Each year, the St. John Berchmans Prize shines light on superb scholarly work done by scholastics and provides recognition for excellence in Jesuit scholarship. Named for St. John Berchmans, S.J., the patron saint of Jesuit scholastics and students, the Berchmans Prize celebrates the achievement of papers that are presented at the annual Winter Forum, hosted by First Studies here at LUC. Three prizes are awarded, one for the strongest academic/theoretical paper, another for the most interesting practical/ministerial project or paper, and a third for general excellence. The prize money is directed by the winner to benefit a particular ministry of their choosing.

 

The First Prize paper is featured in Nexus; and we are catching up here by featuring the winner from 2022, Matthew Zurcher, S.J. The Hank Center is honored to support the scholarly work of the men in formation and congratulates our Berchmans Scholars. 

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The inaugural volume of this journal ended with Joe Vukov’s keen reflection on “the perceived conflict between religious faith and science” as a “primary cause” of religious disaffiliation. The steadily increasing number of disaffiliated Americans, those who say they belong to no religious institution, has occasioned anxiety and friction among the faithful for years.   As this phenomenon grows, transforming the dynamics of our Church, communities, and families, we will only have more opportunity to become familiar with the friction Vukov described. But while some are still adjusting to this such friction, others, myself included, have felt it for some time. 

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I remember one day my 8th grade biology teacher, Mr. Etzel, asked everyone in the class to write on a small piece of paper if we “believed in” intelligent design or evolution. Just beginning to stretch into my own religious skepticism, I wrote down “evolution.” But Mr. Etzel, always sage and strange, told us that we were to write a term paper arguing for the opposite of whatever we had chosen. After a week of research I found myself unconvinced of intelligent design but attracted to my teacher’s strategy. The friction his inverted assignment provoked gave rise to a thin sense that, maybe, religion and evolution could hang together, but how? I felt the tension, but nothing snapped. 

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One year later, though, something did snap. I was sitting in our weekly CCD class and the instructor began to freely expound on Hell. I don’t remember much about the contents of her presentation. What I do remember is my rage. I erupted, made a scene, and was justly told to leave. Rightly or wrongly, though, my teenage self had sensed that there was something inadequate about what I was hearing. Not having the language to articulate that inadequacy, I resorted to making noise. As it seemed to me at the time, my own ideals and the ideals of the Church were parting ways. Full of resentment and anxiety, I returned home and informed my parents that I was never going back. And for a decade I didn’t. 

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While not all disaffiliations are the same, the shape of my own is common enough to serve as a stand in. And while the perceived conflict between science and religion indeed provided some kindling for my own disaffiliation, the igniting spark came from a more profound place: the wrenching tension I felt between the Church’s ideals and those rising within me. Looking back, I wish someone were around to explain to me that this tension was crucial, that the pressure in my gut demanded my ardent attention, and that the sweet voice of the Holy Spirit was there in this small struggle toward maturity. But lacking such a person, abandoning the Church seemed to be the only thing that made sense.

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If my experience is at all representative it means that, although unraveling the knotty relationship between faith and science may help prevent some intellectually-driven disaffiliation, there is something deeper that has yet to be attended to. I have come to think that we in the Church suffer a serious illiteracy, in fact, regarding what our disaffiliating sisters and brothers are disaffiliating toward. We fail to understand what they want; that to which they aspire in their departure from religious institutions and their transformation into someone who is, as it’s often put, “spiritual, but not religious.” While we members of the Church spar about the causes of disaffiliation, we ignore the form of spirituality that reaches out to capture, affirm, and nourish them. Understanding just this spirituality, I argue, is essential because, as sociologists and philosophers have begun to see, disaffiliation does not entail atheism.   Indeed, many of those who disaffiliate find that their spiritual lives begin the moment their religious life ends. 

