What Is Spirituality? Part I: Compared to What?
My sister-in-law is an avid forager, gardner, and artist. Her love of wild things, and what they offer us when nurtured with care, pervades her self-described spirituality. Her husband is just as passionate about hobbies of this ilk. When asked if he also derives spiritual meaning from foraging et al, he replied “well, I don’t really know what spirituality means; therefore, no.” This is not the response of an uninterested nor uninformed dude. He is, in fact, one of the most curious and thoughtful people I know. Like Humanities grad students interrogating every assumption, he’s actually so informed that he perceives the impossibility of defining spirituality, recognizes the variances of its connotations, and is humble enough not to identify with something he can’t describe.
I hold my brother-in-law in my heart as I write the following essay (in three parts) that attempts to reduce ambiguity clouding this ubiquitous term spirituality. I intend to show you how rescuing spirituality from religion has benefited my orientation to the world, how it is actually compatible with secular ideology (if that’s something that matters to you), and why I think we might need a spirituality that liberates for social-justice movements. First I compare spirituality to religion and materialism, arguing that what the concepts connote matters more than what they may denote. In part 2, I offer a working definition of spirituality, but I hasten to add that definitions hardly concretize nor complete our understanding. Good definitions open us up to more pondering yet provide clarity that mobilizes not calcifies. Ultimately, I wonder if some might find shelter in spirituality that religion no longer assembles.
CHURCH WOUNDS
Coincidentally, my muse probably won’t benefit from me telling him that the intentionality and curiosity he brings to his work, parenting, and art read spiritual to this observer. Finding himself within my understanding of spirituality likely won’t comfort him. All the same, he stands among many of my friends who were raised conservative/charismatic/fundamentalist/evangelical Christian in the South like me. Some more than others, but every “ex-vangelical” has been traumatized by the Christian Right’s oppressive ideologies, myself included. As much as my mom would want me to specify its benefits, which exist, Christianity damaged me. This, in part, because it is is one head of the hydra whose fellow craniums include structural racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, classism, and capitalism - I think this is what bell hooks was getting at when describing “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” I’ve had much to unlearn from this insidious beast of human domination, and with a heart full of love and grief, it is primarily to my fellow un-learners I write.
Few who now avoid the term Christian left their curiosity behind with their Jesus-fish bumper sticker and WWJD bracelet. Many of us trace a church-shaped cavity in our bodies. Some miss the routine, trans-generational connections, and the liturgy. Others crave the sense of certainty that Christianity claimed to offer us - it is great comfort to know the answers to the biggest questions. Most miss the sense of connection to the source of being itself even if we no longer call that by any particular name. We are still curious about what is. For many of us, then, an exploration of spirituality emerges as we lick the wounds of our religious trauma and still hold a complex fondness for the accoutrement of the institutions that harmed us.
CONNOTATION > DENOTATION
When it’s your turn in the board game Hues and Cues, you secretly pick a color from a deck of cards that corresponds with one on a spectrum like the wall of swatches at the paint store. Via one word, you describe the secret color to the other players with hopes they select it; you both get points the closer they position their figurine. If I think lavender is more like purple, but you mean it to describe something closer to blue, then you are not telling me what color it is even if you’re right; we both lose. Your correctness did nothing in service of our communication.
The inverse sentiment is also true: if you use the term “in lieu of,” for example, but I understand from context that you mean “in light of,” then you have communicated successfully even if the dictionary says you’re wrong - no harm done. This is an example of how connotation supersedes denotation: what matters more than what a term means, or even how the speaker intends it, is what the hearer interprets. So, what spirituality means in popular usage matters.
VERSUS RELIGION
Spirituality describes practices and perspectives often associated with religious concepts but that don’t fit into a specific institution. Religion connotes organizational structures like the Methodist church or a Buddhist meditation center, most of which are IRS-designated nonprofits. Spirituality, in comparison, connotes one’s direct access to whatever it is that religion purports to broker. The emphasis of spirituality is on one’s personal practice and meaning-making of the world, rather than doctrines ascribed to institutions. If you don’t feel it for yourself, so to speak, it may not be spirituality.
Spirituality also includes semi-institutionalized groups and creeds that exist on the fringe of religious bodies, such as astrology or voodoo, many of which have been persecuted by the dominant faith institutions. Look no further than how Indigenous traditions worldwide were violently suppressed and usurped by Christian imperialism. In a sense, only size and power differentiate these traditions from so-called world religions. If astrology had the finances, hierarchy, and reach of Anglicans, we’d call it a religion. So, when people tell you they’re spiritual but not religious, they signal disaffiliation from institutions that have inflicted so much harm.
In addition to disassociating from major religions, people who identify as spiritual are also telling you something personal. In a sense, religion conveys an outward affiliation. A topic that may merit its own essay, but I argue that religion and culture are not two different things. You cannot show me a definition of religion that doesn’t rely on the customs, context, values, and history of the people who conceived of its examples. Religion’s principle function is about orientation to a group identity. Spirituality, on the other hand, signals an inward orientation. Those who claim spirituality are telling you something about their inner world, their beliefs, and often a nonlinguistic knowingness and connection to something like divinity. Spirituality is the inside, religion is the outside, so to speak.
Paradoxically, as Brian McLaren (an author whose earliest books showed me a way out of imperialist Christianity) points out in Naked Spirituality, religion’s etymology has to do with reconnection: think “lig” like ligament, “re” meaning again. Religion is supposed to be about connecting us to one another and the world. How tragic that religion now conveys the opposite: disconnection, shame, and violence. In the here and now, religion’s connotation wins: it is an empire with all the same markers as governments, corporations, and cartels. It is more important what religion means to those who are oppressed by it than what it means for those who defend it.
VERSUS MATERIALISM
But religion is not the only concept against which spirituality contrasts. Spirituality is wary of some genres of scientific materialism, too. We are all familiar with the atheist who worships empiricism with the same rigor and dogmatism as any fundamentalist Christian. “An old man in the sky made Adam and Eve, who made everyone else? You’re stupid.” Sure. That imagery of god is archaic and lazy, but our friend here fails to acknowledge the value of metaphor and mythology, and worse, deploys the same dichotomous thinking he accuses of the religious. His analysis - and it really seems to be a “he” most of the time - disregards the valid and universal questions that led to these myths in the first place.
For good reason, then, many an exvangelical uses “spiritual” to signal distinction from both forms of fundamentalism. But just as religion’s core values generate connectivity and love apart from its institutionalization, I argue, so too does the scientific method. The core question of both science and religion is “what is this?” As my brilliant and explicitly non-Christian environmental science professor told us, moreover, science hardly proves anything but simply reduces uncertainty. In this sense, the bane of spirituality is neither science nor religion but dogmatism. Still, as I acknowledged in regard to religion, we should admit that science means something more than its dictionary entry, and in this association, spirituality feels unsafe. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
I dislike the cut of Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson’s jib because it presents smug and narcissistic. But his analysis compels. Dr. Tyson is an atheist; he playfully belittles Stephen Colbert when appearing on the Late Show for the host’s Catholicism. An astrophysicist (partially responsible for demoting Pluto), Tyson explains complex science to a lay audience with the intent of cultivating a cosmic perspective, which “embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.” Here, as may be clearer at the conclusion of this series, this materialist has composed a tome as spiritual as anything Brian McLaren ever penned.
In Part 1, I have described what inspired my writing, that we need to focus on what words convey more than how they’re defined, and that spirituality points to an identity apart from dogmatic religions and materialism. Part 2 will explore a “humanist” understanding of spirituality, one that both Tyson and Colbert might embody.
