Tag Archives: Survey

American Judaism

Jonathan Morgan

LA TORAHEarlier this week, the Pew Research Forum on Religion and Public Life came out with a new portrait of Judaism in America.  The New York Times wrote up a quick summary  about how more and more American Jews are identifying as non-religious.  At first glance that’s not too unsurprising- you can see that increase as part of the rising number of Nones in America.  While the trend itself isn’t too shocking, it highlights an interesting question- what does it mean to be a non-religious Jew?  We’re so used to talking about ethnic Judaism, that we don’t stop to think about what the name reveals.  Is it possible to be a non-religious Christian or Muslim?

I’m not trying to be ridiculous- I’m trying to draw our attention to what we mean when we say non-religious.  Why does “non-religious Christian” sound wrong?  I think it’s because we have an implicit assumption that being Christian means believing certain things and that being non-religious means rejecting those beliefs.  Put the two together and you sound as ridiculous as talking about a non-fruit-fruit (a tomato perhaps?).  The reason it doesn’t sound meaningless when we say “non-religious Jew” is that we have the ethnic or cultural category for Judaism as well.

But perhaps that cultural category reveals part of the ambiguity in the definition of religion.  Many religious scholars – Wilfred Cantwell-Smith, Mary Douglas, and Nancy Ammerman, to name a few – argue that religion is way more about what people do than what they believe.  Wilfred Cantwell-Smith, a total boss in the study of comparative religion of the 20th century, even went so far as to argue that talking about religion as if it were a thing is a bit silly.  He, of course, said it more eloquently and professionally than that, but the point is that religion is largely a way of life that is integrated into actions and thoughts.  It only becomes a system of beliefs when we call it religion and begin to analyze it as such.

When we say non-religious Jew, we are straddling two different categories of religion.  There’s the sense that religion is a cultural way of life that’s fundamental to one’s identity.  And there’s the sense that religion is a set of ideas and beliefs that we might change around like furniture.  I think most people exist somewhere between these two extremes, because religion is both.  But the dominant assumption in America, and most of Europe, is that religion is about belief – which is why non-religious Christian sounds silly but non-religious Jew, or non-religious Hindu, for that matter, doesn’t.

If we’re surveying and studying religion, then we have to be aware of these different categories and deliberate about which we are using.  Professed beliefs are a bit easier to study, but as this most recent poll by Pew revealed, they’re not always the most fitting for how people think about themselves.  Given all these difficulties, it’s important to let people define themselves – kudos to the Pew forum for doing just that.  Following their lead, I’ll shelf the category non-religious Christian, at least for now because, when it comes down to it, people don’t actually describe themselves that way.

The Frequencies Project

Jonathan Morgan

monitoring wavesLast week I wrote about the challenges of categorizing spirituality or religiosity. Part of the difficulty lies in the porous nature of the two concepts; each seeps into and encroaches on the other. But another difficulty, one I didn’t touch on last week, is that both concepts are alive – metaphorically of course. They’re dynamic; the ways people and communities use the terms is constantly changing. They aren’t scientific categories, like mammal or friction, with precise definitions. Instead, they’re fluid. This makes the task of studying spirituality or religion challenging and exciting.

A prime example of the nebulous nature of spirituality is the Frequencies Project. This experiment, produced by the people at The Immanent Frame and Killing the Buddha (both worth checking out), aims to be a “collaborative genealogy of spirituality.” They collected reflections from scholars, writers, and artists on what they think of when they think about spirituality. Where a social scientist attempts to be precise and hone in on the concept, this experiment blows open the category and accepts the dynamic and fluid nature of people’s lived spirituality. And the result is fascinating.

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Is spirituality distinct from religion?

Jonathan Morgan

Young pretty caucasian girl praying

How do we categorize someone’s religiosity?  It seems easy enough when people choose their affiliation, but even that category can contain many different types of spirituality: not all Methodists are the same.  This complexity gets even trickier when it comes to categorizing the large group of people who are not affiliated.  The “nones” (a moniker for those who answer “unaffiliated” on survey questions about their religion) encompass everyone from atheists to agnostics to the simply uninterested.  And of course, each of these groups contains an even wider array of personalities.  The complexity is staggering and poses a difficult challenge to anyone studying religion.

On a more basic level, it’s quite difficult to even distinguish between spirituality and religiosity.  In everyday conversation, people readily make this distinction by identifying as “spiritual but not religious,” but new research by Boston University sociologist Nancy Ammerman shows just how blurry the distinction actually is.

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Religion and Morality

classic columns blueprint sketch, vectorHow does our morality affect our religious beliefs?  Perhaps more appropriately: how do our religious beliefs affect our morality? Or do both emerge from something else, like personality? The boundaries and relationships between these different aspects of who we are are very fuzzy. We can’t just point to some behavior and call it exclusively moral, or religious, or just their personality. But while the problem is deeply complex, an abundance of data (some of it collected here) is bringing certain trends into the foreground.

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