Toward Integration of Religion and Spirituality 145
to its continuing hold upon consciousness. Shared faith and community sustain
individuals.
In unsettled times, however, memory becomes more problematic (Hervieu-L ́eger
2000). Lacking a firm rooting within tradition, as with Wuthnow’s “seekers,” people
devise new strategies of action, or ways of responding to the sacred. This can involve
negotiation both with themselves and with others as to the meaning and practice of
faith in a given life-situation. Or it may be more radical as with the conscious explo-
ration of religious alternatives and recognition of the “merits of borrowing” symbols,
beliefs, and practices from many sources. Drawing from their own experiences and an
expanded menu of spiritual resources, people produce discursive strategies toward re-
ligion, as reflected in such questions asked by many today such as, “How can I find a
deeper spirituality?” “What might faith mean in my life facing the problems we face
today?” “Can religion relate to my everyday life in a more personal way than it did
when I was growing up?” It is not so much that religion itself changes, but rather the
psychological frames that people bring to it.
Alasdair MacIntyre argues that in our time “the unity of a human life is the unity of
a narrative quest” (1984: 219). His point is that the task of finding order and meaning
to life becomes more of areflexiveact in a world where tradition has less of a hold
on us. Reflexivity implies an awareness of the contingencies of life, and the necessity
for engaging and responding to those contingencies as best one can. All of which is
to say that modernity, or late modernity depending on how one defines our era, has
given rise to altered relations between the individual and tradition, and therefore to
a fundamental change in the process of self-narration itself. Increasingly, individuals
discover they must “bring” religious meaning to their lives – that is, they must search
for it. Identity becomes inescapably bound up with its narration, and especially so in
a quest culture as we know it in contemporary America. We become our stories in the
sense that storytelling yields a degree of coherence for our lives. We gain not just upon a
heightened self-consciousness but an awareness of the role we play in shaping our own
identities. As MacIntyre insists, we are led to think about life and to ask ourselves: “a
quest for what?” As I have written elsewhere about MacIntyre, “He forces the hardest
question of all, moral in its broadest sense, and having to do with some finaltelos
to which life is directed. Quest is not about itself, but about the narration of human
intentionality and purpose, ultimately about some object of value and fidelity. His isthe
question modernity forces on all individuals in a ‘post-traditional’ context where the
binding force of tradition is greatly diminished and agreed-upon, culturally embedded
answers cannot be presumed from one generation to the next, and where individual
choice in such matters becomes increasingly obligatory” (Roof 1999a: 164).
In one reading of the situation, the challenge to narrative unity is apparent in
people’s use currently of self-reported designations as “religious” or “spiritual.” While
74 percent of the people polled in one of our surveys say they are “religious” and
73 percent say they are “spiritual,” the two identities are only partially overlapping.
Seventy-nine percent of those who are religious claim to be spiritual, but 54 percent
of those who are not religious are also spiritual. This points to a healthy balance
of the internal and external forms of religion for many Americans, yet we cannot
assume that one designation necessarily implies the other. The discrepancy is great
enough that in terms of cultural identities, the “spiritual” and the “religious” take
on separate meanings. Of interest, too, is the empirical finding that the two types of