TruthBook Religious News Blog

Move over, politics. Americans are looking for personal, ecstatic experiences of God, and, according to our poll, they don't much care what the neighbors are doing.

By Jerry Adler
Newsweek
Aug. 29 - Sept. 5, 2005 issue -

In sepulchral black and red, the cover of Time magazine dated April 8, 1966—Good Friday—introduced millions of readers to existential anguish with the question Is God Dead? If he was, the likely culprit was science, whose triumph was deemed so complete that "what cannot be known [by scientific methods] seems uninteresting, unreal."

History records that the vanguard of angst-ridden intellectuals in Time, struggling to imagine God as a cloud of gas in the far reaches of the galaxy, never did sweep the nation. What was dying in 1966 was a well-meaning but arid theology born of rationalism: a wavering trumpet call for ethical behavior, a search for meaning in a letter to the editor in favor of civil rights. What would be born in its stead, in a cycle of renewal that has played itself out many times since the Temple of Solomon, was a passion for an immediate, transcendent experience of God. And a uniquely American acceptance of the amazingly diverse paths people have taken to find it.

A major poll, commissioned jointly with Beliefnet.com, reveals a breadth of tolerance and curiosity virtually across the religious spectrum. And everywhere we looked, a flowering of spirituality: in the hollering, swooning, foot-stomping services of the new wave of Pentecostals; in Catholic churches where worshipers pass the small hours of the night alone contemplating the eucharist, and among Jews who are seeking God in the mystical thickets of Kabbalah. Also, in the rebirth of Pagan religions that look for God in the wonders of the natural world; in Zen and innumerable other threads of Buddhism, whose followers seek enlightenment through meditation and prayer, and in the efforts of American Muslims to achieve a more God-centered Islam.

Whatever is going on here, it's not an explosion of people going to church.

Of 1,004 respondents to the NEWSWEEK/Beliefnet Poll, 45 percent said they attend worship services weekly, virtually identical to the figure (44 percent) in a Gallup poll cited by Time in 1966. Then as now, however, there is probably a fair amount of wishful thinking in those figures; researchers who have done actual head counts in churches think the figure is probably more like 20 percent. There has been a particular falloff in attendance by African-Americans, for whom the church is no longer the only respectable avenue of social advancement, according to Darren Sherkat, a sociologist at Southern Illinois University. The fastest-growing category on surveys that ask people to give their religious affiliation, says Patricia O'Connell Killen of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., is "none."

But "spirituality," the impulse to seek communion with the Divine, is thriving. The NEWSWEEK/Beliefnet Poll found that more Americans, especially those younger than 60, described themselves as "spiritual" (79 percent) than "religious" (64 percent). Almost two thirds of Americans say they pray every day, and nearly a third meditate.

These figures tell you more about what Americans care about than a 10,000-foot-high monument to the Ten Commandments. Seventy-five percent say that a "very important" reason for their faith is to "forge a personal relationship with God"—not fighting political battles.

Today, then, the real spiritual quest is not to put another conservative on the Supreme Court, or to get creation science into the schools. If you experience God directly, your faith is not going to hinge on whether natural selection could have produced the flagellum of a bacterium. If you feel God within you, then the important question is settled; the rest is details.

As diverse as America itself are the ways in which Americans seek spiritual enlightenment.

Beliefnet, the religious Web site, sends out more than 8 million daily e-mails of spiritual wisdom in various flavors to more than 5 million subscribers. Generic "inspiration" is most popular (2.4 million), followed by the Bible (1.6 million), but there are 460,000 subscribers to the Buddhist thought of the day, 313,000 Torah devotees, 268,000 subscribers to Daily Muslim Wisdom (and 236,000 who get the Spiritual Weight Loss message).

Even nature-worshiping Pagans are divided into a mind-boggling panoply of sects, including Wicca, Druidism, Pantheism, Animism, Teutonic Paganism, the God of Spirituality Folk and, in case you can't find one to suit you on that list, Eclectic Paganism.

