I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual. You may have even heard it mentioned before. What does it mean, though, exactly? Can you exist in either state alone? Formerly interchangeable terms, “religious” and “spiritual” are now used to refer to seemingly separate but occasionally converging spheres of human activity. Many people have turned their spiritual practise away from the public rituals of institutional Christianity and towards the personal experience of God within as a result of the twin cultural trends of deinstitutionalization and individualism. The second of a two-part series on faith outside of the church comes to an end here. Since there is some overlap between the two groups, they together make about 11 percent of the population, or about 8 percent of the total population. There are few surprises when it comes to demographics. The groupings are located on the West Coast and the South and tend to have more women than males who associate more with religion and spirituality than men. The former is probably due to the impact of Eastern religions, whilst the latter is due to a general tendency towards religion. They are largely Boomers and Gen-Xers, however the first group is a little older and the second group is a little younger because less young people tend to identify with a religion. Both of the “spiritual but not religious” groups hold unconventional beliefs about God or depart from conventional ideas, as one might anticipate and in stark contrast to the group of people who “love Jesus but not the church.”
