Toward Integration of Religion and Spirituality 139
and pilgrimages in search of something not yet attained may result in a reanchoring
of religious life, even if ever so provisional. The great world religious traditions them-
selves offer rich symbolic imageries of both types. Commenting on biblical imageries,
Wuthnow observes that:
...habitation spirituality is suggested in stories of the Garden of Eden and of the
promised land; it consists of temple religion; and it occurs in the time of kings
and of priests. A spirituality of seeking is tabernacle religion, the faith of pilgrims
and sojourners; it clings to the Diaspora and to prophets and judges, rather than
to priests and kings. The one inheres in the mighty fortress, the other in desert
mystics and itinerant preachers. The one is symbolized by the secure life of the
monastery, the cloister, the shtetl; the other by peregrination as a spiritual ideal. The
difference is depicted lyrically in the story of the Shulamite woman who at first revels
in the security of her spiritual home – “our bed is green/the beams of our houses are
cedar/and the rafters of fir” – and who then wanders, seeking restlessly to find the
warmth she has lost – “I will rise now.../and go about the city/in the streets and in
the squares/I will seek the one I love.” (1998: 4)This example from the Song of Songs cautions against a simple dichotomy of the two
spiritual styles, or our overlooking that the two may actually alternate in “lived” reli-
gion. Even in a highly seeker-oriented culture as we know it in contemporary America,
religious dwelling and spiritual searching often blend in new and creative ways. As the
lyrics illustrate, an individual’s psychological frame can switch from one spiritual mode
to the other rather abruptly. Rather than thinking of “dwellers” and “seekers” as char-
acter types, the two are better viewed as modes of apprehending the spiritual, either
through existing ritual and symbolic systems or through more open-ended, exploratory
ways.
In the United States, much attention over the past several decades was given to
individual subjectivity in religion. “Religious individualism,” as described by survey
researchers, broke into the news in the late 1970s when the pollster George Gallup,
Jr., reported that eight out of ten Americans agreed with the statement that “an indi-
vidual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any churches
or synagogues” (Princeton Religion Research Center 1978). Whether such individual-
ism was all that much higher than in previous years was less the point than the fact
that Americans had become more aware of the role they themselves were playing in
shaping their religious lives. Normative definitions of religious faith and behavior had
themselves become highly recognized as subjective. Gallup, in this same news release,
found that roughly the same proportion of Americans agreed that “a person can be a
good Christian or Jew if he or she doesn’t attend church or synagogue.” The test of
faith lay not simply in keeping with what tradition taught, but in how it was viewed
and appropriated by the individual and made his or her own.
Not surprisingly, much debate ensued in the mid-to-late 1980s on “Sheilaism,” the
term that comes from Robert Bellah et al.’sHabits of the Heartdescribing a radically
individualistic religion where, as these authors say, “God is simply the self magnified”
(1985: 235). They pointed to a greater “expressive individualism,” or concern with the
cultivation of the self and its search for greater meaning and fulfillment. More than
just a topic for academic discussion, this more expansive, self-focused style of individ-
ualism was very much a topic for church and civic leaders, politicians, and cultural