Methods for Exploring
Primordial Elements of Youth
Spirituality
A paper was presented
at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of
Religion, San Francisco, California, August 14,
2004.
by
Michael Mason, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne,
Australia
Acknowledgements
This paper has
been developed within the context of a continuing research
project:
‘The Spirit of Generation
Y’ – The Spirituality of Australian Youth and Young People
aged 13-29
Research
Team
Dr Michael
Mason
(Australian Catholic University, 115 Victoria
Pde, Fitzroy, VIC 3065 Australia m.mason@patrick.acu.edu.au Ph: +61 (3) 9817-9758 Fx: +61 (3) 9816-9805)
Associate
Professor Ruth Webber (Australian Catholic
University)
Dr Andrew
Singleton (Monash University)
Dr Philip
Hughes (Christian Research Association)
I wish to thank the
other members of the research team for the many fruitful
discussions which enrich my understanding of spirituality
among youth, and for their human qualities which make working
together such a delight.
I also express my gratitude to the informants
who willingly gave up their time for the interviews, and to
those who provided access to prospective interviewees in
schools and youth organisations.
Thanks to Sharon Bond, Philip Hughes and Peter
Bentley for conducting the interviews.
We gratefully acknowledge the
financial support of the following project sponsors:
Catholic
Education Commission of Queensland, Catholic Education
Commission of Victoria,
Catholic Education Commission
of Tasmania, Catholic Education Commission of
Canberra-Goulburn, Catholic Education Office of Sydney,
Catholic Education Office of Parramatta, Broken Bay Diocesan
Catholic Schools Office, Catholic Education South Australia,
Catholic Education Office of Lismore, Salesians of St John
Bosco, Council for Christian Education in Schools, Lutheran
Schools Australia, Lutheran Church National Office,
Salvation Army (Southern Territory), Seventh-day Adventist
Church (Australia), Victorian Council for Christian
Education, Uniting Education, YMCA.
© M. Mason 2004
1.
Background to the study of primordial spiritual
experience
This paper contends that
‘primordial’ experiences play an important, and often
overlooked, part in the spirituality of youth, and describes
both a method for uncovering them and some preliminary
findings from an ongoing research project on the spirituality
of youth.
By ‘primordial’ we mean
‘basic, original or fundamental’; our special sense of the
term is defined in more detail at the beginning of section 3
below, in which this aspect of the method and some preliminary
findings of our project will be presented.
But first, to provide the
context necessary for the understanding of primordial
spirituality, we discuss in section 1 a) our multidisciplinary
approach, b) the history of the idea of spirituality and c)
the way in which we have defined it. Next we provide d) a brief
overview of religion and spirituality among youth in
Australia, and e) of the theoretical orientations and previous
research which the project takes into account, before
concluding with f) an outline of the scope of the project, and
of the sample for the first phase of interviewing.
In the following section
2, the analytical framework developed for application to the
interview data is outlined.
a) A multidisciplinary
approach
Although the perspective
of this paper is predominantly sociological, we contend that
spirituality, like religion, can only be studied adequately –
even by sociology – by utilising a multidisciplinary
approach. Failure to do
so is a large part of the reason why much sociological
research on religion peters out at ‘dead ends’. The following disciplines,
which are listed in approximate order of their accessibility
to sociologists, make valuable contributions to such a
study:
-sociology of knowledge and sociology of religion,
-anthropology (especially linguistics and ritual
studies),
-psychology (especially cognitive psychology, social
psychology and psychology of religion). In this discipline, a single
work of one individual: Varieties of Religious
Experience by American philosopher / psychologist William
James, a most gifted and persuasive writer, has had a
prodigious, and in some ways limiting, influence on defining
the paradigm of religious experience, shaping the conception
of religion and the future study of religious experience;
-history of religions (especially the phenomenology of
religion tradition),
-philosophy (especially epistemology and aesthetics),
-theology (especially fundamental theology,
ecclesiology, theology of liturgy, pastoral theology).
Phenomenology, not so much
a discipline as a method which has influenced history of
religions, philosophy and the social sciences, is a
particularly valuable tool, and one variety of
‘phenomenological sociology’, that of Husserl’s disciple
Alfred Schutz, is utilised in our approach.
When the focus is narrowed
to the investigation of ‘primordial’ spiritual experiences,
resources from some of these disciplines, and especially from
phenomenological method, are not merely valuable, but simply
indispensable.
b) ‘Spirituality’ – a
‘master idea’ in Western culture
Researching the history of
ideas on the development of the concepts of ‘spirit’ and
‘spirituality’ and its diverse uses in different fields of
knowledge and different languages results in the discovery
that most treatments are too narrowly religious – usually
Christian.
At its most general,
spirituality denotes immateriality, and connotes capacities
which were thought to arise from ‘going beyond’ the material
realm: particularly the human capacity for
self-transcendence.
In their long
history, the words ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality’ have had a
variety of more specific meanings; sometimes largely
overlapping with ‘religion’, but sometimes quite distinct from
it.
It may be helpful to
distinguish three principal threads of meaning which
contribute to ‘spirit’ / ‘spirituality’: the philosophical,
the ethical and the religious. They are very long threads –
each two and a half to three thousand years old. They emerge at the dawn of
recorded history, and there are indications of much older
pre-historic origins.
They seem to have their roots in very similar reflections on
basic human phenomena, but soon begin to develop somewhat
independently of each other; they intertwine; sometimes
influence each other, but remain distinct. They parallel each other in
many different cultures e.g. Israelite, Greek, Indian,
Egyptian.
1) ‘Spirit /spiritual
/spirituality’ in the Western philosophical tradition
The Western intellectual
tradition is greatly influenced by the ancient Greek
development of the
conceptions of soul or spirit (Gk: psyche, Latin: anima) – notably by Plato and Aristotle.
The Greek philosophers,
like thinkers in many cultures throughout the first millennium
BCE, conceived of all living things as possessing spirit
(pneuma– the breath of life), and as having a soul, or
life-principle (psyche) departing at death; intangible;
invisible; somehow independent of the materiality of the
body. And being
immaterial, hence it was also immortal, surviving the
dissolution of the body in death.
The distinctive
characteristic of Greek philosophy was to develop this line of
reflection into the discovery of mind. In humans,
soul’s independence of matter enabled it to reach beyond
(transcend) the material body to grasp reality in the form of
ideas – to possess consciousness; and even to see itself, to
reflect, to be self-conscious – soul showed itself as mind
(nous).
Spirituality in this sense was the basis of the distinctively
human attributes: language, laughter, abstract thought,
reasoning – all of those characteristics which were thought to
elevate human life above that of lower primates.
For Aristotle, the single
word which says all of this best is rational –
rationality defined humanity (homo est animal
rationale).
Spirituality and rationality henceforth mean the same thing
for a very long period in philosophy.
These Greek conceptions
spread throughout the Hellenistic world. When Western civilisation
collapsed under the impact of the barbarian invasions, parts
of the Greek philosophical heritage survived in the Platonic
and Neo-Platonic writings of the Christian Fathers. The distinctive contribution
of Aristotle was lost to sight for some centuries, but
rediscovered in the High Middle Ages in Arabic translations
from the original Greek, in the work of Islamic philosophers Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi, Abu 'Ali
al-Husayn Ibn Sina and Abu al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn
Rushd, who were well known in the universities of medieval
Europe under the Latinised forms of their names, Alfarabi,
Avicenna and Averroes.
The rediscovery of
Greek philosophy and art climaxed in the Renaissance.
The eighteenth century
Enlightenment was later to reshape the ideal of Reason much
more narrowly into the mould of abstract conceptuality and
discursive reasoning; in reaction, the Romantic Revolution in
philosophy, literature and art attempted to regain something
of the breadth of the Renaissance vision of the human,
integrating reason with affect and imagination. ‘Spirituality’ takes on a
special meaning from this period, which in English, still has
echoes today: spirituality is often used of a person’s
sensitivity to beauty, to the aesthetic dimension; similarly,
one can speak of the spirituality of a work of art.
The period from Kant to
Hegel in German philosophy represents the apogee of the
philosophy of Spirit; but the idea lives on in phenomenology
and other variants of the enduring idealist tradition.
2) The development of the
ethical ideal in Western and Eastern civilisations
About 2500 years ago,
during the first millennium BCE, human cultural evolution
seems to have entered a new phase, marked by a radical change
which spread through, or developed independently in, most
ancient civilisations.
It is often referred to as ‘ethical monotheism’, since a
strong advance in the development of the ethical sense of life
was coupled, in many cases, with a development from polytheism
to monotheism. Although
spirituality has later come to mean more than the reflective
life, or the ethical life, the development of ethics marks an
important stage on the path: it posits an interior dimension
to human life, one in which the individual is confronted by
standards for living which are ‘transcendent’ – which come
from sources above and beyond the individual human level, and
which are capable of making unconditional demands on the
person.
