{"id":8761,"date":"2016-05-18T10:26:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-18T15:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=8761"},"modified":"2016-05-18T10:32:12","modified_gmt":"2016-05-18T15:32:12","slug":"a-process-view-of-religious-nones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/05\/18\/a-process-view-of-religious-nones\/","title":{"rendered":"A process view of “religious Nones”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"hej-podlasie-tutejsi\"<\/a><\/p>\n

While I’ve done no formal surveys, my best guess is that about half my students here at the U of Vermont (at least those in Environmental Studies) would fit into the category of “religiously unaffiliated,” the so-called “religious Nones<\/a>” — a category that\u00a0now makes up<\/a> almost 1 in 4 Americans and over\u00a0a third of those under\u00a025.<\/p>\n

Many, though not all, of my students resonate with the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” If they were offered the option, I suspect they would subscribe to what Elizabeth Drescher<\/a> calls “spiritual cosmopolitanism<\/a>.” <\/span><\/p>\n

Drescher writes<\/a>: <\/span><\/p>\n

“Processes of spiritual and religious being and becoming<\/em> trump the classic religious categories of believing, belonging,<\/em> and behaving<\/em> for Nones. New modes of networked, cosmopolitan affiliation tend to characterize the way Nones gather through their spiritual lives. And, from this, new stories of spiritual and religious experience that both draw upon and move beyond traditional religious language are beginning to emerge.” [italics added]<\/span><\/p>\n

My own work suggests that this category might be thought of as a kind of proto-religious or proto-spiritual “natural state,” the religious equivalent of the proto-ethnic tuteishyi<\/em>\u00a0(tutejsi, tutejszy<\/em>) that I wrote about here<\/a> — people who are locally based (literally, “from here”) but of “no fixed address,” because “address” is something that requires recognition within a system of coordinates, rather like Lacan’s “Symbolic<\/a>” is said to impose an identity on its denizens that forecloses\u00a0the inchoateness of the pre-Symbolic self.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the tuteishyi<\/em>, that formatting has either not yet occurred or has been consciously avoided (as in James Scott’s ungoverned<\/a>\u00a0peoples). To some extent, “spiritual tuteishism<\/em>” is a “polytropism,” as Michael Carrithers has called it<\/a> in the Indian context, a “turning toward many sources”; and to some extent it is merely a hesitant and partial openness<\/em> to such turning. The point, I would argue, is that it is a processual state of relative openness rather than relative closedness, at the same time as it involves a resistance to what’s perceived as being too closed, inflexible, and confining. It is not exactly\u00a0the “seeking” of the Sixties “generation of seekers” or the New Age movement; but nor\u00a0is it the closure<\/a> of the “immanent frame” that\u00a0Charles Taylor critiques. <\/span><\/p>\n

In this sense, “religious None” is a poor choice of term, as it suggests an absence rather than the cautious openness to experience — religious experience alongside other kinds — that characterize many of those in the category. “Unaffiliated” is better, but even that is not quite accurate, as affiliation is part of what these “Nones” do, but\u00a0a local, no-fixed-address kind of affiliation.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The paradox is that an unaffiliated category is a non-category; the new spiritual tuteishyi<\/em> remains an individual even if he or she is part of the fastest growing population set around. By contrast, the ethnic\u00a0tuteishyi<\/em>\u00a0— by which I mean the “classic” borderland dweller (mestizo, creole, et al.) — has always been imbricated within\u00a0multi-layered community, if an inchoate and externally unrecognized one. The difference is, of course, a product of the weakening of\u00a0communal links in late modern society. <\/span><\/p>\n

Sooner or later, however, waves of religious innovation — affective movements that draw on people’s capacity to ritualize and to inhabit modes of “being religious” — tend to sweep across populations. (Rather like fascism swept across Germany, though I wouldn’t of course\u00a0suggest that the liberal New Englanders I teach, in their “mass psychology,”<\/a>\u00a0are anything like the proto-Nazis that Michael Haneke tried to depict\u00a0in The White Ribbon<\/em><\/a>. Far from it. Perhaps Foucault’s hope for a “non-fascist life<\/a>” has made inroads in the broader culture over the past 40 years. That’s a complicated question, which I’ll leave aside for now.) <\/span><\/p>\n

