Toward Integration of Religion and Spirituality 147
but not spiritual in this sense are perhaps more common than we presume, encouraged
in part by the popular cultural meanings that have come to be attached to these identi-
fying labels. To invoke a “religious” identity as distinct from being “spiritual” emerges
as a marker distinguishing conservative fundamentalists from more moderate-minded
evangelicals, charismatics, and Pentecostals. Fifteen percent of our respondents fit into
this more narrow classification, people we call Dogmatists.
And, of course, there is the opposite combination – the spiritual seekers who re-
port being “spiritual but not religious.” This configuration of responses has taken on
a particular cultural meaning with the wordspiritualserving as a unifying label of
positive self-identity, and the wordreligiousused as a counteridentity, describing who
they are not. Here strategies of action are much less established, and often are little
more than exploratory attempts at belief and practice that promise to lead to spiritual
growth and personal well-being. Because spiritual seeking is largely a private matter
involving loosely based social networks, this is more a striving for meaning than for
belonging, but the distinction often evaporates in the lived-religious context. Spiri-
tual quests are not necessarily antitraditional; indeed, “old” pasts are often reclaimed
as in the case of Wicca, and “new” fabricated pasts get created as with ecospirituality
currently. Hervieu-Leger (1994) observes that tradition, or at least a selective reappro- ́
priation of it, is so important that people not well-grounded within it are likely to create
“imaginary geneologies.” In so doing, they lay claim to spiritual lineage and legitimate
themselves as yet another constituency in the spiritual marketplace. At the hands of
spiritual entrepreneurs who rationalize choices and devise technologies, meaning sys-
tems proliferate in an expanding world of metaphysical possibilities. Fourteen percent
of those we surveyed fall into this category, described simply as Metaphysical Believers
and Spiritual Seekers.
Research shows, as well, that there are people who do not identify as either reli-
gious or spiritual. Neither the language of religious heritage nor the inner language of
a spiritual self carry much meaning. They may have “flow” experiences of the sort the
psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi (1990) describes, or moments of intense excite-
ment, energy, and creativity, but in describing them they do not turn to the shared
language of faith or even to a deeply spiritual-type vocabulary. When asked about in-
fluences shaping their lives, they are likely to point to the characteristics they were
born with, or their own mastery of destiny. They do not necessarily reject God-talk,
but when they engage in such talk God or the sacred is imaged typically in a gener-
alized, and highly individualized way. In many respects they are the polar opposites
of the Dogmatists. Often they have explored religious possibilities but over time have
worked themselves out of a religious frame of mind; rather than reifying tradition and
becoming rigid and exclusivistic, they have moved toward open-mindedness to the
point of being inarticulate about what they really believe. Strategies of action are em-
bryonic, if at all evident. One would suspect there is a thin boundary separating those
who make use of the word “spiritual” in defining themselves and those unable to make
use of the word. Twelve percent of the people we interviewed belong to this category,
labeled simply as Secularists.
As pointed out, this typology is at most a heuristic device sensitizing researchers
to some crucial dimensions in the analysis of contemporary American religion. It is
but a start toward gaining greater clarity and analytic control over James’s “firsthand”