In ancient Israel during
this period, a radical monotheism begins to take shape, in
marked contrast to the polytheistic fertility cults of
neighbouring peoples.
And in this context, the author of Deuteronomy, the fifth book
of the Torah, proclaims that it is the duty of Israel
to love the Lord their God, and their neighbours as
themselves; that this is more important than sacrifices
offered at the altar. In
succeeding centuries the major and minor ‘ethical prophets’ of
Israel preached increasingly strict and explicit standards of
justice by which all were bound.
Socrates (d. 399 BCE), in
Plato’s account, believed that reflecting on life so as to
pursue goodness was a command of God, and at his trial,
declared that he could never desist from ‘examining’ his own
and others’ lives, since ‘the unexamined life is not worth
living’ (Plato 1961 pp. 71-2). His courageous insistence on
this dimension of ethical reflection and questioning in a
society whose religion was still at a more primitive, amoral
stage, was so unwelcome as to cost him his life – not an
uncommon fate of ‘ethical prophets’.
In India, the Upanishads
(e.g. the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad c. 650 BCE) showed
a developing ethical consciousness; the Hindu sages taught
that atman (the human spirit) is identified with Brahman (God) ‘tat tvam asi’ (Beck n.d.).
The teachings of Gautama
Siddhartha (Buddha 563-483 B.C.E.) draw sharply away from the
worldliness of the Vedas; fulfilment of the ethical
demands of the Noble Eightfold Path is the sole way of escape
from the wheel of death and rebirth, fuelled by desire, which
is the cause of all human suffering. Although Buddhism was later
to become extinct in the native land of the Buddha, his
teachings remain to this day extremely influential in China
and South-East Asia.
Later developments in
Hinduism – for example, the Yoga Sutras of Pathanjali (oral
traditions written down between 200 BCE and 50 CE) – show a
similar ethical emphasis; the first requirement on the path of
Yoga is Yama—moral duty, right acting
(Roszak 1975, p. 219)
.
Islam, the most
uncompromising of all the monotheistic religions, appears on
the world scene only centuries later (Muhammad 570-632
CE). It draws partly on
Biblical sources, and presents in the Koran and the
prescriptions of shariat (religious civil law in the
Islamic theocracy) a complete ethical program for both the
individual and society.
3)
‘Spirit / spiritual /spirituality’ acquires an even more
transcendent meaning in Israel and Christianity
The philosophical sense of pneuma takes on a properly religious dimension of
meaning, even more transcendent than ethical reflection, in
the New Testament, in Neo-Platonic philosophy, in subsequent
Christian patristic writing and in Christian and Gnostic
theologies.
(a)
Scriptural roots of ‘spirit /spiritual’
--OT:
Heb. ruah ; shows a breadth of meaning parallel to that
of Gk. pneuma.
Initially breath, wind; breath of the mouth; breath of life;
spirit, animation, agitation, temper, disposition, vivacity,
vigour, courage; spirit of the living being in men and
animals; departing at death; spirit of God as inspiring
ecstatic state of prophecy, imparting energy, resting on the
Messianic king;
ruah elohim (the spirit of the Lord); God’s
creative power – hovering over the waters in Gn.1.
--NT:
especially in the epistles of the apostle Paul: Gk. pneuma spirit, and a new word which Paul coins: pneumatikos – spiritual,
referring to the person under the
influence of the divine Spirit (also
applied to charisms,
blessings, hymns, conduct). ‘Spiritual’ in this sense is
contrasted by Paul with two other modes of being: psychikos, pertaining to the human
soul, indicating what belongs to the merely natural level of
human being, to an earthly, ‘secular’ world (1 Cor 2:14-15) and,
at the opposite extreme from the Spiritual, sarx ,
sarkikos: the flesh, the fleshly person (‘flesh’ here
denoting not the body, but the principle of finitude,
limitation, sinfulness, opposition to God).
(b)
‘Spirituality’
(1)
Earliest uses in English: a) ‘the spirituality’ vs. ‘the
temporality’ – the clergy; the body of spiritual /
ecclesiastical persons (1441 Pol Poems, Songs); also,
ecclesiastical property or revenue held in return for
spiritual services; b) the quality or condition of being
spiritual; attachment to things of the spirit as opposed to
material / worldly things (1500 Dunbar).
(2) Despite the
Reformation’s rejection of monasticism, the teaching of the
Reformers paid great attention to piety, to the manner of
living the gospel, and movements like Pietism and Methodism
have at their core highly developed ‘spiritualities’.
(3) Influenced
by the ‘turn to the subject’ in philosophy’s modern period
from the seventeenth century, spirituality became increasingly
the interior dimension of religion’s public, external and
visible world of doctrine, ethics, ritual and
community.
(4) From the seventeenth
century, especially in France, spiritualité /spirituality refers to a
person’s manner of living the Christian life and seeking
‘Christian perfection’, and particularly to their mode of
private prayer – to the
intense cultivation of religious self-consciousness. Particularly in the religious
orders, there developed ‘styles’ or schools of spirituality:
Benedictine, Ignatian, Carmelite, Alphonsian. Each of these centred on a
particular way of praying, but encompassed an entire spiritual
lifestyle, applicable not only to the monks and nuns of the
orders, but gradually, adopted also by small numbers of laity
for whom piety was a primary concern. Spirituality was their
personal, affective style of living the Christian life.
(5) In
the late twentieth century, from an almost exclusively
Christian, (and mostly Catholic) usage, ‘spirituality’
expanded to embrace the world: of the twenty-five volumes of World Spirituality: An
Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, (Cousins
1985) only three volumes were devoted to Christianity.
Nowadays, the term
‘spirituality’ is used by young people to refer to beliefs,
practices or lifestyles drawing on exotic or ‘New Age’ sources
(such as Asian martial arts, Goddess worship or
neo-paganism). Or
spirituality may consist of a mix of themes from traditional
and non-traditional sources. Some who show no interest in
traditional religion seem nonetheless to be considerably
influenced by these alternative spiritualities; others
interpret their lives in completely secular ways.
In summary: through the
centuries of Christianity, ‘spirituality’ comes to imply much
more than ‘humanity’ – it is the attraction to the things of
the Spirit rather than to earthly things, and, by the
17th century, has come to mean the conscious living
of a Christian way of life – especially its personal, interior
dimension, in contrast to public, external, visible religious
rituals and institutions. But now in late modernity,
spirituality, while retaining the sense of a person’s interior
life, begins to be understood as no longer necessarily linked
to institutional religion; sometimes even standing in
opposition to it.
c) Defining ‘spirituality’
(1) Ways of defining
spirituality
The article ‘Preparing
spirituality for citizenship’ by Jacqueline Watson (2003)
illustrates a courageous but confused approach to
definition. She sets out
to take Wittgenstein’s advice, and derive the meaning of
spirituality from its use – in this case, in a
quite small set of journal articles. She does not recognise that
even within this limited range, the word is used in some quite
different and incompatible senses. Watson tries nonetheless to
arrive at a sort of general, all-embracing definition.
As if we realised that
from usage, ‘blue’ sometimes means a colour; sometimes ‘down
or depressed’, sometimes ‘vulgar, rude, obscene’ as in ‘blue
jokes’; and we ended up with a definition of ‘blue in general’
as ‘coloured depressed vulgarity’!
Hay and Nye (1998), cited
by Watson (2003 p.12), fall into this mistake when they locate
spirituality as ‘delicacy of awareness’, ‘musical or poetic
sensitivity’ at one end of the scale and spirituality as
‘mystical experience’ at the other. They are quite correct in
identifying both of these as among the shades of meaning
attached to the word, but these two meanings are not variants
of some basic form, but equivocal – quite different from each
other, having arisen in different historical circumstances, in
response to different developments, as our condensed history
of the word shows. Thus
Hay and Nye force two different meanings of spirituality (the
philosophical-aesthetic and the religious) on to the same
scale.
The confusion rampant in
the Watson paper is a good argument for stipulative
definitions over lexical definitions in research. Lexical definitions classify
usage; stipulative definitions declare that in using the term
‘spirituality’, the writer intends the meaning ‘X’ and not
other usages such as ‘Y’ and ‘Z’. It is sometimes said that
definitions are ‘arbitrary’; this is true in the sense that
one can draw definitional boundaries wherever one chooses, but
not in the sense that there is no reasoned basis for the
choice. Including some
meanings and excluding others must be supported by appropriate
arguments.
