Since I spend my summers near Minneapolis, I’m part of a working group at my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, called the Religion and the Public University Collaborative (RPUC). Tomorrow the group will discuss research by sociologist Nancy Ammerman that led to her important book, Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes. Although I’m often delinquent at RPUC, I am not entirely expelled. And it turns out that I reviewed Ammerman’s book when it came out, so here I am sharing the review with my compatriots via MBE . This also relates to what I wrote about “agnostics in 700 words or less” earlier on MBE.

Unfortunately this is less straightforward than it may seem, in ways that may be passably interesting to the kind of academic geek that that I am and parts of the RPUC discussion.

I wrote “first thought, best thought” version of my review, to which we will return.  But sadly this draft was much longer than my word limits—the story of my life!  An extremely compressed version of it was published as follows, for an OK place to start.

[Ammerman offers] an important critique of common wisdom about supposed polar differences between the “spiritual” and “religious,” and thus by extension about the upsurge of “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR.) The base of evidence—95 fairly representative although disproportionately suburbanite people from Atlanta and Boston—sometimes feels narrow, but is deeper than average since Templeton Foundation funded extensive interviews plus exercises like journaling and photographing meaningful places in people’s lives. Importantly, Ammerman is extending her previous research on Golden Rule Christianity.

Ammerman’s method is using vernacular narratives and descriptions of practices across various domains of life to document lived spirituality. Although the theoretical intervention sometimes gets lost in meandering and repetitive middle chapters, the conclusion pointedly rejects rational choice theories, sweeping secularization models, and the narrowness of certain Weberians. She retools Durkheim’s sacred/profane distinction, now conceived as a continuum and attuned less to consensus than to small groups in everyday life.

In line with common sense, Ammerman documents the multivocal practical meanings of “spirituality”: (1) theistic language plus associated practices like praying or participation in churches; (2) discourses about the sacred immanent in nature, the arts, families, or neopagan practice; and (3) assumptions about spirituality correlating with morality. More importantly, she emphasizes something that should become common sense: being spiritual is not an alternative to being religious—rather the two typically coincide. The few people who fit a SBNR profile are mainly pious evangelicals who use Protestant rhetoric against empty ritualism or people who in practice are neither religious nor spiritual.   

Is that suitable for a blog? Blogs prioritize concision— but in this case concision presupposes a lot.  For starters it expects readers to know Ammerman’s concept of “Golden Rule Christianity.”  That is her umbrella term for liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics, and a center-left fraction of evangelicals whom I call “stealth liberal Protestants,” although Conservative evangelicals disdain them as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deists.”Likewise it presupposes familiarity with (1) a free-market approach to religion called rational choice theory, (2) the use and misuse of sociologist Emile Durkheim in the academic study of religion, (3)  “sweeping secularization models,” and more. Perhaps that’s for a longer essay to unpack.

“Spirituality” in Action: the Case of Popular Music

Later I wrote the words which I am about to rework in this section–citing Ammerman– for my essay about religion and music (in this book.)  It will feed into a book of mine tentatively called Listening for More: Spirituality and Cultural Critique in American Popular Music.  Now, for anyone writing book on this subject, there is an enormous problem of finding a viable working definition for the “religion” we are “listening for more” of.

This problem is pervasive and acute problem because huge numbers of musicians want to be considered (the cool kind of) “spiritual” while desperately hoping not to be lumped in with “Christian rock”–even if they really are Christians who play rock. How should we approach them if they insist they are “spiritual but not religious”? Are they relevant to my book or not?

I attacked this question, first, by arguing that scholars who cannot distinguish between forms of music that are “more religious” as opposed to “less religious”—because they posit that whatever we like is “our religion” by definition—are using a definition that is too broad to be helpful.  Everything but nothing in particular becomes religion. Beyond this fatal flaw, this is also a problem because it’s disconnected from common sense vernacular understandings.

But vernacular language merely shifts our problem:

[It] gives mixed messages about spirituality. People contrast “religion”—referencing institutions and external authorities like the Roman Catholic hierarchy with its dogmas, canon lawyers, and lobbyists—with “spiritualities” that are centered on internalized values and moods (typically cultivated individually) and  treat submission to external authority as something strictly optional and likely undesirable. Such an approach can seriously distort lived experience, since real-life religion typically includes, and can even emphasize, the supposedly “merely spiritual” aspects of cultivating personal values and questioning illegitimate authority. Certainly “religion” should not refer solely to whatever is left over after spirituality (as defined above) is filtered out.

Meanwhile, importantly, our vernacular is not consistent. There is also a vernacular category for the spiritual/religious, in which these two terms blend on a shared continuum. Thus, someone whose life is entwined with Catholic institutions (religion) would naturally have values and emotions (spirituality) informed by Catholicism (as a mode of religion/spirituality.)

So we come to the problem:

Given that many musicians and their fans say they are spiritual but not religious, and given our plan to focus on religion (guided by vernacular concepts) a question arises whether to include this blurred continuum under our rubric of religion interacting with popular music.

I think the answer is clearly yes—and not solely because many self-styled spiritual people do not force a zero-sum choice.

