can feel like transcendence. Ayahuasca, taken in the right ceremonial context, really can reorganize how you understand your life.
But individual transformation is not the same as collective power. And that distinction is part of what the Pew data is exposing.
“37% of U.S. adults now say religion is gaining influence, the highest share since 2002” (Graphic courtesy of Pew Research Center)
Organized religion, for all its failures, knows how to show up. It has institutions, congregations and email lists. It has spent decades building the kind of infrastructure that translates conviction into political action. That is why when conservative Christians want the government to promote Christian values, they have organizations, lobbying arms and school board slates ready to go.
What do spiritual-but-not-religious people have? Podcasters and social media influencers.
I want to be clear that I am not arguing that the religiously unaffiliated need to go back to church. The reasons people left organized religion are real and often legitimate. I’m not suggesting anyone return to an institution that hurt them.
But in my research for my recent book, “Beyond Wellness,” I kept bumping into the same problem: We have borrowed the most individually appealing parts of religious practice — the meditation, the ritual, the transcendence — and left behind everything that felt like a duty. Or commitment. Or accountability. Or even community that makes demands on you. The obligation to show up even when you don’t feel like it. The sense that your spiritual life is bound up with other people’s.
And that is what transforms private experience into public presence.
The Pew survey finds that 52% of Americans think conservative Christians have gone too far in pushing their values into government and public schools. Forty-eight percent say secular liberals have gone too far in keeping religion out. But complaining from both sides isn’t getting us anywhere.
The spiritual-but-not-religious Americans I’ve interviewed for my research are often the most thoughtful people I’ve met when it comes to meaning, mortality, ethics and human flourishing. They’ve thought hard about how to live. What they haven’t figured out is how to translate that wisdom into anything that scales.
We traded our collective power for a yoga mat. The bill, it turns out, is coming due.
(Liz Bucar is a professor of religious ethics at Northeastern University in Boston and the author of “Beyond Wellness.” She writes the Substack newsletter Religion, Reimagined. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)