Along with diversity has come a degree of inclusiveness that would have scandalized an earlier generation. According to the NEWSWEEK/Beliefnet Poll, eight in 10 Americans—including 68 percent of evangelicals—believe that more than one faith can be a path to salvation, which is most likely not what they were taught in Sunday school. One out of five respondents said he had switched religions as an adult.

This is not surprising in the United States, which for much of its history was a spiritual hothouse in which Methodism, Mormonism, Adventism, Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Nation of Islam all took root and flourished. In America even atheists are spiritualists, searching for meaning in parapsychology and near-death experiences.

Empowerment is at the heart of Pentecostalism, which has burgeoned from a single Spirit-touched believer at a Kansas Bible school at the turn of the last century to 30 million adherents in America and more than half a billion worldwide. Marching under the Pentecostal banner is a host of denominations whose names roll off the tongue like a voice from heaven: Church of God, International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, International Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Assemblies of God.

Empowerment requires intensity of effort; Americans like the idea of taking responsibility for their own souls. This may be why Buddhism—a religion without a personal god and only a few broad ethical precepts—has made such inroads in the American imagination.

People like that could become panentheists, too—a new term for people who believe in the divinity of the natural universe (like the better-known Pantheists), but also postulate an intelligent being or force behind it.

Those seeking a more structured nature-based religion have many choices, including several branches of Druidism. "I talk to my ancestors, the spirits of nature and other deities on a regular basis," says Isaac Bonewits, a 55-year-old New Yorker who founded one of the best-known Druid orders. Wicca, the largest Pagan sect, with an elaborate calendar of seasonal holidays and rituals, is popular enough to demand its own military chaplains.

Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which got its start in 1967 when a Duquesne University group on a weekend retreat felt a visitation by the Holy Spirit, now runs thousands of prayer groups in the United States, where worshipers may speak in tongues or collapse in laughter or tears.

The quest for spiritual union with God is as old as mankind itself, uniting the ancient desert tribes of Mesopotamia with the Christian hermits on their mountaintops with American pop singers at the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles, poring over the esoteric wisdom encoded in early Jewish texts. And who can begrudge it to them?

The Hasidim pray ecstatically; they dance with the Torah; they fast to achieve a higher spiritual state, and they drink wine for the same reason. With their distinctive black frock coats and curly sideburns, they are a visible and growing presence in New York and some other cities. Orthodox Judaism, of which they are a branch, is on the rise among young Jews who trade Friday-night dances and shrimp egg foo yung for a more intense religious experience. Orthodox Rabbi Irving Greenberg calls the phenomenon "Jews by choice," reflecting the reality that Jewish practice is no longer a tribal imperative. In a world in which practically every religion has its own cable-TV channel, to step inside a synagogue becomes an existential choice.

...the same issue is very much on the minds of America's Muslims. Forced to define themselves in the face of an alien—and, in recent years, sometimes hostile—majority, the second generation especially has turned increasingly observant. Unlike their parents, they may attend mosque several times a week and pray five times a day, anywhere they can unroll a prayer mat. It has not been lost on them that the way to fit in in present-day America is to be religious.

Islam emphasizes the unity of all believers, so American-born Muslims are shedding the cultural accouterments of the many countries from which their parents came, or the political freight of African-American converts. They are intent on forging a purer and more spiritual religion.

So, a generation after the question was posed, we can certainly answer that God seems very much alive in the hearts of those who seek him. We have come a long way, it would appear, from that dark year when the young Catholic philosopher Michael Novak was quoted in Time, saying, "If, occasionally, I raise my heart in prayer, it is to no God I can see, or hear, or feel." To make the point, we gave Novak, who is now 72 and among the most distinguished theologians in America, the chance to correct the record on his youthful despair. And he replied that God is as far away as he's ever been. Religious revivals are always exuberant and filled with spirit, he says, but the true measure of faith is in adversity and despair, when God doesn't show up in every blade of grass or storefront church.

So let us say together: Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! Sh'ma Yisrael. Allahu Akbar. Om. And store up the light against the darkness.