From Brint Montgomery, who teaches philosophy at Southern Nazarene University:
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on religious independents. From the article:
According to the most recent American Religious Identification Survey, only 76 percent of Americans identify as Christians, down from 86 percent in 1990. But interestingly, while non-Christians are not choosing Islam or Judaism, neither are they choosing atheism. A poll done by Gallup in 2008 found that 15 percent of Americans—up from 8 percent in 1999—say they don’t believe in God, but they do believe in a “Higher Power” or “Universal Spirit.” More and more, Americans believe that the world was created by a spiritual being, but they reject the Torah, the Quran, and the New Testament as the explanation for it.
That article notes a well-known observation that, “Demographically speaking, the Religious Independents, like their political counterparts, are more affluent and well-educated than traditional God-believers.” More than one study has shown that people become less religious when they perceive themselves both as reasonably affluent and as much so as their neighbors. Moreover, a lack of income inequality and insecurity is a nice way to liberalize the religious outlook. Add a strong educational element and a pluralistic social environment, and that becomes a sure-fire formula against traditional religious affiliation.
Not surprisingly, such religious independents are also more likely to care about ethics and social justice than metaphysics and dogma:
Perhaps most importantly, 83 percent of Religious Independents say it is more important to be ethical than to be devout, compared to only 64 percent of traditionalists. Seventy-two percent of Religious Independents say that living a good spiritual life depends on how you act, not what you believe—compared with only 59 percent of traditional followers. In other words, Religious Independents have just as strong a desire for repairing the world, even as they reject the habits and practices of religion.
All this has substantial implications for American culture. Religious Independents don’t want to get involved in cultural wars or fights over Christmas crèches. They are focused on self-improvement, not evangelism. Without high priests of any sort, they’re more apt to resolve political and ethical questions on issues like abortion on a case-by-case basis, rather than with dicta handed down from on high.
That might be frustrating to advocates of institutional religion, since such an autonomous, case-by-case thinking style makes it difficult for such organizations to tell people what and how to think. Independent thinking on religious matters might merely be a corollary to the growing attitudes about privatization of religion. Indeed, for some time now, Americans have been sliding into a mode of privatized religion, one that see-saws opposite from their institutional religious loyalty. On the hit list of most likely to be privatized are men, whites, young Americans, liberal Protestants, and people of an indeterminate religious affiliation. Pacific and New England states also appear to be the most privatized. There is, of course, the subtle matter of teasing out the difference between independent thinkers generally and religious independents, for neither the latter nor the former entail one another. Still, both camps could present new kinds of difficulties for traditional religious institutions.
First, independent thinkers might come to decide that even if science never presents a complete and final explanation of the world, its method of encountering the world can, in fact, function as a fully satisfying, overall philosophy of life—something akin to the popular proverb that it’s the journey, not the destination that gives life meaning. In fact, there are even new kinds of collaborations in contemporary music that outright support this link between a scientific worldview and its unique, underlying aesthetic for human existence.
Second, religious independents might come to decide that large institutions are ultimately a corrupting force for true spirituality, and that such social structures are merely the dying relics from an age when kings and corporate titans were required to manage people. But human coordination now trends toward flat, highly networked models of teamwork rather than vertical models of authority. So, with the ever-growing connectivity of both technological and social networking, religious advocates can finally decouple themselves from the necessity (or perhaps even necessary evil) of large, managing bureaucracies and any concomitant subordination to their autocracies of piety.
