According to Gallup and Pew Research, approximately 20% of the US population identifies today as spiritual but not religious (SBNR). I dare say that many of us in progressive Christianity fit into this movement in some way, myself included, even though we may not like the phrase, “spiritual but not religious.” So what does it mean to be SBNR?
In general, the movement is born out of various contemporary concerns. First, it’s born out of a deep moral sensibility – this sense that organized religion, namely Christianity, tends to be homophobic, sexist, patriarchal, often racist, often nationalist, and generally aligned with right-wing politics. There’s also a common feeling among many SBNRs that organized religion tends to be anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-questions and doubts, anti-other worldviews, anti-other religions and thereby elitist, arrogant, and closed minded.
However, the SBNR movement is not just a protest against rigid religious traditions; but it’s also a protest against the rigid and reductive materialism out there today that says: Everything is just stuff. Just cold, dead, mindless stuff. Nothing other than the physical is real and the physical is not endowed with any qualities or properties that science cannot eventually detect, measure, or understand. Therefore, life is just a strange accident of nature along with consciousness. What we call our mind and consciousness, our dynamic inner life, our sense of awareness and subjectivity; it’s probably not real and just an illusion created by our advanced brains, but even if it is real, it certainly tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of matter or reality. Like life itself, mind and consciousness is just a fascinating but ultimately meaningless accident of nature, that tells us nothing about the fundamental nature of reality.
I think the SBNR movement is as much a protest against that kind of reductive materialism as it is a protest against religious conservativism. It rejects both extremes as kind of arrogant, narrow minded, and as ideologies born out of fear: fear of the unknown, fear of the mystery and the weirdness that is innate to life and consciousness. In this way, reductive materialism and religious fundamentalism are actually very similar. They share the same fears and the same desires to domesticate everything and force everything into the categories they’re comfortable with.
In this way, ironically, reductive materialists can be just as dogmatic about their beliefs as religious conservatives. I think SBNRs understand that and also understand that neither extreme probably has the story right. So what is the right story? If reductive materialism and strict atheism probably isn’t the right story and religious fundamentalism most certainly isn’t the right story, then what is? Well, I don’t know completely but I think it has to do with campfires.
About thirty years ago, I was camping with my uncle and he told me that the wood burning in our campfire was really just the sun’s energy being released that was stored in the wood over the course of decades. He was talking about the process of photosynthesis - the process by which plants convert the sun’s light energy into chemical energy. In a very real way, the light and heat of those flames in our campfire was the same light and heat of the sun, simply transformed and stored in the wood. Even though the sun was millions of miles away, this was its light and heat being released in our little campfire.
I remember staring into the fire that night and being amazed. The memory of that has stuck with me all these years because it’s a great example of the deep and wondrous connection that exists between everything, and I think there’s something not just physically and scientifically true about that but metaphysically and perhaps even spiritually true about it.
You see, it’s not just trees that are connected to the sun like this, but we are too. The sun’s energy that is transformed into plants, is then transformed into us as we eat the plants and eat other animals that eat the plants. And it’s not just the sun’s energy that becomes our bodies and our minds, but the rain, the earth, and the air we breathe becomes our bodies and our minds as well. We are literally stars. We are literally the rain and the oceans. We are the earth. We are the sky and the air. I don’t mean that metaphorically, I mean that quite literally. That’s just physics, chemistry, and biology. Which is to say that we are connected to everything, not just physically but I suspect consciously too. After all our minds are part of our body too.
In other words, in the same way that the atoms and molecules in my body and brain are also found in the trees, the rocks, the stars, and other living things; so I suspect that my consciousness is also part of a cosmic consciousness that we approximate with words like: Ultimate Reality/God/the Divine/the Source/the One/Brahman/etc.
If we are physically connected to all things it only makes sense that we are also consciously connected to all things. I suspect that consciousness and mind are at least as fundamental to the nature of reality as space and time, matter and energy. In fact. I suspect that consciousness or mind is the true underlying nature of these things. I may be wrong about all that, but that’s where I lean and where an increasing number of scientists and academics in a variety of fields today lean too. And it’s where a lot of SBNRs lean because thinking along these lines of interconnectedness and mutuality, is a big part of what I think it means to be SBNR.
I think these ideas are what’s animating the SBNR movement to a great degree because I think they constitute a new metanarrative, a new grand overarching story and a depiction of reality that makes sense and harmonizes science and spirituality in ways that neither conservative religion nor reductive materialism could ever do. And we need such a new metanarrative, a new grand story, because as humans we need such stories to give us meaning.
We humans are what some call: meaning making machines. Whether we’re atheist, theist, agnostic, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, it doesn’t matter. We need to find meaning in life, or create meaning because that’s a big part of what makes us human. Which is to say we need stories because stories create meaning, and what greater story is there than the fact that we are all connected, at the deepest levels of our being, to everything and everyone? I suspect this is the biggest story of all and the most meaningful story that we can tell. And it’s a life-giving story, a healing story, and a hopeful story.
It’s also a story that comes with profound moral and spiritual implications. It teaches us mutual care and concern. It teaches us to love and value others and to pursue justice and equity because we’re all connected. And I think this story holds ecological implications too. If we are truly connected to all living things and the environment itself, then we’re going to care about other living things and the environment because it’s all a part of us and we are a part of it.
But this story not only teaches us mutual care and concern but I think it also gives us a deep sense of transcendence, a sense that we are a part of a profound and wondrous mystery. There is something deeply spiritual, cosmic, and mystical about this story. This story affirms a kind of horizontal transcendence rather than a vertical transcendence.
Vertical transcendence is this idea often found in religion that God is located somewhere up there in heaven and the whole point of existence is to get where God is - get to heaven and leave this crummy world behind. Horizontal transcendence on the other hand says – no, God or the divine is found right here, right now in the fabric of our lives and in each other. Material reality is infused with this immaterial or transcendent quality, if you will. This is called divine immanence rather than divine transcendence. The divine is immanent, it’s here and now. I think that’s a view that comports more with our lived reality and our understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. And I think it’s a view that leads to a way better way of living, as it affirms this life and world in its depths.
This view is also where a lot of reconstruction can happen for us. I think spiritual reconstruction is really about learning to tell new stories - bigger and better stories than the ones we were given. Which is to say, I think deconstruction happens when we realize that the stories we were given by our religion, our culture, or our family were too small, too tribal, too contextual to a particular culture, time, and place. And the God of those stories is therefore too small and too tribal. Reconstruction therefore can be understood as simply learning to tell a bigger story, a better story, and a truer story that makes us better people and more honest people. I think that’s not only what reconstruction is about but it’s also a big part of what it means to be SBNR.