SBNR - The Spiritual But Not Religious have their own Acronym!

It's about time, since they make up "7 percent of all Americans, a bigger group than atheists, and way bigger than Jews, Muslims or Episcopalians" according to an article in the New York Times, which chronicles the interaction of four different people with SBNRs. That's a technical term Nate Silver and Ben Bernanke like to use -- "way bigger".

Rev. Lillan Daniel gained notoriety with a funny rant in the Huffington Post where she "voiced her exasperation with the predictability that she found in spiritual but not religious people." So she thinks they ought to join a church where they all read from the same book, profess their belief in the same conception of the divine, repeat the same rituals they've been doing for a thousand years. That would cure that predictability problem.

When I left the Congregational church where I'd been an active member for a decade, I told the ministers and deacons who questioned me the following:

• I don't think everything we need to know about the Divine and our relationship to it was given to us in one book or set of books from one teacher or one culture
• I think religions are actually inhibiting the spiritual growth of their members by limiting their experience and understanding to a single tradition. 
• We only truly connect to God right here and right now, not via a person or prophet or event from the past

Their responses shocked me at the time, because they were all similar to Rev. Daniels'. They expressed no concern about my spiritual health or relationship to the the Divine. They talked about how nice it is to worship in a group, do good things in the neighborhood, how good it made them feel to conduct rituals and sing songs.

"Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community?" the Rev. Daniel asks. Yes, it was hard for me to give up those days of not even thinking about the Divine and go back to church. But after 10 years of church-going, it was much, much harder to give up that community, to insult or disappoint the friends I'd made there, and frighten my family, to search for the truth all alone. But I can assure you of this: my relationship to God is much, much better now after having learned so many things that the Church refused or declined to teach me. I miss the community, but I now feel the presence of the Divine everywhere, not just in a church.

In her background article in the Christian Century (which was, like, the 1300s right?) Rev. Daniels suggests that the real problem most SBNRs have with the church is that they don't like the mass of humanity in it; she specifically mentions people singing out of tune, people who haven't showered, screaming babies. I get the impression the Rev has not been to the Electric Daisy Carnival, where 300,000 young people (the generation which is abandoning the faiths of their parents in droves) get together every year to enjoy just such togetherness (pls substitute "babes" for "babies"). 

No, the problem with the church is not the people in it; it is the fact that the church (and I mean every church in every religion that I know about) is not providing the spiritual guidance we need. "Thousands of years later, we're still trying to be the body of Christ, and we are human and realistic enough to know we need a savior who is divine." Well, maybe if you stop indoctrinating us with myths and legends, start teaching us the truth about Jesus and Buddha and Lao-Tzu and Mohammed as human beings, explain what they were all trying to teach us, stop trying to make us the body of Christ (is that yucky or what?) and stop trying to tell us we need something besides a close, strong, healthy --- and yes, because we are each unique -- personal  relationship to the Divine, then maybe there will be a smaller canyon between what is spiritual and what is religious.

OTOH --- stay tuned for part 2 ...