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Allan Petersen, in The Myth of the Greener Grass, tells the story of a group of a dozen married women having lunch together. One woman asked, "How many of you have been faithful to your husbands throughout your marriage?" Only one woman out of the twelve raised her hand. At home that evening, one of the women who didn't raise her hand told her husband about the lunch, the question, her reaction. "But," she quickly added, "I have been faithful."
"Then why didn't you raise your hand?"
"I was ashamed."
I was reminded of that while reading Wade Clark Roof's new book, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Only, the question around the table isn't, "How many of you have been faithful to your husbands?" The question is, "How many of you would call yourselves religious?" According to Roof's research, a very small percentage of Americans would raise their hands—not because many don't attend religious services and engage in religious practices on a regular basis, but because they're ashamed. Very few Americans consider themselves "religious" anymore. No, as everyone from New Age aficionados to born-again charismatics to mainstream, middle-American believers are quick to point out, "I'm not religious—I'm spiritual." This is the new watchword, the shibboleth at the river-crossing between generations, that marks baby boomers from their forebears.
But what does it mean, spiritual? That's what Roof has set out to ask and to answer: to track, capture, and name the current varieties of religious— or spiritual—experience in America. What he's come up with is a kind of metaphysical seed-catalog, a bewildering array of groups and sub-groups, beliefs and opinions, views and world-views, much of it mixed and matched. At the same time his book is a kind of sociological taxonomy, an attempt to sift, sort, and narrow down the field of spiritual types into a few basic species. Roof comes up with five: Secularists, those who forswear religion as a force shaping their lives in any meaningful sense; Metaphysical Seekers and Believers; Born-Again Evangelicals; Mainstream Believers; and Dogmatists.
The thin thematic thread that holds these diverse groups together—with the exception in most instances of the Secularists and the Dogmatists—is what Roof calls a "spiritual quest culture," a sense that one's life is a journey of self-discovery and personal growth. Gone are the old verities: faith as a settled position, a set of revealed and received truths, an inheritance of time-honored traditions. Gone, almost, is the sense that faith's object is a Wholly Other God. What's supplanted all that is the notion that faith is a process of finding my own life's uniqueness and connectedness. It's about finding truth for me.
This process may be helped along by one or several faith traditions. What matters is that I choose my faith. I might frame it within a given religious system. Or I might, collage-like, decorate it with symbols, stories, liturgies, rites borrowed from a variety of sources, religious and otherwise. The role religious institutions—churches, synagogues, temples, mosques—play in this process is, in a sense, to deconstruct themselves: to stop acting as ancient and unchanging repositories of creed and ritual, and instead become clearinghouses of beliefs and practices: spiritual marketplaces.
Roof isn't suggesting that all religious institutions are becoming syncretistic (though he thinks that "to speak of 'syncretism' to describe this diffusion [of traditions and beliefs] is to perpetuate old, misguided notions of religious purity spoiled by contamination"). Rather, he sees many religious institutions adapting—for both survival's and opportunity's sake—to the ill-defined but very real spiritual yearnings of a generation that distrusts all institutions and is used to getting what they want when they want it.
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