Liberal Church Historian Hopes for a “Spiritual Awakening”


“We’re living in a time of spiritual climate change,” Diana Butler Bass told attendees of a recent United Methodist Association of Communicators conference in Arlington, VA. Bass, an Episcopalian, church historian, and author of the book, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening has “bright optimism” for the future of American Christianity despite the precipitous decline of mainline denominations over the past several decades.



Discussing the growth of “spirituality,” Bass reviewed statistics on the “rise of the nones” reported by the Pew Forum showing the “significant decline in the number who describe themselves as ‘Protestant.’” The “nones” do not identify with any particular religious group and also do not describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. Generally they prefer “spirituality” to “religion.” In just six years, the number of self-described Protestants has decreased by five percent, and for the first time since religious polling began in America, less than half of the population describe themselves as “Protestant.” 



“Some time in the last 12 months, history changed,” Bass stated. She explained: “We went from being a majority Protestant country … to a pluralistic country … We’ve been blabbing about pluralism for a long time, but we’ve never really had it until now.” According to the author, this dramatic change requires a shift in “the entire ethos of the way we talk about American religion.” 
Contributing to the growth of “spirituality” are “young adults, [who] don’t like to lead with labels, which they feel are external sorts of creations. Instead they like to build out of their community of friends and how they’re in relationship with people what they understand themselves to be.” Though denominational affiliation is shrinking, that does not mean people want to “run off and sit on a hill all by themselves, Bass said. “Half of the American population is looking for a way to put these pieces together again” and figure out “what would it look like for us to be spiritual and religious,” she explained.



The “vast majority of Americans” define religion as “an institution that has organized matters pertaining to belief and derives its authority from external sources,” Bass explained. “People are not happy with religious institutions,” and because of the negative associations many people have with institutions in general, Christianity must be understood in a new context to survive, she said. Bass offered “spirituality” as a better term. Although the word “almost always used to mean alternative religion, it always meant new age, non-institutional, Eastern religion, it was a catch-all phrase for everything that wasn’t church, now it actually means something a little more specific than that,” Bass said.

The future of Christianity, Bass asserted, is in “the shift away from identity as being ascribed by a label, toward identity being found among a community.” She defined spirituality as “an experience that connects one with a deeper sense of the self and the divine, wherein authority is validated through internal sources.” Bass emphasized that spirituality is “non-hierarchical” and “very experiential.” Further, it is a “move toward the connection of our own selves … with God or the divine,” she said. 

“I actually think that this is an awakening,” Bass said. She continued: “I think this is a spiritual awakening in the same vein as the first Great Awakening in the 1740s and the second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, [and] the third Great Awakening at the beginning of the 20th century.” Bass claimed: “People get anxious about just being religious, and it’s at that moment that spiritual movements arise, usually from the fringes, to call institutions back to a deeper kind of soulfulness and a deeper kind of experience and new understanding of what their teachings and practices are.”

The shift from “religious” to “spiritual” constitutes a dramatic change in the “climate of faith,” Bass claimed. She elaborated: “What is happening in churches is often like reporting weather,” because just as “what is happening outside your window is not the climate,” neither is what happens within your local church reflective of Christianity throughout the country. Still, Bass said too often “people look at what is going on in their community and apply it to the whole country.”

 

Referencing those who believe Christianity must remain rooted in a traditional context, Bass said, “There’s always controversy at these moments” of change. She insisted the way forward requires “[putting] together that which we have inherited and that which we experience in a way that’s meaningful for 21st century people.”