Journalists have largely missed or misreported the story of America’s turn in recent decades toward a deeply felt, personal spirituality that is pursued independently of religious customs and institutions. One of the earliest significant markers of this trend appeared in the January 1988 issue of Better Homes and Gardens, when the magazine published a report on “Religion, Spirituality, and American Families,” based on a survey it had conducted among its eight million readers a few months before. The survey was returned by 80,000 people—more than two and a half times the response expected by the editors, and far more people than are usually sampled in public opinion polls—and provided the following information:

Some results suggest that respondents’ spirituality is strongest on a personal level. The largest group (62%) say that in recent years they have begun or intensified personal spiritual study and activities (compared to 23% who say they have become closer to a religious organization). 68% say that when faced with a spiritual dilemma, prayer/meditation guides them most (compared to 14% who say the clergy guides them most during such times) . . . .

While such results were revealing in themselves, it’s also worth noting that the title of this mainstream survey of the late 1980s already drew a distinction between religion and spirituality. The difference would probably have been lost on anyone but theologians just a few decades earlier. A noticeable divergence between the social conventions of religion and the individual pursuit of spirituality most likely took root in the 1960s and has only widened since the late 80s, as evidenced by more recent data from a variety of sources:

•In January 2002, a USA Today/Gallup poll showed that almost half of American adults do not consider themselves religious in the usual sense. In 1999, 54% said they considered themselves religious; that number had shrunk to 50% in 2002. A full third (33%) described themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” an increase of 3% over three years. Ten percent said they regarded themselves as neither spiritual nor religious.

• According to an “American Religious Identification Survey” released in 2001 by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the most dramatic demographic shift in religious identification is the number of Americans saying they do not follow any organized religion, increasing from 8% (about 14.3 million people) in 1990 to 14.1% (29.4 million) in 2001. During the same period, the number of Americans identifying themselves as Christians shrank from 86.2% to 76.5%, a reduction of nearly 10 percent. If the trend holds, Christians will be outnumbered by non-Christians in America by 2042.

• The Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling and research organization, noted in a March 2007 report that “one out of every three adults (33%) is classified as unchurched—meaning they have not attended a religious service of any type during the past six months. While that figure is considerably higher than the one out of five who qualified as unchurched in the early Nineties, it is statistically unchanged since 36% were recorded as having avoided religious services in the company’s 1994 study.” The Barna Group also notes that while 38% of the American population (84 million people in 2006) identified themselves as “evangelicals,” only 8% (18 million) met the Barna Group’s nine-point “evangelical filter,” an increase of just 1% over the previous decade.

The fact that evangelical Christians (by any count) are significantly outnumbered by Americans who do not consider themselves religious may be surprising to many, considering the prominence of evangelical activists in the press and their recent influence on society. For instance, after the national election of 2004, some analysts attributed the winning edge of President Bush’s victory to the mobilization of evangelical voters in the so-called “red states.” (Bush’s final popular vote margin over John Kerry was 2.5%.)

The evangelicals’ social perspectives and political agenda also get substantial and continuing coverage in the media, particularly in regard to such hot-button issues as abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, and the teaching of creationism vs. evolution in the public schools. Yet as the data above suggest, the overall number of Christians is steadily declining and a substantial and growing proportion of the population prefers to be identified as “spiritual but not religious.”

There are at least three major factors contributing to this dramatic disparity between popular perceptions of America’s spiritual evolution and what is really going on. First is the media’s failure to pay attention to the actual shifts of belief that are occurring quietly behind the more easily reported controversies that involve religion. The second factor is simply that evangelicals have a mission to spread their creed. Over the last two decades they have done an increasingly effective job of enhancing their media profile and their political clout, even if the effect on the number of people espousing their cause is negligible.

Third, the “mission” of people who are turning away from organized religion toward a more individual style of spiritual practice could well be described as the polar opposite of evangelism. Instead of trying to convert others to their beliefs, the new spiritualists are questioning their own beliefs, and privately experimenting with alternative perspectives. Rather than feeling the evangelicals’ need to persuade others to adhere to a traditional vision of absolute truth, the new spiritualists are bent on experiencing mystical truths by their own direct experience, and then basing their moral decisions on what they have learned...

For more information see Understanding A Course in Miracles: The History, Message, and Legacy of a Spiritual Path for Today by D. Patrick Miller. CLICK HERE TO ORDER.