A stipulative definition
should have a strong connection with at least one family of
meanings in usage; otherwise, we are inventing pure technical
jargon, which people will find very difficult to interpret,
because it strays far from common usage.
So we are not obliged to
include in our definition everything that fits into the idea
of ‘spirituality’ in its philosophical sense of ‘having a
mind, a rational soul, a psyche, consciousness, capable of
reflection on itself’, nor in the aesthetic sense of ‘delicacy
of awareness, sensitive receptivity to art’. These senses certainly occur
in the history of the word’s usage, but we may wish
legitimately to emphasise in our research some more specific,
more closely defined meanings.
The other great weakness
in the Hay and Nye approach (on which we comment because
Watson seems so taken with it) is the idea that spirituality,
‘like all awareness, is
a biologically inbuilt constituent of what it is to be human’
(p. 14). If ‘spiritual
awareness’ were a feature of our biology, everyone would be
spiritually aware all the time! But ideas are not
innate! Awareness is an
activity, not a biological structure.
We are not born with a set
of visions / visual experiences, but with eyes, which have the
capacity for sight. If
anything in the line of spirituality is ‘biologically
inbuilt’, it can only be the organic basis of the capacity for
awareness: e.g. the development of a brain and nervous system
of a certain size and complexity of organisation, with certain
capabilities. The
research tradition stemming from Alister Hardy sees spiritual
awareness as probably universal in humans. Such an idea presents no
problem; but the zoologist in Hay leads him to postulate too
hastily an organic basis for this universality. The notion of awareness /
consciousness as ‘biologically inbuilt’ makes no sense, but is
not the only foundation for a universal experience.
Secondly, awareness, or
consciousness, is always awareness of something (or as
phenomenology says, consciousness is intentional). For Hay, the aim of spiritual
development is ‘to be aware of one’s awareness, and to reflect
on this experience’.
This amounts to awareness of awareness of awareness, and Hay
does not want to ‘emphasise the religious or cultural forms of
spirituality’ (which is what people are spiritually aware of)! Such a
reflective process is possible, but it is the profoundest and
most subtle of philosophical reflections – in its extreme
abstractness, it is
light-years from the kind of spiritual awareness teachers
strive to develop in children.
A set of practices is also implied in the notion of
a ‘way of life’: they are the means by which it is enacted, by
which it influences or shapes the lived reality. They may be ritual or non-ritual, collective or
private; e.g. reading, reflection, meditation, prayer, music,
dance, drama. Most
spiritualities give a prominent place to “doing forms”, as it
is called in martial arts: repeating symbolic actions: as in
Yoga, Tai Chi, the Japanese Tea Ceremony, and those forms of
worship called ‘liturgical’. Spiritual practices may
extend to acts of altruism or benevolence towards others; our
study pays particular attention to the ‘social consequences’
of spirituality: ways in which social interaction is shaped by
spiritual beliefs – either consciously or without
deliberation.
d) Religion and
spirituality amongst young people in contemporary Australia
In
contemporary Australia only a very small proportion of the
youth population has anything to do with organised religion.
There has been a growth of interest in alternative forms of
spirituality, but the percentage of the population identifying
with a major religion has fallen from 89 per cent in 1961 to
72 per cent in 2001. The
percentage of the Australian population attending religious
services at least monthly almost halved from about 39 per cent
in 1960 (Mol 1985, p. 58) to 20 per cent in 1998 (Bellamy et
al. 2000, p. 5). Only 14
per cent of all Australians in there twenties attend religious
services at least once a month compared with 35 per cent of
people seventy years of age or older. Attendance has declined most
sharply in the mainstream, previously well-subscribed
Christian denominations.
While 27 per cent of those 70 years or older attend Anglican,
Catholic, Orthodox or Uniting Churches, only 7 per cent of
people in their twenties attend those denominations.
Approximately
the same number of people in their twenties attending
Anglican, Uniting and Orthodox churches combined are attending
Pentecostal churches.
While mainstream churches are attracting comparatively few
younger people, several of the smaller denominations such as
Pentecostals, have grown in numbers and are maintaining high
attendance rates (Hughes 2001).
Despite their low level of
involvement in organised religion, or perhaps because of it,
many young people appear to take a positive view of
‘spirituality’. Whereas
the word used to refer to the cultivation of personal
religiosity based on the religious tradition of a community
(especially Christian), it seems possible that for many in
contemporary society spirituality is not so often based in, or
derived from, one particular tradition or source; rather the
individual assembles items from a variety of sources available
in the ‘spiritual marketplace’ (Roof 1999) into a loose
collage (Bibby 1993; Hughes et al. 1995; Bruce 1999). Instead of providing a
spiritual ‘home’, locating one’s identity in a particular
community, contemporary spirituality may be experienced as a
journey - a ‘spiritual quest’ (Batson et al. 1993; Wuthnow
1998).
Giddens (1994) argues that
since World War Two a ‘post-traditional social order’ has
emerged in western societies, whereby tradition, including
religious tradition, is increasingly open to ‘interrogation or
discourse’. No longer
aligning themselves with any particular institution,
tradition, or meaning-making system, individuals make meaning
by drawing on an ever-increasing range of resources. This has implications for
both religion and spirituality. As religious themes have
begun to become available ‘unbundled’ from particular
traditions and communities, ‘spirituality’ has come to be
understood by many as more radically individual;
self-constructed rather than accepted; free to borrow from
various traditions, but separable from religion, and at times
reacting against it – an alternative to religion (Marler &
Hadaway 2002).
In our interviews, the
term ‘spirituality’ is used by young people to refer to
beliefs, practices or lifestyles drawing on exotic or ‘New
Age’ sources (such as Asian martial arts, Goddess worship or
neo-paganism). Or
spirituality may consist of a mix of themes from traditional
and non-traditional sources. Some who show no interest in
traditional religion seem nonetheless to be considerably
influenced by these alternative spiritualities; others
interpret their lives in completely secular ways.
In summary: through the
centuries of Christianity, ‘spirituality’ comes to imply much
more than ‘humanity’ – it is the attraction to the things of
the Spirit rather than to earthly things, and, by the
17th century, has come to mean the conscious living
of a Christian way of life – especially its personal, interior
dimension, in contrast to public, external, visible religious
rituals and institutions. But now in late modernity,
spirituality, while retaining the sense of a person’s interior
life, begins to be understood as no longer necessarily linked
to institutional religion; sometimes even standing in
opposition to it.
e)
Theory and Research on religion / spirituality
1) Theories of spirituality as a commodity chosen in
an enlarged market:
In the well-known theories
of Batson, Schoenrade & Ventis (1993), Wuthnow (1998,
1999), Roof (1999) and Davie (1994) youth spirituality is
pictured as follows: in the ‘post-traditional’ situation,
young people are on a Quest for meaning; their spirituality is
one of ‘Journey, rather than Home’; they select from a
‘market-place’ of spiritualities and put together their own
eclectic combination independent of institutions -- they
‘believe without belonging’. But few of these theories
take account of continental philosophies of post-modernism
which argue that an even more radical change has taken place
in the relation of the individual to society.
2) Theories that postulate
a radically changed relationship between individual and
society in the postmodern world, leading to a spirituality of
alienation:
In traditional
sociological theory, the individual is first initiated into
the social world (‘primary socialisation’) in a
once-and-for-all manner in early childhood; and later will
undergo various kinds of ‘secondary socialisation’ as
preparation for specific social and occupational roles. Through these roles the
individual is inserted into the network of social institutions
which will organise and structure a considerable proportion of
his or her life.
Continental
theories of postmodernity postulate a very different
relationship between individual and society. According
to Alain Touraine, we are seeing “the end of the definition of
the human being as a social being, defined by his or her place
in society which determines his or her behaviour and
actions”. Instead, the
combination of the “strategic definition of social action that
is not oriented by social norms” and “the defence, by all
social actors, or their cultural and psychological specificity
. . . can be found within the individual, and no longer in
social institutions or universalistic principles’ (1998,
177). This theme of the
changed social location of the individual in postmodernity,
and the new intensity of focus, is a common feature across the
whole range of theories.
“Modern society exists in
its activity of ‘individualizing’ (Bauman 2000, 45). Individualization is a fate,
not a choice (46). It
consists in transforming human identity from a given into a
task, and giving the actor responsibility for that task and
for its consequences.
“Freedom was desired as an
absence of obtrusive and insidious constraints and
limits. Our ancestors
thought of freedom as a state in which one is not told what to
do and not forced to do what one would rather not do. . . .
The price . . . is insecurity (or, rather Unsicherheit:
a much more complex discomfort, which includes uncertainty and
unsafety alongside insecurity) . . .”(Bauman 2001a, 44).
