Religion: The do-it-yourself approach

Raised a Baptist, 27-year-old Count Chandler Pierce of Duncansville, Pa., briefly studied Mormonism before taking up Buddhism. He believes in astrology and the supernatural, yet insists he still derives meaning from “the whole Christianity thing.” As he explains, “My religion now ... it’s complicated.” In that complexity, said Eric Gorski in the Associated Press, Pierce typifies tens of millions of Americans. A new Pew Forum survey has found many of us prefer the “build-your-own approach” to religion, cobbling together disparate, even contradictory, elements of different faiths. Twenty-two percent of Christians, for example, believe in reincarnation, “which is part of Buddhism and Hinduism.” One in four Americans sometimes attend services of a faith other than their own, and the same percentage have adopted Eastern or New Age ideas. That catalogue includes “yoga as a spiritual practice” and “spiritual energy in things like mountains, trees, and crystals.”

As a religion professor, I find this “religious promiscuity” worrisome, said Stephen Prothero in The Wall Street Journal. There’s no harm in studying other faiths, but approaching religion as a “divine deli,” where you can mix and match from everything on the menu, is something else entirely. Most Americans “know almost nothing about their own religious traditions”; how can they possibly appreciate the riches of others? Pursuing a spiritual path requires work and single-minded dedication, and wandering all over the place gets you nowhere. Yet many Americans now do exactly that, searching for “the next new thing,” seduced by “store managers in our spiritual marketplace” who sell us “whatever they imagine we want,” whether it’s inner peace, the promise of heaven, or a yoga-toned butt. “Something precious is being lost here.”

But perhaps something precious is being gained, said Charles Blow in The New York Times. By “bending dogmas to suit them instead of bending themselves to fit a dogma,” Americans are very characteristically exercising the right of individual choice. What the seekers are after, it seems, is a more direct experience of God, not mediated by self-appointed guardians of rigid truths. And all the evidence suggests that this unconventional approach to religious belief is “leading to more spirituality, not less.” Nearly half of those surveyed, Pew found, have had a religious or mystical experience—twice as many who said so in 1962. So “cue the harps, and the sitars, and the tablas, and the whale music.” It’s time to feel at one with the Universe.

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