Toward Integration of Religion and Spirituality 143
spiritual seeking? The need for new perspective arises in part because in an age of highly
privatized religion and attention to the instrumental functions of faith, “spirituality”
becomes distinguished from “religion” in popular thinking, but also, and more seri-
ously, as sociologists of religion we do not have a well-developed interpretive paradigm
for a proper analysis. Given the evolution of our discipline, the sociological study of
religion concerns itself largely with congregations, social institutions, and religious
movements, and generally proceeds with assumptions about individuals as religious
actors with “demand” needs, that is, for meaning and belonging. Typically, it is pre-
sumed that people are socialized into a particular faith through their upbringing, or
that individuals later on make rational choices as adults about the congregations they
join – but in neither instance is religion itself as a category problematized. If the def-
inition of religion is addressed at all, usually it has to do with the relative merits of
substantive versus functional approaches. Little attention is given to the psychological
frames people bring to historic beliefs and practices. What do people have in mind
when they say they are religious? What do they mean when they use a word like spiri-
tual? Or, to sharpen the problem further, what is meant when as some people now say
“I’m spiritual but not religious,” or that their spirituality is growing in importance but
the impact of religion on their lives has declined? Only recently have such questions
come to be dealt with in a more serious manner as scholars begin to recognize that
“lived religion,” as opposed to religion as an abstraction about normative belief or an
institution, is extraordinarily complex and subtle, and even more so in the American
setting in which religion is regarded as highly voluntary in character.
To begin with, we should note that such questions arise during a time of consider-
able personal autonomy for Americans generally. Over the past half-century, there has
been, in Phillip E. Hammond’s words, “both an enlarged arena of voluntary choice and
an enhanced freedom from structural constraint” (1998: 11). As options in matters of
lifestyle, sexuality, and the family sphere have increased, so likewise within the reli-
gious sphere. The prevailing culture of choice erodes the binding quality of religious
reality and transforms it as an institutional presence in society into a more individu-
ally centered, subjective reality. With greater choice comes a fundamental shift in how
the church and other religious bodies function within the larger society – away from
collective-expressive functions to more individual-expressive ones, as Hammond puts
it. In effect, churchgoing becomes less a “habit” or “custom” and more a personal “pref-
erence” related largely to one’s tastes, recognized needs, and states of mind. Religion
thus loses its traditional Durkheimian role of expressing collective unity in ceremony,
symbol, and ritual. Not that religion loses all its public force within society, but to
the extent it exerts influence it is mainly within the individual life-sphere. In keeping
with Peter Berger’s (1967) widely accepted argument about privatization in the modern
context, the religious world shrinks becoming less and less an overarching canopy of
meaning for the society as a whole and is reduced to smaller realms, namely personal
and family life. Counter trends toward deprivatization are identifiable currently, but
the dominant thrust is still in the opposite direction at present.
Even within the family sphere, this privatizing trend is apparent. Greater attention
to personal life comes at a time when shared religious unity has become problematic
for many American families. Not just family disruption but spiraling rates of interfaith
marriages and new types of family units undermine the traditional role of families in
sustaining religious life. Moreover, the normative religious expectations of family life
have faded despite the rhetoric about a return to “family values” voiced a decade ago. A