Since its inception, the United States has been a laboratory of human spirituality. As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday, we remember that early European settlers like the Pilgrims and Puritans came seeking freedom to practice faiths that were frowned upon. Even within these struggling settlements, individuals like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who were exiled by authorities, formed new communities where they could experiment with spiritual ideas.
And it’s been one big spiritual explosion since.
I’ve watched organizational leaders – in business, in education, in the public sphere, even in faith-related organizations – struggle to get their heads and hands around how this wild phenomenon impacts them. Because it does, in ways subtle and overt. It shows up in office and institutional politics, fund-raising, employee motivation and growth, and much else.
And today, it’s particularly weird and wacky. And oh so much more. I’ve been studying and observing this landscape for thirty years, and our time is bonkers, even by American standards. (And yes, “bonkers” is a technical term.)
So here’s a guide to help you get through – some sane voices, observers, and thinkers to help leaders both at home and abroad understand just what the heck is going on spiritually in America right now. This is by no means exhaustive, but rather a few voices to give some structure to the American spiritual experience. (And yes, I’m very aware of what’s lacking here – these sources are about the shape and contour of the American context in a nutshell.)
The Strange History of American Religion
American history oozes with religious and spiritual overtones. If you have no clue where to begin, I’d start with Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham’s American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of Nation. A broad, lively, reliable, and readable introduction, it ranges from the colonial era to the present, providing a framework for how religious and spiritual ideas take shape in the unique American context. His unpacking of the “city on a hill” motif is especially helpful for understanding why many Americans believe we play a special role in the world, baffling as that may be to everyone else.
Dig a bit deeper in the soil of history, and you find American spirituality saturated with the legacy of slavery and race. You just can’t get around it, not if you care about understanding either the past or the present context. Here, three voices are noteworthy:
· Skip Gates’ magisterial The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song is without doubt the single best guide to the importance of the Black Church in American history. There is, of course, no one “Black Church,” but the combined streams of Black experience have marked so many aspects of spirituality in this land—with music, with pain, with justice. A truly wonderful read from one of our leading intellectuals and cultural commentators.
· Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation has caused a stir among conservative evangelicals, even though its history is far less “political” than they make it out to be. A professor of history at Calvin College, Du Mez provides deep insight into the ways religion and politics have intersected in evangelical experience, and how evangelicals have brought a racialized, hyper-masculine style of “Christian nationalism” to the forefront of public discourse. A must-read for relating to your weird uncle or cousin this Thanksgiving.
· Robert Jones’ The End of White Christian America puts some demographic data behind all the political bluster and cultural missile-launching that hides considerable anxiety over how America has changed in the past fifty years. Jones founded PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) and shows how declining numbers of white Christians have fueled much of the hate apparent in immigration debates, civil rights cases, and sexual identity struggles, among other issues.
These four books can help the history start to make sense, especially because you can’t understand American spirituality without grasping just how influential white Christian Protestants and their institutions were for a couple of centuries. But what about the impact of more directly spiritual, rather than historical, concerns?
A Whole New World of American Spirituality
One practical consequence of the historical and demographic shifts detailed in the history is that Americans have been opened, like it or not, to the spiritual experiences of other peoples. While the United States has always been more diverse than is commonly portrayed, in the past several decades the world has come to America, bringing its traditions, beliefs, and practices. New forms of Christianity have developed alongside construction of synagogues, mosques, temples, ashrams, and meditation retreat centers. And Americans have been more open to learning from their new neighbors than you might imagine.
Proof of this comes from a study by the Fetzer Institute, What Does Spirituality Mean to Us: a Study of Spirituality in the United States, released in 2020, just before the pandemic. While there is a close overlap in spirituality and religiosity—73% of Americans claim to be both spiritual AND religious—the study identifies ten different ways that spirituality is expressed. And it’s a diverse set of expressions! This would not surprise scholars per se, but many people don’t even think of how wide their own spiritual expressions may be. The drawings that Fetzer had its respondents do paint a picture of just how wondrous our stick-figure spirituality can be. And their interactive website accompanying the study is rich with information on our spiritual experience.
If you’re more of an auditory learner, the radio show On Being has, for nearly two decades, explored the vast, diverse terrain of spiritual, ethical, and cultural meaning in America. Led by Krista Tippett, one of our wisest questioners and listeners, On Being has featured everyone who’s anyone in the contemporary landscape of spirituality and meaning. This includes important contributions of people who aren’t particularly religious or spiritual, but who’ve made important inquiries into issues with spiritual import. You’ll hear from scientists, poets, preachers, advocates, and psychologists among many more. And Krista gets them talking like no one else does. Their show roster could be a reading list for anyone wanting to do a deep dive in American spirituality. Or, you could read Krista’s book Becoming Wise: an Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, and get the distilled wisdom of a lifetime of conversations.
What the heck is next?
Here I want to mention three resources that serve as icons into the questions shaping what’s to come. Up first is Brian McLaren’s recent Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned. McLaren was one of the leading voices in the emerging church movement of the late 90s/early 00’s, and now locates himself at the Center for Action and Contemplation. A prolific writer grounded in the sense that our traditions are vehicles of underlying narratives, he writes with clarity, compassion, and curiosity. This book is a question McLaren himself has asked, as have thousands others, and the answers to it will reshape much of the American spiritual landscape for years to come.
If staying or leaving the traditions we were raised with is a central question for the future, the next question is what to do with all that wild diversity in spiritual experience. And here I want to recommend Katie Hays’ We Were Spiritual Refugees: A Story to Help You Believe in Church. Katie describes herself as a “recovering fundagelical” (fundamentalist-evangelical) who then planted a church in Texas, specifically ministering to displaced and excluded LGBTQ Christians or the Christian-curious. It’s a wild, wise, and funny ride through difficult issues, bumbles and fumbles, and what a real spiritual education looks like. In the end, it’s a hope-filled, experimental wonder that offers a glimpse of “what might be.”
Finally, because of how spirituality and American identity have often been intertwined, I recommend the forthcoming Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom: The Future of Religion in American Diplomacy by Shaun Casey, who was the founding director of the US Department of State’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs. Casey, an ethicist and minister, witnessed the global scope of religion and spirituality in his work at State, and saw first-hand how spirituality can be a catalyst for peace, reconciliation, and restoration on a global scale—or the opposite. And the choice of what it will be has huge implications for all of us, wherever we live. There’s no better guide to the global ramifications of spirituality than Shaun.
In the end, of course, we will choose what to make of our spiritual lives and traditions. I hope these resources will guide you, whatever your interest, whatever your role. Please feel free to share those that have guided you in the comments.