How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (6) Can the HERI survey put the matter to rest?

In the last post in this series I summarized some of Christian Smith’s reservations about the degree of “spiritual seeking” among teenagers. Few, he finds, are on the “spiritual but not religious” quests that other researchers are so taken with. Can the HERI survey resolve the disagreement?

Probably not.

To get at the students’ “spirituality,” the HERI team adopts two strategies, neither of which gives me much confidence that their results can be used to adjudicate between Cherry, Beaudoin, and Wuthnow, on the one hand, and Smith’s findings for teens, on the other.

• Strategy one entails letting respondents provide their own definition of “spiritual,” “spirituality,” and “spiritual quest.” But do the students understand “spirituality” in the way that the researchers do? Little way to tell.
• Strategy two involved developing “scales” to measure dimensions of “spirituality”—Spirituality, Spiritual Quest, and Equanimity—that upon examination may not easily stand for what their titles suggest.

A longish justification for my lack of confidence follows the break.

How “religious” or “spiritual” are your students? (4) More “spiritual” than “religious”?

In summing up their in-depth survey of the religious belief and practice of undergraduates at three universities and one college, researchers Conrad Cherry, Betty DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield offer a distinction that may be important for understanding undergraduate belief and practice. “The undergraduates we interviewed, as well as many of the campus professionals who helped us interpret the religion of undergraduates,” they explain, “preferred to use the worlds ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritual’ instead of ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ when describing undergraduate attitudes and practices.”[Cherry, 275] Cherry and his colleagues suggest that by “religion” or “religious” students and campus professionals mean institutions or organizations and by “spirituality” or “spiritual” they had in mind a personal experience of God or Higher Power and an expression of ultimate concerns and values. The sociologist Robert Wuthnow put it this way, quoting from an informant in his sixties, “Religion is structure, an institution. It limits you. Spirituality is something you are.” More formally, Wuthnow defines spirituality “as a state of being related to a divine, supernatural, or transcendent order of reality or, alternatively, as a sense or awareness of a suprareality that goes beyond life as ordinarily experienced.” [Wuthnow (2001), 306] It may, or may not, occur within an institutional context designed to encourage or nurture this spirituality.

Cherry and his colleagues suggest that “spiritual” or “spirituality” also connotes for today’s undergraduates a quest or journey while “religious” or “religion” suggests something fixed and handed down. One of their informants, a chaplain at a Catholic university, offer this striking definition and explanation, “Religion means, literally, to bind. Although those of us in the professional religious business see this binding as ultimately freeing, binding of any kind is antithetical to the late-adolescent project. It’s a time of questioning and stepping back.”[Cherry, 275]

Obviously, being within an institutional or organizational structure does not prevent one from feeling related to a divine, supernatural, or transcendent order of reality, and for much of history, that is how people experienced spirituality. But that may be changing.