So\u00a0the question for me is: when\u00a0something comes up with the capacity to “format” (or “territorialize”) the “unformatted data” of\u00a0the proto-religious (ignore the problems of the computer\u00a0metaphor for now), what will that something be?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I know that some of my colleagues in religious studies, and in the “religion and ecology” field in particular, would propose that it would be something on the spectrum of green religiosity (such as Bron Taylor’s dark green religion<\/a>). Ecology is, after all, connected to one of the authoritative discourses of our time — science — and an ecospirituality has the capacity to make today’s ecological challenges meaningful in ways that no other spirituality does. For my students, I would say that option is fairly probable. But for the 33 million other Americans in the “spiritual but not religious” category,\u00a0that would only be one option among many. <\/span><\/p>\n

Part of the\u00a0work of ecoculture may be to render it — or something like it — a viable option. <\/span><\/p>\n

Here’s\u00a0where I would say to my Religion and Ecology students: “Discuss.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I’ve done no formal surveys, my best guess is that about half my students here at the U of Vermont (at least those in Environmental Studies) would fit into the category of “religiously unaffiliated,” the so-called “religious Nones” — a category that\u00a0now makes up almost 1 in 4 Americans and over\u00a0a third of those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[691847],"tags":[25054,350243,350242,16781,350245,350241,350246,417,350240,16875,350244],"class_list":["post-8761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion-spirituality","tag-bron-taylor","tag-cosmopolitanism","tag-dark-green-religion","tag-foucault","tag-mestizo","tag-non-fascist-life","tag-polytropism","tag-religion","tag-religious-nones","tag-spirituality","tag-tuteishyi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2hj","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12302,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/12\/14\/reimagining-religious-imagination\/","url_meta":{"origin":8761,"position":0},"title":"Reimagining religious imagination","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 14, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Wouter Hanegraaff has proposed that we rethink the study of religion as the study of \"imaginative formations.\" Much of my research has focused on something like that, or at least on the creative role of imagination in mediating the ways people come to live in the world, shape that world,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/12\/9780231189460.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9559,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2018\/01\/21\/comparative-practicology-philosophy-as-a-way-of-life\/","url_meta":{"origin":8761,"position":1},"title":"Comparative ‘practicology’: Philosophy as a way of life","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 21, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"This course (an Honors College course I'm happy to be to teaching this year) is already in progress, but I'd be curious to hear any comments on it. 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What's missing?\u00a0 Self-Cultivation and Spiritual Practice: Comparative Perspectives This course introduces\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2174,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/08\/religious-returns-in-the-wake-of-global-nature\/","url_meta":{"origin":8761,"position":2},"title":"Religious (re)turns in the wake of global nature","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 8, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm reorganizing the piece I wrote for the School of Advanced Research workshop on science, nature, and religion so that part of it will fit into the introduction of the book we are producing (which I'm co-writing with the workshop organizer and chair, Catherine Tucker) and the rest will make\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cultural politics"","block_context":{"text":"Cultural politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cultural_politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10247,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2019\/10\/14\/long-term-civilizational-prognosis-a-hypothesis\/","url_meta":{"origin":8761,"position":3},"title":"Long-term civilizational prognosis: a hypothesis","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 14, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's a hypothesis: If the human community exists in some more or less unified form in 880 years (in the year 3000 by our calendar), that feat will have been accomplished, at least in part, in and through the emergence of an ecological religion. 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Disenchantment and re-enchantment are long-running tropes in the intellectual currents of modernity, which I've frequently explored in my\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Spirit matter"","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/03\/global-warming-hokusai-revisited-jean-louis-lassez-275x183.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5965,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/05\/20\/sar-nature-science-religion-volume-out\/","url_meta":{"origin":8761,"position":5},"title":"SAR “Nature, Science, Religion” volume out","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 20, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I received my copies in the mail this week of the book that arose out of the School of Advanced Research seminar on \"Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment.\" It's a handsome volume, whose contents provide a level of cross-cutting conversation that, I think, is rare\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2012\/05\/sar_press_nature_science_and_religion_cover_fancy_l-275x275.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8761"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8775,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8761\/revisions\/8775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}