Pierre Bourdieu reflects
on the conditions necessary for a person to be capable of
hoping for social transformation. “To have a well thought-out
intention to transform the present, a modicum of hold on the
present is needed. But
people find that none of the most important levers and
safeguards of their current situation come under their control
e.g. in the case of loss of employment because of recession in
the economy. Any social
position is in the longer run precarious. Fear is diffused and
ambient; it haunts
consciousness and the subconscious. It renders all futures
uncertain’ (Bourdieu 1998, 97).
How is unity is maintained in
a differentiated society? “Until
recently, . . . a normative answer to this question was sought
– as if participation in society led to the assumption of a
minimum of obligation. .
. . increasing differentiation leads to an increasing
generalization of . . . norms and values . . . their directive
value decreases when the complexity of society increases”
(Luhmann 1990, 422-23). “The
cosmologically/religiously founded continuum of meaning breaks
down, and . . . religion
is reduced to one social function among others and condemned
to a kind of faithless belief” (427). Ethical and political
discourse is not now framed around the concept of the ‘just
society’ but around ‘individual rights’. Margaret Thatcher declared:
‘There is no such thing as society’.
As de Tocqueville long ago
suspected, setting people free may make them indifferent. The individual is the citizen’s worst
enemy, suggested de Tocqueville. The individual tends to be
lukewarm, sceptical or wary of the ‘common good’, of the ‘good
society’ or ‘just society’. What is the sense of common interests unless they let each individual
satisfy his or her own? The only two useful things
‘public power’ can do is to observe ‘human rights’, that is,
to let everyone go his or her own way, and to enable everyone
to do this in peace – by guarding the safety of a person’s
body and possessions. (Bauman 2001b, 49)
Touraine’s interpretation, taken literally, would seem
to make it impossible to speak of ‘society’ any longer; and
attempts to formulate social policy would make no sense.
Theories
of postmodernism may nonetheless serve a useful purpose: as a
dramatic metaphor for the changed sense of self, and the
pervasive alienation from society, characteristic of late
modernity, especially among youth. No interpretation of their
situation, or policy recommendations for supporting among them
a sense of belonging, can afford to ignore these factors, to
which postmodernist theory draws attention.
However,
that extraordinarily prescient observer, de Tocqueville,
quoted above, long ago offered an alternative interpretation,
applicable to the late modern situation, but harmonising with
classical social theory.
He presaged today’s symptoms of social dysfunction as the
consequences of
(extreme) individualism, and foresaw clearly the threat it
poses to the social fabric. The individual pursuing only
personal or family interests does not support the citizen’s
concerns. Individualism
is not moved to act for the common good, or for social
justice, but instead sees the only function of the State as to
protect the safety of individuals and their possessions (de
Tocqueville 1839/1997).
In
summary, theories that define contemporary Western society as
having moved into a decisively new ‘postmodern’ phase tend to
define the isolation of the individual and the eclipse of
community as socially determined and irreversible. De Tocqueville, without
postulating any such seismic shift in social relations,
attributed similar effects to (extreme) individualism. This may be the more
parsimonious explanation; but both approaches serve to warn us
that today’s young people are growing up in a situation in
which the forging of basic social relationships is far more
difficult than it was half a century ago. The present project seeks to
shape its research questions and analysis against this
background of theoretical understanding.
The search for personal
meaning; the construction of the life-story:
Young people make sense of
their lives, identities and experiences through the stories
they tell about themselves, their values and experiences. Telling stories enables
individuals to make sense of their experiences, to order
events in a coherent fashion, relate events to other events,
attribute causality and create a sense of biographical
continuity for themselves.
The cultural stock-in-hand
on which individuals can draw for their stories ranges from
complex narratives which embody entire worldviews down to
component ideas, values and symbols, expressed in language,
music, clothing, leisure activities, whole ‘lifestyles’. Moreover, people in different
social settings access and adapt these cultural materials in
different, socially-structured ways, and the kind of picture
or story that results has important consequences both for the
individual and for the society.
Bauman, describing how people
construct life-narratives in an increasingly individualized
society, suggests that “the point of the utmost sociological
relevance is . . . where
the boundary between one’s doings and the conditions under
which one acted (and, by definition, could not have acted
otherwise) is drawn in the course of the narrative. . . .
Lives lived and lives told are closely interconnected. What is taken for granted as
an unchangeable condition in the telling, is likely to be
accepted as one in the living. One lives one’s life as a story
yet to be told, but the way the story hoping to be told is to
be woven decides the technique by which the yarn of life is
spun.” (2001, 7-8). As
mentioned above, Giddens (1994) argues that
now, in Western societies, individual biographies are formed
‘reflexively’, as individuals make meaning by drawing on an
ever-increasing range of resources.
Sociological theory, from
the time of the discipline’s founders, identified religion as intimately involved in the process of
socialisation (Durkheim, 1912/1961). Religion
authoritatively defines the relationship of the individual and
the society: it is the zone of culture containing the
“master-narrative” which encodes the culture’s worldview; it
provides the language for expressing the sacred or
transcendent, the rituals and other practices for maintaining
its place in daily life.
Religion also comprises an ethos—a detailed value system for
individual and social life, given religious legitimation in
the worldview, ranging
from general principles to detailed practical norms. Religion lays the foundation
for community life (Putnam, 2000, p.66).
Spirituality, in the
traditional context, largely overlapped with religion. In
contemporary society, where religious themes have begun to
become available 'unbundled' from particular traditions and
communities, 'spirituality' has come to be quite widely
understood in a much more individualistic mode:
self-constructed rather than simply accepted from one’s
religious tradition; free to borrow from various traditions,
but separable from religion, and at times reacting against it
- an alternative to religion (Marler & Hadaway 2002,
Fuller 2001). It
becomes possible for young people to have a very low level of
involvement in organised religion, but still to view
spirituality positively.
There are several
alternative explanations for the changes in participation in
institutional religion, especially among those in their late
teens and twenties. Some
sociologists note the development of consumerist attitudes to
religion: Luckmann and secularisation theorists suggest that
religion, still intimately entwined with the formation of
personal identity, is now restricted to the private sphere,
and that its dominant themes are personal autonomy,
self-development and self-realisation. Instead of embracing
the worldview and ethos of one particular tradition and
religious community, the individual assembles items from a
variety of sources available in the 'spiritual marketplace'
(Roof, 1999) into a loose collage (Bibby, 1993, Hughes et
al., 1995; Bruce, 1999). For many, contemporary
spirituality is experienced and understood as an evolving
story or journey - a 'spiritual quest' rather than the
location of one's identity in a particular community (Batson et al., 1993; Wuthnow, 1998).
Religion
and spirituality are significant in relation to citizenship,
we believe, for reasons that echo Weber’s argument against
Marx: no doubt the
decline in adherence to institutionalised religious
communities and the growth of individualistic spiritualities
is mostly a reflection of the changed social location
of the individual in post-traditional society; but culture is
not always the dependent variable vis-à-vis economic
and social change: where spirituality remains attached to a
religious community, there is a basis for resistance to
individualising trends. “Religious
institutions tend to promote norms of cooperation and a
worldview that encourages a focus on problems lying outside the self” (Crystal & DeBell, 1998).
f) ‘The Spirit of
Generation Y’ – The Spirituality of Australian Youth and Young
People aged 13-29.
This is an ongoing
three-year research project (Singleton, Mason &
Webber 2004). The project began in 2002
with a pilot study, consisting of 20 lengthy interviews, and
was used to refine our definition of spirituality, our
interview schedule, and an initial analytical framework.. It
was followed in 2003-2004 by Phase 1 of the main project,
recently completed, which consisted of 40-minute, in-depth,
face-to-face interviews with 64 teenagers and young adults
from widely varying backgrounds. Phase 2, now commencing,
comprises a telephone survey of a national random sample of
about 1100 teenagers and young adults; in Phase 3, another 70
qualitative interviews will be conducted – some of them with
the same subjects who were interviewed in Phase 1.
The purpose of the first
phase was to investigate in detail the variety of
spiritualities to be found in our target age-group. As in all
qualitative research, it was not our aim to profile the
population, or to describe typical cases, but to explore in
depth a selection of cases chosen to manifest the range and
variations of spirituality.
Target
sample. The
sample was designed to include a diverse range of young
people, including private and public school students, tertiary
students, those in the workforce, the unemployed and those
from both high and low socio-economic backgrounds. We sought
to have equal numbers of male and female informants, and an
appropriate mix of rural and urban. The sampling was
strategic: we sought to interview a number of people from each
cohort so as to enable us to get a sense of the types of
spiritualties one might find amongst these different
groups.
Achieved sample. In the core project, a
total of 64 interviews were conducted with young people aged
13–29. Approximately half were female and half male.