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Having returned to the Church by means of the spirituality I am about to describe, I am no stranger to such aspirations. And any healthy Catholic response to those who practice this spirituality should be grounded in a sincere effort to understand it. In this essay, then, I hope to supplement Vukov’s concern for disaffiliation by describing first, the aspirations and ideals of the disaffiliating and then, second, turning more directly to the non-religious spirituality that smooths the tensions that arise between these ideals. I call this “liquid spirituality.” 

 

Rooted in the ideals and tensions that both attract and haunt our disaffiliating friends, liquid spirituality is a set of existential strategies meant to preserve the admirable ideals sought by the disaffiliating and reduce the friction caused by the tensions that arise between them. In other words, I want to provide a way of understanding the existential shape of a “spiritual-but-not-religious” life, of the liquid spirituality practiced by these “SBNRs” that is so tightly bound to the promise and the peril of the liquid modernity from which it arises.

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It is tempting to think that liquid spirituality was birthed fully formed, emerging not from the head of Zeus but the back of a tye-dyed VW bus, a moonlit Ouija vigil, an over-caffeinated AA meeting, or a New Age seminar. But this would be a mistake. It has taken centuries to invent the now-familiar distinction between “spiritual” and “religious.” And it has required tectonic cultural shifts to bring the valuation of one over the other to its present popularity. Recently, I have been cataloging the treasure and trash of our post-modern spiritual marketplaces and the menagerie tells a sprawling, regularly entertaining, and occasionally terrifying story. This is a story trying to scratch its way out of advertisements and constitutions, self-help manuals and manifestos, the Instagram posts of our most vaunted gurus and the unconscious shrapnel of everyday speech.

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A last caveat before diving in: for those of us more firmly embedded within a religion it can be tempting to think that our spiritualities are solid and stable, that they have little to do with the liquid. But we have more in common than we think. Alongside SBNR’s, we too might chafe at the possibility of miracles and apparitions but feel comfortable “vibing” our way to moral judgments. Like the disaffiliating, we too may lament the burden of religious discipline even as we head to a spin class held inside a black box indistinguishable from a strip-mall microchurch. And like the “Nones,” we too know the experience of speaking delicately when we talk about religion and confidently about spirituality. 

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As I will describe in what follows, the ideals and tensions of liquid modernity exert pressure on and shape us all. What makes the rapidly growing cohort of the disaffiliated distinct is not our context, and not our desires for help navigating it – what makes them distinct is their effort to sail the seas of liquid modernity without the burden of affiliation – on the barque of a liquid spirituality. To better understand what this means we need to understand the ideals of SBNRs, and to understand these ideals a brief word on the theoretical background within which liquid spirituality arises will be required. It is to this that we turn next. 

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Liquid Spirituality in a Secular Age 

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The major insight of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) was reframing our concept of secularity. Rather than defining the secular as a historical process of declining participation in religious activities or a political arrangement dictating the separation of Church and state, Taylor argued that secularity is a “social imaginary,” a context filled with rival conceptions of fullness, a metaphorical space within which the heirs of Latin Christendom find that faith in God, “even for the staunchest of believer, is one human possibility among others.” 
 

While this context is new, human beings have always developed strategies to negotiate the tensions that constitute their given context. The liquid spirituality adopted today by so many SBNRs is another in a long line of such strategies. This liquid strategy, however, is unique in facilitating their liberation from what they consider outmoded, often hierarchical, institutional forms. This is a strategy that likewise facilitates their rejection of certainty, their refusal of the comforting confidence offered by fundamentalisms and exclusive humanisms. Freed from institutional constraints and the demand for certainty, practitioners of liquid spirituality are open, for example, to attend a teaching at a Buddhist temple on a Friday night, read a few passages from the Kabbalah on Saturday afternoon, and do yoga on Sunday morning. How are they able, we who are more firmly embedded may ask, to sail so blithely past what has long been divided by thick boundaries and feel so little friction in the process? The answer lies in the tactics of liquid spirituality.

