Toward Integration of Religion and Spirituality 141
about human depravity. Religious appearances and rhetoric notwithstanding, the enor-
mous social and cultural transformations for evangelicals have produced a moral and
religious ambiguity not unlike that many Americans face wanting, as the psychologist
Robert Jay Lifton (1993: 9) points out, to be “both fluid and grounded at the same
time, however tenuous that possibility.” Lifton’s description flies into our face, but it is
paradigmatic perhaps of life in the late modern, or postmodern world.
The actual changes in religious behavior for younger generations of Americans do
not permit easy generalizations. Surveys suggest a slight decline in attendance at reli-
gious services, but the patterns are complex. For example, among the baby boomers who
had “returned” to active participation in 1988–9 in our survey after having “dropped
out” at an earlier time in their lives, only 43 percent in 1995–6 reported they attended
religious services even as often as once a month or more. Having dropped out of a reli-
gious congregation once, if they returned to active participation they could also drop
out again, and indeed they did. Yet there was an opposite movement as well calling
into question any simple notion of secular drift. Among those who had dropped out
of religious participation at the time of the first survey, one-third in 1995–6 said they
attended religious services weekly or more, and one-half actually two or three times a
month (Roof 1999a: 117–20). When asked for their reasons for either getting involved
or dropping out, our respondents often mentioned subjective concerns such as “feeling
comfortable with the congregation,” “spiritual concerns,” and “family and/or lifestyle.”
Inner realities took precedence over external explanations.
Older sociological models for explaining religious life seem less and less appropriate
in a culture that emphasized so much personal choice and inner well-being. Moreover,
our interviews following the surveys revealed that people often made cosmic leaps, at
times affirming theistic faith, then later seriously questioning it; they switched from
one ideological extreme to the other seemingly with ease, and often altered their views
of God or the sacred, even when remaining outwardly loyal within the same faith
tradition. While such fluidity is hardly new in the American context, our findings un-
derscore just how unbounded and protean personal religion in the latter decades of the
twentieth century had become. Clearly, too, the movement back and forth between a
radically self-focused spirituality, on the one hand, and a more dweller-focused spir-
ituality involving a transcendent conception of God, on the other, was not all that
uncommon. Those who were long-time participants in church and synagogue often
dropped out to see where the freedom of their inner quests would take them while
their polar opposites – the metaphysically homeless – dropped in on congregations to
see what was happening and it might be relevant to them. Unquestionably, Robert
Bellah and his associates inHabits of the Heartwere correct when they observed fifteen
years earlier that the two – that is, an internal versus an external religious orientation –
organize much of American religious life and, more directly to the point of this discus-
sion, that “shifts from one pole to the other are not as rare as one might think” (1985:
235).
This observation of a protean religious style, consistent with what William
McKinney and I called the “new voluntarism” (Roof and McKinney 1987), stands in
stark contrast to the cultural-war model presuming rigid and strong boundaries sep-
arating liberals and conservatives. Correct in its description at the extremes, this lat-
ter model espoused in the 1980s overlooks a vast majority of Americans who are not
so ideologically consistent but are more pragmatic in their moral and religious views.