Age Group
|
No.
|
%
|
13-14
|
12
|
19
|
15-19
|
43
|
67
|
20-24
|
4
|
6
|
25-29
|
5
|
8
|
Total
|
64
|
100
|
Informants were recruited
from a range of organizations. Over half were recruited
through schools (four schools participated in the project, two
Catholic and two Protestant). One quarter of informants were
involved in a week-long programme devoted to the development
of civic consciousness and skills among youth. The rest of the
sample was recruited through a community college, a ‘work for
the dole’ scheme, a regional Catholic Education Office and a
Bible College.
Sixty-one per cent of
informants were born in Australia to Australian parents.
Twenty-eight per cent were second generation Australians: 14
per cent had parents from an English-speaking country (UK and
New Zealand) and 14 per cent from a non-English speaking
country (Poland, Holland, Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Syria,
Mauritius, Malaysia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea and
Brazil). The remaining 11 per cent of informants were born
overseas; eight per cent of these in non-English speaking
countries.
The interviews took
between 30 minutes and an hour to conduct. A better
quantitative measure of content is the approximate number of
words spoken by the person being interviewed, which varied
from 620 to 10,500 words. As might be expected, younger
informants were less articulate, with some notable exceptions.
The transcripts of the more extensive interviews ran to
fifteen pages of single-spaced type.
2. Analytical framework
Our subjects’ spirituality
is understood and described in terms of an analytical
framework derived partly from theory, but strongly shaped by
successive attempts to frame meaningfully the rich content of
the interviews themselves. We see spirituality as having three
components: worldview, ethos and practices.
Worldview
What is the shape of this
person’s life-story? (Has any story with a defined form even
emerged yet?) How do they see and project themselves in
relation to their world? What beliefs and ideas do they draw
upon in interpreting their experience? Sometimes, there will
be components which are both more subtle and more influential
than clearly-formulated ideas; so we also ask: what
significant experiences does this person relate? These may
give rise to various forms of experiential knowledge – and come to expression as ‘sensings’, intuitions, feelings,
moods, motivations, attractions, questions etc., rather than
clearly formulated rational reflections.
-Articulation of the worldview:
To what degree, we further
ask, is our subject’s spirituality named, explicit, expressed,
articulated, known, owned, understood, recognised, and
reflected on?
-Coherence of the
worldview:
are the stories, beliefs
and ideas which are present consistent with each other, or are
there marked discontinuities? What structural pattern or
patterns do we see linking items of content? What level of
complexity can be accommodated? How is ambiguity handled? Are
incompatible items forced into a Procrustean fit? Is there a
tendency towards the unity of a ‘system’, (imported or
created, whether explicitly recognised or not)? Where is there
flexibility, and where rigidity? What seems more stable and
settled, and what is in flux?
Ethos:
Spirituality, as we see
it, does not consist solely, or even primarily, of stories or
beliefs or ideas. These may be quite dependent upon ethos,
memorably defined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, p.
127) as ‘the tone, character and quality of life; its moral
and aesthetic style and mood’; which also includes values
(more universal or general principles of evaluation),
attitudes (more particular affective orientations towards
specific objects or ideas – especially towards the self,
others, the surrounding society) and dispositions (habitual
preparedness to act in a specific manner). Geertz’s conception
alerts us to such subtle but powerful components as the usual
feeling-tone of a person’s life; and elements of style and
mood derived from aesthetic as well as moral values and
criteria.
Practices:
How is spirituality
expressed in action? How does it shape the way a person
regularly acts?
As we have emphasised from
our earliest reports, we believe that much less weight should
be assigned to a mere idea with which a person may toy idly,
without much understanding of it, without any specific
associated practice, without any impact on the person’s
lifestyle. So our
interviews enquired in detail about practices related to
spirituality.
We found it useful to
construct a set of ‘types’ of
spirituality, which combine the dimensions of worldview, ethos
and practices:
Traditional: grounded in the tradition of a
world-religion (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism,
Judaism);
New Age: embracing a framework from one or
more New Age religions or spiritual paths: (e.g.
neo-paganism, goddess worship, Wicca, channelling, Reiki,
crystals); or occult or paranormal beliefs and
practices: (e.g. spiritualism, belief in ghosts, superstition,
astrology); or elements of Eastern or esoteric religious
practice detached from the tradition to which they belong:
(e.g. Yoga, Tai Chi, TM);
Eclectic: a collage of themes from disparate
sources, sometimes including elements from traditional
religions – for many authors, this is the paradigmatic
‘post-traditional’ spirituality;
Secular: ways of making sense of life which
reject religious traditions; sometimes finding an alternative
base in science, philosophy or economic theory; often
predominantly pragmatic and atheoretical;
Self-developmental: focussed largely around
issues of personal autonomy, self-development,
self-realisation;
Embryonic (unformed, undeveloped, inchoate,
tentative, emergent, amorphous, nascent): largely implicit and
unreflective – because of the subject’s early adolescent
stage, or lack of education, cultural, social or family
ambience, or brutalisation, or other factors which have
impeded development.
Particular strategies, to
be described shortly, were employed to explore the
‘primordial’ dimension of spirituality in these
interviews.
3.
Primordial spiritual experiences.
a)
‘Primordial’ Spiritual Experience
We
postulate that there are spiritual experiences which give rise
to an experiential knowledge which, for various reasons[14], is not
brought, through reflection, to conscious rational
knowledge. Commonly,
this may occur because the subject lacks any framework of
interpretation in which such experiences can be assigned
meaning. Consequently,
these events of inchoate spiritual awareness remain in a realm
beyond words, lurking on the periphery of consciousness[15], in what Schutz (1967), in
a suggestive metaphor, calls the ‘penumbra’. Since they have not been
reflected on and conceptualised, people are not aware of them
in such a way as to be able to answer direct questions about
them. They are primitive,
basic, fundamental to more developed forms of religious
experience and spirituality, prior to explicit religious
faith, yet continue to play a role underlying these more
developed levels of religious experience, beliefs and
knowledge.
If it seems to be the case
that people’s deepest sense of themselves, and of what matters
most in their lives, lies at least partly in a realm beyond
words, nonetheless this need not make it completely
inaccessible; there are other ways in which it can be
recognised and expressed.
The final component of our
hypothesis, then, is that it is possible to ‘evoke’ spiritual
experiences – to assist the subject to retrieve them from the
periphery of consciousness, and to acknowledge, express and
recognise them, by means of appropriate symbols.
We propose the term ‘primordial’ to describe this
elementary, fundamental kind of religious or spiritual
experience. The Oxford
English Dictionary defines ‘primordial’ as “original,
fundamental, existing at the beginning” (etymologically derived from
the Latin words primus (first) and ordiri (to
begin)).
Our hypothesis is
supported by a considerable body of previous research
(although other
researchers have not used the term ‘primordial’ to designate a
class of religious or spiritual experiences).
b) Findings of earlier
survey research on religious / spiritual experiences in the UK
and Australia
Research
on religious experience in the tradition of Alister Hardy
(1966), carried forward primarily by Edward Robinson (1977,
1978, 1987, Robinson and Jackson 1987), and David Hay (1987,
1990, Hay and Nye 1998), concludes that religious / spiritual
experience is virtually universal -- that it is inherent in
humanity and culture. We will briefly review this
work, and some parallel research we have conducted in
Australia.
In 1966, in his pioneering
survey of religion in Australia, Hans Mol
(Mol 1971)
included the question:
“Have you ever experienced the presence of God since
childhood?” 48% of the
sample answered in the affirmative.
In 1983, as part of the
World Values Study Survey, ‘Hardy’s question’[18] on
religious experience was administered to a national sample of
Australians aged 14 and over.[19] 44% of respondents gave a
positive reply. The
corresponding figure for Britain 9 years earlier had been
36%. There are
indications that in the decade previous to 1976, there had
been an increasing trend in responses to similar questions in
both Britain and the USA (Hay, 1985:115-117). In Britain, age, years of
education and social class were positively associated with
report of religious experience; in Australia, there was no
association with these variables, but a clear echo of the
strong association found in Britain with church attendance and
‘importance of spiritual experience’.[20]
The following table
compares the British and Australian responses.
Table 1. Reported frequency of
religious experiences
|
Britain 1976
|
Australia 1983
|
|
All
|
All
|
Men
|
Women
|
Once or twice
|
18%
|
13%
|
11%
|
14%
|
Several times
|
10%
|
15%
|
13%
|
18%
|
Often
|
6%
|
10%
|
8%
|
12%
|
All the time
|
2%
|
6%
|
5%
|
6%
|
TOTAL
|
36%
|
44%
|
37%
|
50%
|
The Australian response
was significantly higher than that in Britain, peaking at 50%
of women respondents, and showing a slightly greater frequency
(‘several times’ vs. ‘once or twice’).