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The rapid growth of such bespoke, “remixed,” liquid spiritualities suggests a lacuna in Taylor’s project.    While he masterfully charts the contingent historical construction of secularity as a space buffeted by rival master narratives – atheism versus fundamentalism, secularism versus sectarianism – I want to suggest that the strongest winds in our liquid modernity spin us not toward combative certainties but into the widening gyre of agnosticism, doubt, and uncertainty. 

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Liquid spirituality is a set of strategies developed by SBNRs to help them in building a safe nest in this billowing open space of secularity. Strangely, then, practitioners of liquid spirituality are certain of only one thing: uncertainty. As the cultural prevalence of such supremely confident positions declines, the liquid strategies practiced by the constitutively uncertain disaffiliating, and the nests these strategies help construct, are poised to dominate the landscape. 

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These nests, however, are built both for protection and in pursuit of ideals. While the disaffiliated will often articulate themselves against institutional domination, the best way to understand them is to understand what they are working toward, not what they are working against. 

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The Ideals of the Spiritually Liquid 

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In listening to the harmonies and dissonances of the disaffiliating – to the heavy silence that falls when someone sounds a little too evangelical, to our desperate cultural dependence on the word “vibe” – three inviolable values begin to emerge, three maxims which give voice to these ideals.  Echoing the old revolutionary trinity of liberté, egalité, and fraternité, the maxims sound like this: 

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1) Liberté – matters of ultimate concern and the practices that nourish them must be freely pursued by individuals acting in accord with their own expressive authenticity.

2) Egalité – all persons have an equal right to their own spiritual journey. These matters and practices cannot and should not be coerced. 

3) Fraternité – this journey toward authentic, uncoerced flourishing is not owned, it is not the exclusive property of any one religious tradition.

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In this articulation, it must be noted, the tenor of the revolutionary trinity has been transformed, its ideals stretched and amplified into three, homologous, contemporary priorities: authenticity, noncoercion, and inclusion. A word in turn follows about each of these maxims and ideals – ideals so familiar to we denizens of western secularity.

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The first maxim displays the critical role of expressive authenticity in liquid modernity.   In our milieu, the search for divinity is expressive and individual, governed by one’s private, liberated sense of authenticity. The truth criteria for all spiritual claims is not correspondence or coherence, but resonance. For something to be taken as true in our times it must “resonate” or “feel right.” After all, we each have our own way of realizing our humanity; it is imperative that we seek out and display this uniqueness. In this maxim, Polonius’ “to thine own self be true” shifts from counsel to commandment. Importantly, it is this requirement of authenticity that gives “spirituality” its veneer of individual agency, though I will have more to say about that soon. 

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The effort to fulfill this maxim lies behind many stories of disaffiliation. It counsels that any religious teaching or traditional wisdom that doesn’t “feel right” should be refused, the commitment to the institutions that imposed them jettisoned. Notably, this means that it is not because these teachings present incorrect beliefs or contain factual errors that they are refused, but because they fail to resonate. 

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But even affiliated students make use of this maxim. A few months ago, for example, I asked a group of actively religious students how their spirituality has changed since coming to college. The nearly-universal answer was that they were growing toward affective engagement with something which had so far only been rote or habitual. Of course I was pleased by this sign of their spiritual maturity. But perhaps I was also pleased by their subtle embrace of this maxim, with their mature capacity to experience deeply what they’ve been taught about God. 

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As we mature into such authentic spiritual expressions, we quickly find ourselves rubbing shoulders with others doing the same. While maxim 1 invites me to be true to myself, the second maxim – the mutual respect and non-coercion that are the heirs of egalité – reinforces individual expressive authenticity as a shared norm. The roots of this maxim of noncoercion can be traced back to the political arrangements following the wars of religion. As Taylor tells the story, in the centuries since this norm of religious pluralism came to dominance, mutual non-interference has taken on both an inter- and intrapersonal character. Paraphrasing popular articulations, Taylor describes this ethic of noncoercion as one where we “ought not to challenge another’s values. That is their concern, their life choice, and it ought to be respected.”    Here we see the historical roots of our contemporary antipathy to judgment – having “no judgment” of one another being an inviolable pillar of all authentic relationships in liquid modernity. Indeed the goal and ideal of many such relationships is the preservation and celebration of one another’s equal right to authenticity and autonomy. 

