Growing alienation of young people from organized churches and the general decline in church membership in the country have many denominations scrambling to find new ways to reach out to the unchurched.
Linda Mercadante, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister who teaches theology at Methodist Theological School in Ohio, has moved beyond speculation and conducted extensive research on what people mean when they say “I’m spiritual but not religious,” (SBNR).
She recently shared some of her findings, which will be published in a book “sometime,” she says, with a group of about 50 PC(USA) national staff members in Louisville. Her visit was hosted by the denomination’s Research Services office.
Referring to “SBNRs,” Mercadante freely admitted she was once one of them. “I was definitely one of those people,” she said. “I’m a baby-boomer — I tried yoga, Transcendental Meditation, all that stuff. My mother was Catholic and my father was Jewish so I had no real religious training growing up. I went through it all — Catholicism, atheism … and finally found the PC(USA).”
Everybody knows someone who professes to be SBNR, Mercadante said, and so she has traveled around the country — Colorado, New York, Ohio, California, even to Canada — conducting 90-minute interviews with anyone who will talk to her.
The response has been overwhelming. “I spent two months in Boulder (Colorado) and there were so many volunteers I didn’t have time for them all,” she said. “There’s not just a spiritual hunger out there, but a hunger to talk about it.”
So why aren’t these spiritual but not religious people in the church?
One of the common assumptions — that many spiritual but not religious people had bad experiences in the church — is simply not true, she said. “I was surprised, but there was very minimal reporting by people that they had been hurt in or by the church.” In fact, Mercadante said, spiritual but not religious people “start in many different places but they all seem to have arrived at close to the same place.”
That place, she continued, is marked by “stereotypical arguments against organized religion and the claims of churches.” They include:
• churches claim to “exclusive truthfulness — that they have a corner on the truth market”;
• churches demand that personal beliefs be abdicated;
• churches demand conformity to a “corporate mentality”;
• joining a church means a loss of personal integrity;
• churches demand commitment “to things that have no meaning”
• churches demand commitment to disagreeable codes of conduct; and
• churches profess arbitrary or implausible beliefs.
“I heard the same arguments over and over again,” Mercadante said of her research. “I don’t know where this script comes from — no one knows any real churches that fit this profile or stereotype.”
Another flawed assumption, Mercadante said, is that young people leave the church, typically after high school if not before, but then return to the church after they get married and have kids. “By and large, it doesn’t happen,” she said.
Another religious researcher, Robert Wuthnow, has conducted research into sociological trends that impact church membership and participation in organized religion. They include:
• delayed marriage (Americans are marrying at a later age, on average) and increased divorce rates;
• fewer children born later in their parents’ lives;
• less job security, therefore greater financial insecurity, making commitment less likely;
• higher levels of education, which decreases “unquestioned belief”;
• “loosening relationships,” resulting in less community involvement;
• Globalization, producing less homogeneity and greater diversity; and
• the “information explosion,” which creates “broader spiritual horizons and therefore looser religious identification.”
“I think it’s clear that much of the problem organized religion faces today is not really the church’s fault,” Mercadante said. “We are experiencing a massive cultural shift that is extremely hard to keep up with and the church always lags behind these shifts — too slowly, obviously, for some people.”
But the church, as it has in all ages, has the spiritual resources to meet the hunger that is always present, Mercadante concluded. “Our challenge is to bring all the church has to offer into this milieu and break the stereotypes that keep people away.”