The British responses
showed that those over 55 were much more likely to report an
experience.
The Australian responses
were evenly distributed across age groups: 42% of those aged
between 16 and 24 answered positively, and 44% of those over
age 65.
Even more interesting was
the denomination of those responding affirmatively to the
question above:
Table 2. Denomination of those
reporting religious experience
|
Britain
|
Australia
|
Anglican
|
33%
|
37%
|
Catholic
|
41%
|
47%
|
Other Christian
|
68%
|
81%
|
Agnostic
|
23%
|
21%
|
Atheist
|
24%
|
36%
|
In both countries, it is
remarkable that a significant proportion of those who regarded
themselves as agnostics or atheists reported such
experiences. The
strongest response, especially in Australia, came from “Other
Christian” denominations – not surprisingly, since many of
these denominations – especially Pentecostals -- place much
greater emphasis on religious experience than more traditional
churches.
About 50% of those who
attended a church at least occasionally responded positively;
and about 27% of those who said they never attended apart from
weddings and funerals.
Again, what is striking is that so many of the second group
reported an experience of this kind.
When Hay later pursued the
topic by conducting 172 personal interviews in the northern
industrial city of Nottingham, the proportion responding
positively (62%) rose to double the level of the survey
response (which in Nottingham, had been 30%); a face-to-face
interview appeared to be a much better setting in which to
raise this sensitive topic than a mere question on a survey
form (1987).
In a later survey in
Britain (1987) by Hay and Heald, a positive response of 48%
was reported
(Hay 1990)
.
Further research in
Australia has taken the following form: in the 1996 survey and
again in 2001, a subsample (N=5661) of Catholics attending
Mass on the weekend of the survey in a large sample of
parishes throughout Australia were asked a set of questions
about religious experiences. A shorter set of questions
was asked in the 2001 survey; the results were very similar to
those of 5 years before.
The research design was
based on a chronological
framework, exploring:
-remote antecedents of
the experience: e.g. personal religious background
variables;
-proximate antecedents: the situation or
occasion of the experience
-the experience itself: often
indescribable -- an ‘ineffability gap’;
-proximate
aftermath: immediate affective response and
interpretation;
-remote aftermath: later effects,
re-interpretations, evaluation.
Three multiple-response
questions on kinds of religious experiences (rx) and the
circumstances of their occurrence were shaped to accommodate
three varieties of religious experience:
-direct, explicit
experiences -- the classic Protestant conversion experiences
and some others similar;
-primordial, implicit
experiences:
-in positive circumstances: ‘ecstasies’: rx
and peak experiences,
-in negative
circumstances ‘boundaries’: rx in life-crisis situations;
akin to those of James’s ‘sick soul’, and Batson and
Ventis’s ‘existential concerns’.
Respondents were asked
“Have you ever experienced any of the following?” and how
often. There followed a
list of nine of the more well-known, explicitly religious
experiences, such as being ‘baptised in the Spirit’ or ‘born
again’, or experiencing an answer to prayer, or being called
or guided by God.
Responses were:
Never
Rarely Sometimes Often
22%
19% 39% 19%
Those over the age of 50
were more likely (65%) to have had such experiences
‘sometimes’ or ‘often’, compared with younger people (51%);
and women (61%) more than men (53%).
Two further sets of
questions asked about experiences of quite a different kind:
those which take place in everyday life, when an event which
is usually quite ordinary becomes the occasion of an
experience of God.
“Have any of the following
ordinary events had special meaning for you because they
strengthened your awareness of God?” Two lists followed: one of
events which are usually experienced as ‘positive’, such as a
wedding or the birth of a child; the other containing various
challenging or difficult circumstances of life, such as a
death in the family or a crisis in a relationship.
When asked how often they
had such experiences, the responses were:
Never
Rarely Sometimes Often
2%
43%
11%
44%
Again, women and those
over 50 were more likely to answer ‘sometimes’ or ‘often’.
Obviously, these ‘everyday
life’ experiences are much more common than the ‘explicitly
religious’ kind.
The next survey question
asked about the occasion or setting in which the experience
took place:
Q. Has this happened in
any of the following situations? (Mark all those that apply)
Then followed a list of 19
situations (ten ‘highs’ and nine ‘lows’) in which such an
awareness might have occurred. The ten most common
situations, in order from most often chosen to least often
chosen, were as follows:
-The birth of a child / or
a special moment with a child -Enjoying the beauty of nature
-Death of a family member or friend
-An
answer to prayer
-A sense of being guided by God
-At mass, or another service, or praying with a
group -Accepting Jesus as Lord and Saviour
-While in
some place that is special to you
-Being healed by
God
-In personal suffering
There was very little
difference in the order of these choices between those under
and over the age of 50, and between men and women, except that
women were more likely than men to choose “the birth of a
child”
We wanted to know about
the “aftermath” of the experience; how did it leave them
feeling? What were they
thinking? Did they
“know” anything more than before? Did they have any new beliefs
or convictions? Did they
do anything different as a result? The question we asked was:
“How did this event strengthen your awareness of God?”,
and a list of possible responses to the occurrence was given;
it was equivalent to asking: ‘How did you feel / what did you
know immediately afterwards?’.
The order of the eight
most common responses (from most frequent to least frequent)
was:
-a moment of truth, of
deeper conviction that God was real / God became more
important in my life
-I had a strong sense of awe,
wonder
-Being forgiven, renewed
-Extraordinary
joy without any clear reason
-A sense that my
surroundings, the universe, other people and myself were
totally one in God
-A sense of determination to
change my life
-A new understanding of the
relationship between Jesus’ life and mine
-A sense
of the harmony or order in the universe / of the meaning and
purpose in events.
Younger (under age 50)
respondents were a little more likely than older people to
choose ‘awe, wonder’; the older group more likely to choose
‘being forgiven’. Women
chose ‘extraordinary joy’ and ‘can’t describe’ more often than
men. Otherwise a common
pattern prevailed across age and gender.
Finally, we wanted to know
how they viewed the experience in retrospect. How did it stand up to later
reflection? As merely a
moment when they got “carried away”, or did it seem to have
lasting significance?
When asked “How valuable do you now think this
experience was?”, very few chose ‘Not valuable at all’ or ‘Not
very valuable’; nearly 20% were undecided about the value of
the experience, but the large majority (80%) chose either ‘
Very valuable’ (60%) or ‘The most valuable experience I ever
had’ (20%).
Recalling that almost 90%
of the sample reported such an experience, we discover that,
with the benefit of hindsight upon an event which may have
occurred only once and long ago, no longer caught up in the
emotion attached to the occasion, most of those who had such
an experience judge it to have been ‘very valuable’; and for
one fifth, it seems to have been the discovery of the ‘pearl
without price’!
The responses also varied
according to the occasion / situation / circumstances in which
the experience had occurred.
Table 3 shows, first, in
the left column, ten kinds of experience, in order, according
to how frequently people rated this experience as the most
valuable experience in their life. Second, it shows the three
most frequent responses to each type of experience (the
response with 1 in its column was the most frequent for the
type of experience named at left, so for example, the three
commonest responses to a strong experience of God’s presence
while hearing a sermon were, first, “a new understanding of
the relationship between Jesus’ life and mine”, second “a
sense of determination to change my life”, and third, “a
moment of truth, of deeper conviction that God was real / God
became more important in my life”).
Table 3. The ten most
highly valued experiences, and most common responses to
each
|
Sense
of
awe |
Uni-
verse one
with God |
Extra-
ordinary
joy |
Sense
of
being for-
given |
Loss
of
fear
of death |
Con-
viction
that God was real |
Sense
of
meaning
in
universe |
New
relation-
ship
with
Jesus |
Deter-
mined
to
change
life |
1 Birth of a child /
or a special moment with a child |
1 |
3 |
2 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 Beauty of
Nature |
2 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
1 |
|
|
3 A death in the
family |
3 |
|
|
2 |
1 |
|
|
|
|
4 At Mass / in
prayer group |
|
|
|
2 |
|
3 |
|
1 |
|
5 In Sacred /
special place |
|
1 |
3 |
|
|
|
2 |
|
|
6 Personal
suffering |
|
|
|
3 |
1 |
|
|
|
2 |
7 Quiet reflection /
prayer |
|
|
|
3 |
|
2 |
|
1 |
|
8 A
wedding |
|
3 |
1 |
|
2 |
|
|
|
|
9 Desolation /
despair |
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
2 |
1 |
10 Hearing a
sermon |
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
1 |
2 |
Results of these two large
random-sample surveys convinced us that primordial experiences
were very common amongst church-attenders in one
denomination.