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Critics often emphasize this maxim’s vulgar slogans – “you do you,” or “find your bliss” being particularly easy to mock – but such rejection looks past the power of the maxim of noncoercion. Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, puts this maxim to unquestionably positive use by encouraging its often-disaffiliated members – many of whom cross the threshold of a 12-step meeting with deep and legitimate anti-institutional grievances – to entrust themselves to God as they understand God.    To the benefit of so many, AA has refused to coerce those who attend, choosing to prioritize the urgent virtue of sobriety above any doctrinal orthodoxy. Even more, it is the ideal upheld by this maxim that supports AA’s essentially important 11th tradition, which describes it as a community of “attraction rather than promotion.”     Here we ought note how embedded wtihin such a model of community is the moral stance that voluntary belonging is the only sustainable model of community in liquid modernity.    Indeed, Catholics would do well to see something of the same attitude at work in Pope Francis, who has repeatedly denounced “proselytism” in favor of “evangeli gaudium.”

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Following the dual ideals of expressive authenticity and mutual noncoercion, the third maxim rejects exclusive religiosity and celebrates just such a voluntary inclusion of all persons. Here we see the maxim of inclusion holding up the ideal of an open, indeed universal horizon of accessibility for every tradition and institution. Turning again to Taylor’s explication of the roots of this ideal we can see in it a movement toward what he terms a “universal sympathy” that “lies deep in our emotional makeup.”     Sadly, he notes, this universal capacity has often “been suppressed, distorted, covered over by the false and denaturing conditions which have developed in history.”     In light of this failure, the logic of the maxim runs, our task is to liberate this deep sympathy by lauding not unique and therefore exclusive spiritual traditions, but those paths along which all persons can be invited to travel. Those living toward the third maxim’s ideal of inclusivity, then, seek to make the therapeutic resources of any religious tradition available to all – even the disaffiliated. 

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In this turn toward a universal horizon in which all are included we begin to draw closer to our contemporary understanding and use of terms like “spiritual” and “religious.” As Nancy Ammerman has shown, for example, it is the desire to draw a boundary between oneself and an offensive religious ideology – to exclude exclusion, in other words – that SBNRs are often seeking.

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But this desire to exclude exclusion also has a history. In Frederic Spiegelberg’s memoir The Religion of No-Religion, for example, he recounts a walk during which he experienced a mystical encounter with “the bright glance of some super-cosmic sun shining from the centre of every creature.”     Ironically, this experience of universally-present glory only ended when Spiegeberg stumbled upon a church. “If there is really anything else, anything peculiar behind those walls,” he writes, “it could only be a matter outside God.”     It was the church, experienced by Spiegelberg as a non-inclusive boundary to a universal sacrality that jarred him from his visions. In the vision he saw “nothing but holiness” and a “vanishing secular world,” he wrote, but this pristine universality was disturbed by something that claimed the sacred for itself: a church. 

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In our secular age, experiences like Spiegelberg’s are ready to hand. Recently, a young family member decided not to go through with the sacrament of confirmation because of a strikingly similar sentiment. Fifteen-years-old and hardly an idealogue, she simply couldn’t square some of the things she was hearing in church with her love for her friends of other faiths. When her mom asked if I would intervene, I demurred, and this not only because of my own history as practitioner of liquid spirituality. Who can blame this lovely young human being, I thought, for wanting to honor those holy friendships without insisting they change? How could I fault her for striving to live up the ideal to which the third maxim gives voice? 