Also relevant is that many people underestimate how things that feel to them like mere individual taste or common sense may be covertly informed by larger traditions.For example, Madonna and Oprah Winfrey are role models for spiritualities that were shaped by Italian popular Catholicism and African American Protestantism—whether or not their fans are conscious of this. More abstractly, if we overlay core distinctions from Protestant theology (external law, work-righteousness, and ritualism versus internalized grace and the priesthood of all believers) onto a religious vs. spiritual distinction, the match is too close for coincidence.

In other words, to be self-consciously anti-religious may be the same as being formed by Protestant traditions.Perhaps we could debate whether to call this a vernacular understanding, but for many Protestants it at least comes close.  In any case it suggests how spirituality and religion are entangled.If we treat the self-professed “spiritual but not religious” as religious, we do foist a label on them that they may not desire—not an ideal situation. But still it is more illuminating, for understanding more people, to use an umbrella category that conflates the spiritual and religious on the same continuum, as opposed to using spirituality as a zero-sum distinction to split off and marginalize religion.

First Thoughts/Best Thoughts? My “Unfinished Editors Cut” and the First Draft

Maybe that could be a wrap.  Yet there remain two more versions of my writing about Ammerman. One, saved on my hard drive, is a sort of imagined “editor’s cut” for the smashed down version where we started— but sadly not fleshed out before I started cutting back into the less ambitious smashed version.  It reinstates the last few dozen words I cut and broaches several ideas that I never bothered to try cramming in.  Probably this could have been the best one for MBE—if I had spent my time doubling my first draft and polishing it instead of cutting it in half.  Because I didn’t, it doesn’t exist to share.

So we come around to my first draft.  My son always told me I revise too much: “first thought, best thought.”  So here’s a test.  I have marked in brackets two stretches that made it all the way into my final review, which appears above.  and I filled out a couple of sentences that were half-complete in my early notes, which I intended to fill out later.  Otherwise this is my “first thought” version, lightly edited.

Ammerman makes an important intervention against sociological and pundit-based common wisdoms about the supposed polar differences between “spiritual” and “religious.”

[Short stretch similar to the published first part above, about the strengths and limitations of her interview data.]

Importantly Ammerman builds on a wide base of her longstanding and important work on “Golden Rule Christianity” [let’s recall, that’s her term of centrist liberal churches, especially mainline Protestants]—giving additional depth and texture to this work—and especially how the ideas of “spiritual” or the (increasingly important) category of “spiritual but not religious” function for such people.  Her end game is to capture this in narratives that accurately reflect her informants’ vernacular understandings. 

Many of her findings simply reinforce common sense.  Unsurprisingly she finds the idea of “spiritual” to be fluid and multi-voiced.   

[Here follows another stretch that made it to the final draft: her typology for how the term “spiritual” can refer to “theistic” and/or “extra-theistic” and/or “moral” approaches. Let’s belabor: that’s a full spectrum from “standard religious” through self-understood “fully secular.”]

Importantly, Ammerman underlines something that in my view should be common sense but is not:  being spiritual is not necessarily an alternative to being religious—in fact they typically coincide.  Most of the people she interviewed who use the idea of “spiritual but not religious” are either (1) pious evangelicals using a typical Protestant rhetoric against “empty ritualism” (classically Catholic, but also in Protestant variants) or (2) people for whom religion is, in fact, not salient, just as they report—but who tend not to engage with spirituality either. 

The theoretical intervention of all this is understated—especially in the book’s middle sections that are too meandering and repetitive—yet thoughtful, forceful, and highly important. Ammerman is especially disgusted with rational choice theories popularized by scholars like Rodney Stark.  She underlines how her data make Stark seem notably non-illuminating. She argues that Martin Reisebrodt’s reworking of Max Weber on religion, although a big improvement on Stark, does not fit her sample, since Reisebrodt narrows to a different subset of religion/spirituality:  ritual actions directed toward benefits from “supernatural powers.”   Meanwhile she takes for granted that strong forms of secularization theory are out of touch with the ongoing salience of spiritual/religious practices.  Thus she proposes to build on, while reworking, a Durkheimian distinction between the sacred and profane that is too often deployed in clumsy and cliched ways. For her, this should not exclude the possibility of a sacred/profane continuum nor fixate on cultural consensus.  

That’s three large steps forward, to create an argument that needs to be widely digested and discussed.   Sadly the descriptive chapters in the middle sections of the book are a step backward—far too repetitive and at times surprisingly lame and delimited. Stick with the first couple of chapters or, better yet, the article version of the book—that’s five stars.  The book’s conclusion is worth five stars for content and four for presentation.  The rest of the book is a let-down—I recommend skimming a little and letting a lot go—but, emphatically, I do not want this to deter many people from the steps forward, especially when she is flexing with her theory and showing how vernacular discussions are muddled. 

Anyone still with me? Anyone think that, even after a massive amount of time I spent revising, this “first thought/best thought” version remains the best— well, except for disrespecting my word limits, not reining in my voice as “scholarly” conventions may have preferred, and not yet being entirely polished?  Maybe that’s just me, but to me it’s interesting to think about.

Anyway, perhaps some of my RPUC compatriots will find this useful, and perhaps someone else who has come this far will, too.  Or I may tear it down after the meeting tomorrow.   

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