The question of whether
they would also be commonly experienced by people of other
denominations, and those professing no religion, and
particularly whether they would be observed among and young
people (in these age-groups, church attendance is at its
lowest level) still remained to be answered, although the 1983
World Values Survey had provided some encouragement to believe
that the answers to these question would be affirmative.
The “Spirit of Generation
Y” project provided an opportunity to explore both of these
questions.
c) Method
Our method requires firstly a careful phenomenological epokhe (bracketing) exercise:
-not assuming that all ‘strong believers’ or religious
conservatives are fundamentalists; being careful to use that
label as accurately descriptive of groups with that historical
origin and self-designation, rather than as a broader
pejorative; similar care with the label ‘superstition’;
avoiding pejorative labels generally – also for New Age
practices;
-particular care in interpreting responses of those
whose spiritual style is distasteful or repugnant to the
researcher;
-rejecting the assumption that spirituality is a purely
or basically rational knowledge or belief about which the
believer can or should be able to answer simple rational
questions;
-rejecting the assumption that whatever happens to be
called ‘spirituality’ will function as such in our defined
sense of the word; (our interview schedule does not use the
word spirituality at any point); i.e. rejecting the
identification of “common-sense” and “scientific” usages of
terminology;
-avoiding asking “researcher’s questions” of the
subject: e.g. “Are your decisions on X influenced by Y?” People are often unaware of
what influences them.
The answer to this question can only be determined by a
disciplined process of scientific inquiry, which is a
researcher’s task, and which the subject is generally not
equipped to engage in.
Our methods for developing
a ‘thick description’ of contemporary youth spirituality will
be illustrated by examples, first from our pilot study,
consisting of 20 long interviews, then by means of selections
from the 64 interviews of Phase 1 of the
project.
One popular research
approach has been to ask subjects whether they consider
themselves ‘a spiritual person’ (e.g. Marler and Hadaway
2002); others have asked directly about spirituality. We
pursued this line of questioning in the very first draft of
our interview schedule. As a starting point for discussion, we
asked informants: ‘Now, I want to ask you about the term
spirituality. Different people have different ideas of what
spirituality might be. What is your idea of spirituality?’.
Typical responses included 13-year-old Stephen: ‘The term
spirituality, what does that mean? It must be aims or
something, I don’t know, aim for the top or something.’
12-year-old Peter replied: ‘If you believe in something, God
or something.’ The informants’ answers not only reflect
uncertainty about the term itself; this question did not
provide us with a useful pathway for asking follow-up
questions.
For these reasons, taking
particular account of the age range of our target group, we
stopped using the words ‘spirituality’ and ‘spiritual’ in the
interview schedule. Instead, we formulated less obtrusive,
more focussed questions (see below). As the interviews
progressed, the value of this approach became clear: those who
were prejudiced against some particular form of spirituality
did not write off the interview as concerned with something
irrelevant.
Our interview schedule
also placed a considerable premium on eliciting personal
narratives – stories recounting their own experiences – as
opposed to asking questions which draw on formal conceptual
knowledge. Recent research demonstrates that telling stories
enables individuals to make sense of their experiences, to
order events in a coherent fashion, relate events to other
events and create a sense of biographical continuity for
themselves (Kerby, 1991; Alasuutari, 1995; Gubrium & Holstein, 1997; Singleton,
2001). Consequently, an informant’s personal orientation,
sense of self, values and worldview are all apparent in the
stories they tell about themselves (Kerby, 1991; Singleton,
1999; 2001). Personal narratives reveal not only what people
do and experience, but also how they feel and decide, and they
reveal these dimensions in a much more real and natural way
than if we asked ‘What do you feel about X?’.
Questions for providing a
‘thick description’ of spirituality
Our stipulative definition
of spirituality – a conscious way of life based on a
transcendent referent – led us to inquire about spiritual
practices, beliefs and experiences. If an informant indicated
religious belief and affiliation, we asked about the beliefs
and associated practices such as personal prayer, Bible
reading, attendance at services and other activities. We also
asked about alternative and ‘New Age’ practices which are now
part of the broader ‘spiritual marketplace’ (Roof, 1999), as
well as those usually classified as ‘paranormal’, such as
reading one’s horoscope and following its advice, taking part
in a séance, having a tarot reading. Questions about these
practices and beliefs were formulated in ways which would
encourage storytelling (for example: Have you ever got
seriously into: yoga, meditation, Tai-Chi, chanting? Can you
tell me the story about how you came to be involved in this activity?).
Certain kinds of spiritual
practices are characteristic of age groups, something we took
into account when formulating questions. Australian
adolescents are more likely to have participated in a séance,
read their horoscope, or had a powerful encounter with nature,
whereas those in the young adult bracket may have participated
in what Roof (1999) describes as ‘client services’ (i.e. paid
services), like visiting a medium.
Our interview schedule
also invited narratives about various kinds of experiences of
transcendence. In the manner of other studies, we asked, in
the pilot stage of our project, direct questions about feeling
close to nature or feeling some kind of spiritual force. Some
people relate such experiences to the meaning of their
existence.
Our methodology has three
distinctive features: no direct mention of the term
spirituality, the soliciting of personal narratives and the
use of symbolic techniques to evoke primordial spiritual
experiences.
We noted earlier that even
experiences of which the subject initially had no recollection
could be evoked by the use of symbols. The first technique we
adopted for this purpose was to utilise a non-verbal symbol:
the photograph. We
showed each subject eleven photographs selected from the Photolanguage Australia series (Cooney &
Burton, 1986),
A second
technique was adapted from Maslow
(1970, pp. 59, 84 ). Exploring ‘peak-experiences’,
he found that subjects found it difficult to recall them, and
showed a certain reluctance to doing so. So he devised a method for
assisting his research subjects to bring these experiences
into the focus of awareness. He called his approach
‘rhapsodic isomorphic discourse’; stripped of the jargon, it
consists, firstly, in the creation of an encouraging and
approving atmosphere in which subjects felt safe to recall and
express their experiences. Secondly, the method involved
telling stories about, or giving examples of, such
experiences. These can
evoke in the hearer by a kind of association, the hitherto
implicit or suppressed awareness of analogously similar
experiences. The hearer may not have had any of the actual
experiences mentioned by the researcher; they may in fact
recall things vastly different from the examples, but which
are nonetheless part of the ‘family’ of primordial spiritual
experiences in which we are interested
d) Pilot study: techniques
and responses
The photos elicited a
series of interesting responses. [26] For example, 21-year-old
“Aldi” said:
S: All right. I think I’ve
got it already. It’s got to be that one.
I: Yeah, the one with the boy
holding the stick up to the big tree?
S: Only because I have a
bit of a reputation with my friends as kind of being the
little child-like one and I hopefully have a bit of an aura
like this little childish mischief thing going on. I don’t
know if you’ve noticed. But yeah and it’s also the little boy
standing in front of the really big tree. It’s kind of like
he’s just discovered that there’s something bigger than him
the world.
In similar fashion,
22-year-old “Romi” said:
S: I’ve picked three. I’ll
explain all three. That one.
I: That’s the man in
the boat.
S: Because I love the sea.
I love to walk by the sea. And the boat is like going off to
have an adventure somewhere. This one is the railway lines
because it’s like all these different things combining:
family, uni, and jobs. And everything is going somewhere. And
also this one because of the church windows. When I was
overseas, which was one of the biggest things in my life, I
went to so many churches and all so beautiful and they all
looked something like that. And I loved sitting in them
because it was so quiet and beautiful. I went to one that was
one of the Benedictine monks’. It was a chapel and there was
one other person there. It was out in the country and all the
monks had come out to sing. I was sitting up there, and they
were all singing.
Both informants’ answers
indicate significant elements of their worldview and the ways
in which they see themselves, and both relate different kinds
of experiences of transcendence.
Second, we asked the
following question:
“People sometimes say they
sense a kind of presence or power, or feel they are a part of
something bigger than themselves. Often they can’t understand
it. Sometimes it happens like this: (The remainder of this
question was on a card, given to the respondent to read).
“When someone you love
dies, or you are extremely stressed, you sense a presence
which brings very strong comfort or reassurance; or you are in
the country or at the beach, and suddenly you feel strongly
that you are united with the world around you, or nature seems
especially beautiful or amazing. Has anything like that ever
happened to you? Can you tell me about it?”