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Although it has required some time to do so, time is required in order to understand the phenomenon of disaffiliation not through the problems they are rejecting but the ideals being pursued. It is, I would contend, nearly always best to begin by acknowledging the sincere ideals to which our students, friends, and family members are aspiring in the actions they take. Certainly it is the case that the disaffiliated are reaching for real goods which, to them at least, are neglected, even countermanded, by institutional religion. All to say that the seeds of the strategies that are liquid spirituality can be found in the effort of SBNRs to live up to the ideals through which they understand what it is to be good: expressive authenticity, noncoercion, and inclusion. But as those seeds take root in the soil of liquid modernity, new problems emerge. 

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Liquid Tensions; Liquid Negotiations 

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As I began to navigate my own disaffiliation in high school, I remember sitting in a class discussing Plato’s Phaedo. Because we were teeneagers, the discussion morphed into a debate on the properties of the human soul. In the midst of this, my unflinchingly generous teacher let me experiment aloud with the possibility that there is no such thing. It was then that one of my classmates began to cry, sharing through the tears about his mother who had recently passed away. To this day the tension I felt is as clear and pristine and if I were still sitting in my desk. I wanted to display my own authentic impression of the world, to be me and have my ideas. And simultaneously wanted nothing more than not to disrupt the consolation of my classmate’s idea.

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As I discovered, it is one thing to let these liquid ideals lead me away from a religious identity; it is quite another to build a life within them. Despite the rich affinities between authenticity, noncoercion, and inclusion, they can be rivalrous; producing painful tensions that demand difficult resolutions. 

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An example: maxim two’s injunction to mutual non-interference might fragilize the way we speak about the authenticity demanded by maxim one. The episode I just described is a pedestrian example of this tension, but it is a regular fixture of our common democratic life. Here we can see that what, on the macro level, amounts to the “separation of church and state” becomes on the micro level an interpersonal norm regulating what can be said in our workplaces and over our dinner tables.

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Another: the universal horizon of accessibility envisioned in maxim three can also easily put pressure on the ideal of authenticity, placing a heavy burden on individuals to assemble their own patchwork of cosmic symbols and spiritual meanings. For every Spiegelberg who feels creative exhilaration in accepting this burden, there seem to be hundreds who experience it as something like Durkheim’s anomie.

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These are two of the myriad tensions that crop up between our maxims, generating a friction and a heat that requires coolant to continue moving forward. And indeed this is (part of) what all spiritualities serve to do. What sets liquid spirituality apart from these is not its cooling capacity, but the particular strategies it develops and deploys. Although space precludes identifying them here, in a longer exposition of this project I isolated six such tensions and six corresponding negotiation strategies. Here, I will focus on just one pair. This tension I call “unreserved openness to fallibility” and the liquid-spiritual strategy that cools its friction I have called “cultivated agnosticism.” 

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We can begin to grasp this pairing by turning, perhaps surprisingly, to a birthday card – albeit one written by one world-class philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, to another, his friend Charles Taylor. Habermas took the opportunity afforded by this occasion to summarize the intellectual state of the affairs between them. What is essential for our aim of understanding this particular aspect of liquid spirituality is Habermas’ description of what he took to be the attitude necessary for democracy. He called this attitude an “unreserved openness to fallibility.”      What is being celebrated here by the great German philosopher is the attitude that things could always be otherwise, that one could always be wrong. Liberal democracy’s health, he contended, in fact depends on the maintenance of just this openness to fallibility. The upshot of Habermas’ argument is a familiar one: all ideologies that would reject this openness to fallibility, this potential for being wrong, are a potential danger for a plural polis. Indeed, an aura of laudable humility is to be noted in the “unreserved openness” advocated by Habermas, like a breath held in wonder at what we do not know. But accompanying such humility is a striking instability, an incapacity to settle not only in dominatory ideologies but on anything like stable ground. What strategy has liquid spirituality developed to respond to the tension that emerges here between humility and instability, laudable openness and regrettable precariousness? 

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Liquid spirituality responds to this instability by accepting instability as an asset and using it as a spiritual resource – a resource I call “cultivated agnosticism.” Developing a cultivated agnosticism affords value not to having knowledge, but to the state of uncertainty: to not knowing. For SBNRs, the uncertainty programmed into maxim two opens the door to precisely the kind of fluid exploration and experimentation that is limited by dogmatic religion. For those who succeed in practicing a cultivated agnosticism, in other words, uncertainty acquires an apparently telic quality. 

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But how is such an uncertain strategy sustained? Is there any institution, any “nest,” capable of holding together the resources, narratives, and practices of which such a strategy is composed?, In this case indeed there is. You might even already be using it. It is called Headspace, and it is a mindfulness meditation app. 

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In 2010, former Buddhist monk and circus performer Andy Puddicombe started Headspace to, as he put it, “demystify” meditation techniques.     “My hope is that I can share [Buddhists’] wisdom and insight with you,” he narrates on Netflix’s Headspace Guide to Meditation, “so that you don’t have to go to the Himalayas, you don’t have to become a monk or a nun, and you don’t have to make all the mistakes that I made on my journey.” 

 

As of this writing, the Headspace app has been downloaded over 70 million times and has spawned 3 programs on Netflix. For a monthly fee of $70, a user gets access to hundreds of meditation courses tailored to a variety of situations, like “healing after breakup,” “coping with cancer,” “managing financial stress,” and “productivity,” all guided by an animated orange orb named Eve. Special features abound. A handy “SOS” feature for emergencies, for example, spiked 44% in usage the day after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency.     Advertisements promise 14% less stress to regular users within 10 days and a “Headspace for Work” package is now being marketed to employers as a “mental health solution,” complete with analytics on how employee engagement increases productivity. 

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The Netflix series mentioned above culminates in an episode called “How to Achieve Your Limitless Potential.” There Puddicombe teaches what he calls a resting awareness technique. As it turns out, the key to mastering this technique and achieving your limitless potential is a cultivated uncertainty. This is particularly clear in an exercise that focuses on “letting go of our story.” Here is Puddicombe’s narration: 

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When we let go of that, we experience vulnerability, a sense of uncertainty, of openness. And within that, somewhere, we discover this quiet confidence. Maybe it’s just a byproduct of being willing to exist without those stories in our mind… To rest with that sense of vulnerability, not necessarily knowing but at the same time being comfortable not knowing: that’s quiet confidence. If we can go into our meditation with that frame of mind, if we can carry that quality of mind into our everyday life, then suddenly everything is possible.

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As Puddicombe frames it, meditation is a tool for cultivating uncertainty. And it’s uncertainty , that in turn unlocks our limitless potential. 

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What is this limitless potential? Careful to honor an authentic, noncoercive, and inclusive spiritual milieu, Headspace appears to leave the answer up to the user. The means are clear – buy the app; use it to meditate – and the ends are “limitless.” But where Puddicombe sees serene uncertainty and quiet confidence, the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman sees something a bit different: ceaseless restlessness, a novel “state of perpetual anxiety” that arises from “not knowing the ends instead of the traditional uncertainty of not knowing the means.”    On the one hand, then, Headspace reframes unknowing as the exhilarating experience of a Nietzschean becoming. On the other hand, and turning again to Bauman, this “state of unfinishedness, incompleteness, and underdetermination is full of risk and anxiety.” 

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None of this, of course, is what Habermas intended. His aim was not to celebrate incompleteness and anxiety but preserve the plurality of our democracies. And yet it strikes me as plausible that it is precisely the horizon of “limitless potential” that produces the anxiety driving the disaffiliated toward commodified versions of meditation in the first place. Further, Headspace’s advertisements suggest what hidden aims might lurk beneath the surface of this invitation to limitlessness. The goal, as one print ad puts it, is to “Be the Monk Who Buys a Ferrari.” A different ad, this one carefully placed on subway trains passing beneath Wall Street, depicts a powerlifter. The caption: “I meditate to crush it.”

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This is neither to say that all of liquid spirituality’s nests are nefarious nor intimate that they mask exploitative intentions, it is to raise a warning flag signaling that the spiritual marketplace is full of products capable of bending the ideals of our liquid age to their own ends.     Nests, in other words, tend to produce both an experience of tension and a product that promises relief from this tension.     One important outcome of this discussion of nests like Headspace is that we can now see that describing those who are becoming spiritual but not religious as “disaffiliating” is only half true. What our attention to the ideals that drive disaffiliation has shown is that “the disaffiliating” are not only leaving something, they are joining something else. And in so doing they are becoming something, something they call “spiritual.” 

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Coming to grips with what this refers to, with the theoretical origins of the distinction between religion and spirituality and the strange relationships their severance has empowered, will bring us to the close of this essay. 

 

Private Religion and Public Spirituality 

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The function of nests is to institutionalize the practices of liquid spirituality. As we saw, Headspace accomplishes this institutionalization by means of Puddicombe’s “demystification” strategy, his effort to normalize and make accessible the esoteric practices he had mastered in a Buddhist monastery. 

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And, while demystification is one apt term for this process, Charles Taylor provides another: excarnation.     Like demystification, excarnation describes a process of making something accessible, but it does so with another emphasis. With the heuristic it provides, what is attended to is the ways that rituals and behaviors that were once embedded in thick cultural contexts are removed from those contexts. What this accomplishes is a relocation of these formerly unique, exclusive practices from their original cultural location into the universal horizon of accessibility. What Puddicombe has done, in other words, is excarnate meditation; he has shifted the practice from one social imaginary to another that is motivated by quite different ideals. Self-abnegation becomes self-actualization.

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This harvesting and repackaging of thick cultural resources conceals a conceptual move that is pivotal for our understanding of both the distinction between “spirituality” and “religion” and what SBNRs are disaffiliating towards. But understanding this distinction will require a brief detour through the thought of the famous anthropologist of secularism, Talal Asad. 

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According to Asad, the construction of spirituality as independent from religion relies on the transformation of how we are taught to understand “religion” in the contemporary, democratic, west. Having noted, with Habermas, that democracies rely on the supposed neutrality of a plural public sphere, Asad goes on to argue that this neutrality is made possible by an historically novel “disjunction between belief and behavior” – a disjunction that codes behavior as secular, public, and stable, while belief is understood to be religious, private, and fragile. 

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For Asad, what this means is that “in defining religion for legislation, liberal democracy… not only works through secularity, it requires that belief be taken as the essence of religiosity.”     Taking belief as the most important aspect of religion forces it to be understood as an interior phenomenon, inducing a turning away from publicly ritualized and performative styles of religious expression and a turning toward private emotional or intellectual authenticity. The idea that religious interiority, whether taken as feelings, passions, or beliefs, should take precedence over social expression may appear to we secular moderns as a given, but Asad emphasizes that it is not. Rather, this movement originated in contingent circumstances and rests on a specific vision of religiosity and privacy that rose to power in the polite, European, Deist milieu of the 17th and 18th centuries.    It is because of this history that religion begins to look less like something I am willing to be burned at the stake for and more like a private, unstable fantasy––“just my belief.”

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It is this contingent disjunction between belief and behavior that allows Puddicombe to call “demystification” what Taylor would call “excarnation” and allows practitioners of liquid spirituality to make use of religions’ resources without calling themselves “religious.” The option to keep the behaviors (prayer, meditation, yoga) and ditch the belief (doctrine, creed, moral codes) now appears open. In the case of Headspace, a practitioner is no longer bound to believe or know anything about Buddhism. One does not need to buy into its tradition of self-abnegation. Instead, one can use its resources to pursue productivity and, purportedly, “limitless possibility.” By framing such practices in universally accessible language and making them publicly available by unhooking them from their cultural and religious background they become “spiritual” practices – and their practitioners become the spiritual but not religious.

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The result of this established relation is that we inhabit a context in which “spirituality” becomes what we can speak of smoothly and publicly because it has been excarnated and thereby made inclusive. “Religion,” on the other hand, ought to remain private because it is exclusive. This produces a curious reversal. The common assumption is that “religion” is “organized, traditional, and communal” while “spirituality” is “improvised and individual.”     But in the milieu of liquid spirituality that I am describing, the inverse seems to be true, it is “religion” that is unstable and private while “spirituality” acquires a ready publicity because it aspires to a universal horizon of accessibility. “Religion” has become something I can only decide for myself. “Spirituality” is something around which we all might gather. Ours is, it seems, a world of private religion and public spirituality. 

 

The nest of this public spirituality is something like the mall, or the app store, what Wade Clark Roof has termed our “spiritual marketplace.”     Wherever it is located, this marketplace serves as a way of ordering the “limitless possibility” for self-collage that exists in our liquid landscape. It reorganizes the resources of religion, limits choices, and makes them more easily consumable by retrofitting them to the ideals of authenticity, noncoercion, and inclusion. The marketization of spirituality preserves our indispensable freedoms and binds all its shoppers together through the nest of the marketplace and their identity as consumers. It is not without reason that Bauman writes, “in a consumer society, sharing in consumer dependency – the universal dependency on shopping – is the sine qua non of all individual freedom, of the freedom to be different, to ‘have identity.’”

 

What this means for our ongoing task of understanding the disaffiliating is that, for many of them, their identity as “chooser” matters more than what is chosen. This kind of shopping allows the disaffiliating to take creative ownership of their spiritual life in a way that exclusive religion does not. Indeed, it can be felt as freedom, as a liberation from which there is no turning back. 

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Like the liquid modernity that occasioned it, liquid spirituality harbors both promise and peril. With Bauman, I admit that its closed loop of uncertainty and commodification is a “mixed blessing.” Liquid spirituality aspires to admirable goals of expressive authenticity, noncoercion, and universal inclusion. But strong commitment to these ideals leads to challenging tensions, the resolution of which often opens practitioners up to more subtle versions of the religiosity they sought to evade in the first place, though this time in the sheep’s clothing of a free market. A spirituality without a religion must confront the formidable task of being more than a salve for the wounds of its own ambition. If liquid spirituality’s negotiation strategies produce the modern, secular subjectivity, then we cannot say that this modern, secular subject is liberated – we can only say that the object of their obedience is now the looming phantom of uncertainty and the commodities that exorcize it. 

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But just as with the ideals traced out above, so with this inversion of religion and spirituality: we affiliated have more in common with SBNRs than we might think. That is, in fact, the point of this reflection on the spiritual marketplace. Which of us, after all, has not encountered a new way of praying and not been moved by the surprising resonance it awakens in our hearts? Tracing out the rise of the spiritual marketplace and the ongoing rearrangement of religion and spirituality in our lives can help us not just identify but walk out on the common ground we share with the disaffiliating. 

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With them, we feel the attraction and pressure of their liquid ideals. We too feel deeply the tense challenge of their realization. And, if Bauman is right, we are all familiar with the experience of shopping for our own identities. Though we may differ in the way we choose to negotiate the tensions of liquid modernity, don’t we all yearn for a universal horizon where we can speak smoothly, affectionately, and with mutual understanding about what moves us most? It is my hope that analyzing disaffiliation from this perspective will allow us to focus on what our disaffiliated friends are seeking rather than what they are fleeing, what’s pulling them close rather than what’s pushing them away. 

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On a last point I wish to be absolutely clear: there is not much reason to assume that (re)affiliation is a perfect response to liquid spirituality’s deficiencies. Rooted as disaffiliation is in the harms – both real and imagined – of institutional religions, such an invitation is likely to fall on deaf ears. If, for the disaffiliating, the identity as “chooser” matters more than what is chosen, our response should be to display a style of life that is worth choosing. I am convinced that nothing will be as helpful in this pursuit as letting their ideals remind us of our own. Liquid spirituality, unfortunately compromised by the same social sins that we in the Church are even quicker to ignore, is an attempt to recover aspects of Christian virtue that are dying on our own vines. We would be wise to let their best qualities prune us.