This question elicited
several accounts of spiritual experiences from the small pilot
sample. Here is one example: in response, self-professed
atheist, 22-year-old “Richard” said:
S: I’d say this is the closest. I’ll give you a story
of the closest I’ve ever come to spirituality in my entire
life. [It] would have to be when I was looking after the woman
with emphysema. Her name was Gladys and she was a very, very
devout Christadelphian. So she always reminded me how the Jews
killed Jesus [informant was Jewish] … you know, but I took
that in my stride and she would always try and convert me to
her faith. Anyway, after caring for her for about eight
months, you know, one day before I stopped, I had to stop, she
just said that she would remember me, and even though I didn’t
believe that she as going to heaven or hell or whatever, and
that there’s an after life, that affected me profoundly. It
made me feel very good, and that’s the closest.
(e) The vignettes of spiritual
experiences
“Rohan” chooses the photo
of the railway tracks, commenting:
S: Because it’s just gone
in every direction. Like, you just don’t know which way it’s
going to go. It’s all mixed up.
I: Yeah, so you feel at
the moment sort of you’re not sure where life’s
going?
S: I’m not sure what I
want to do with my life.
Later in the interview,
Rohan reads a card on which there are several short
descriptions of ‘religious experiences’; and asked to select
anything that reminds him of his own experience, indicates one
of the accounts and comments: ‘He goes on about how it’s just
useless and stuff and if there is a God, then how can bad
things happen kind of things. That’s what he’s trying to say,
and that’s how I feel sometimes, you know.’ The item on which
he is commenting contains the phrase: ‘feeling desperate about
the uselessness of my life’, and goes on to describe ‘ the
feeling of a Presence, of Light, of Love, all around me.’
There is nothing in the account about the problem of ‘bad
things happening’. That’s something Rohan adds in, which he
associates with the ‘sense of how it’s useless’.
Perhaps we can discern an
edge of frustration, of anxiety here. He’s like someone who
realises that they have lost their way; lost confidence in the
map they had been using up till now; there is a sense of being
overwhelmed by the number of possible choices; but he seems to
be holding panic at bay. There is also a calmness and a sense
of confidence that he will be able to work things
out.
Another of the scenarios
begins with the words: ‘No one in our family went to church,
…‘ and goes on to
describe a strong experience of feeling one with the universe.
Rohan comments: ‘And this one, when no one in the family goes
to church -- and that’s how my family is.’ But then,
surprisingly, he adds: ‘Sometimes you just feel, like, a
religious presence when you think about it.’
He doesn’t tell us any
more about feeling this presence; unfortunately, the
interviewer did not ask.
We are inclined, on
theoretical grounds, to expect these scarcely articulated
experiences to be present on the edge of consciousness,
exercising a subtle subterranean ‘pull’ on young people’s
explicit thinking and feeling.
“Katherine”
I: [Handing Card A to subject]. Can you
say if any of that applies to you?
S: I stayed in a caravan
park and I would go for a walk on the beach in the morning or
night and just sort of that being at the beach makes you feel
like not smaller but certainly there is something else out
there. I certainly believe that experience has helped me
convince myself almost that there is something else, something
higher. I haven’t really decided to go searching as much as
some others, simply because I don’t think at this stage of my
life it’s most important that I make a decision of what I
believe. Certainly that
kind of experience has given me this feeling that there has to
be something more around me, something bigger and if it
something bigger it’s better.
[Later, after a question
on belief in ghosts] . . . Certainly there have been times
when I’ve felt a presence or something bigger or higher than
me. I’m not sure what.
I: Can you tell me about one
of those?
S: Well, I know that I was lying
in bed one night after my grandfather had died, six months or
whatever after and just thinking about it and I felt like he
was almost with me, but there was no one in the room, but that
feeling of some kind of spirit being there. . . . Certainly at the time I
was thinking that it was my grandfather or hoping that it was
my grandfather and sort of making me feel better about it and
making it okay.
Both the sense of
‘something else’ in Nature, and of the presence of someone who
has recently died, are very common ‘primordial’ experiences. And in Katherine’s case, as
is typical of such experiences, the subject has no clear
framework of interpretation in which they are assigned the
kind of meaning attached to a concept or idea. They may not
fit in with previously learned beliefs from a religious
tradition, or may even be disapproved of within that
framework; they remain vaguer ‘sensings’ or intuitions arising
from the experience; yet may nonetheless carry with them a
strong sense of validity – the ‘truth of experience’, and
powerful emotive weight and influence because of their
directness and immediacy.
4. Conclusion
In both the pilot project
interviews and the Phase 1 interview series, many interviewee
responses were similar to the examples we have described. They were given by subjects
who were devoutly religious in a traditional mode, and also by
those who had been brought up within a religious tradition,
but were now suspending those beliefs, unsure as to whether
they were still credible, or seeking further
understanding. Most
interestingly, similar replies were given by young people of
quite secular mentality, who had either repudiated their
former religious beliefs, or had not been brought up in any
religious tradition, knew very little about religion, and were
not curious to know more. But such responses were by no
means universal in our interview sample.
The research team felt
that the application of the methods left much to be desired:
the interviewers, though skilful at achieving rapport with the
subjects, and familiar with other religious and spiritual
topics, were either unfamiliar with primordial experiences, or
were not convinced by our rationale for them; in any case they
did not project the kind of positive, encouraging style in
asking these questions which Maslow found indispensable if
subjects were to feel secure enough to give expression to this
kind of experience. We
have discovered numerous obstacles which confront informants
in the expression of such experiences, in addition to those
related by Maslow, which apply particularly in the Australian
cultural setting. The
greatest fear on the part of people who are considering
relating something of this sort is that they will be ridiculed
or regarded as odd.
Needless to say, this fear has its greatest potency for
teenagers.
Although, in general,
accounts of primordial experiences come more often from
persons high in religiosity, with some of the most devout of
these we drew a complete blank in interviews. We hypothesise that in highly
religious types, such basic or primitive experiences may be
‘overlaid’ by much more specifically religious experiences
within their own tradition. Also, because of the
considerable dissimilarity in tone between primordial
experiences and conventionally religious ones, people for whom
orthodoxy is salient may experience some concern that such
experiences are at variance with strongly-held religious
beliefs. In some
“high-church” religious styles, in contrast with, say,
Pentecostal religion, such experiences are not expected or
encouraged, and may be disparaged as dangerous, potentially
heretical, or superstitious.
Many of the responses
which were offered were brief yet promising, but were
inadequately followed up by the interviewers with the further
questions we had suggested.
Nonetheless, we are
encouraged enough by these responses to believe that our
methods are reasonably effective in evoking primordial
experiences.
We face two further
difficult tasks: first, for the large-sample telephone survey,
which constitutes phase 2 of the project, how to adapt our
methods to a situation where we must devise ‘closed’ questions
with very few response options, have much less interview time
and no possibility of showing the photographs. In addition, the telephone
interview setting imposes more psychological distance between
interviewer and subject, and probably (if we use the survey
agency’s interviewers), we will have to contend with an
interviewer not familiar with the material and not likely to
be capable of convincingly expressing an affirmative attitude
in asking the questions, sufficient to provide the necessary
sense of security. On
the other hand, it is a common observation that people often
speak more freely in settings in which they are safely
anonymous, and have between them and the interviewer the
insulating distance of voice-only telephone communication.
Our second task is to
prepare for the second series of in-depth interviews scheduled
to take place in Phase 3 (2005-2006) – both improving our
methods and the technique of our interviewers so as to have
the best chance of calling forth expressions of this important
and fascinating dimension of young people’s
spirituality.
Appendix A
Spiritual experience vignettes
CARD
A
A. After my mother died,
my life seemed empty, and I got very depressed. One afternoon I went into the
kitchen to make a cup of tea, but before I could do it, I had
the feeling of a heavy weight being lifted off my shoulders,
and I said: “Thank you, God”. I got better, and the feeling
has never left me; I don’t think it ever will. I have never lost my faith in
God.
B. When my first child was
born, she was jaundiced, and after a few days she was taken
away. No one explained
to me what was happening and I felt extremely anxious. I noticed the Gideon bible on
the bedside table, picked it up and opened it. I don’t know what I
read. I’ve never been
able to find it again.
But as I read it, a great feeling of peace came over me and I
knew everything was going to be alright. I had been frightened half
out of my mind, and suddenly this calm, peaceful feeling took
over; something told me that my daughter was going to be
alright. The same thing
happened one other time, after my husband and I had split
up. I felt I just
couldn’t go on, and again, this calm, peaceful feeling took
over and something told me that everything would be
alright.
C. Alone in my room,
feeling desperate about the uselessness of my life, I said out
loud: “If there is a God, can you help me?” I was overwhelmed by the
feeling of a Presence, of Light, of Love, all around me. I can’t explain it. It appeared to last a minute
or two, although I can’t be sure. I lost all sense of
time. I was left with an
indescribable feeling of peace and joy. This moment completely
changed my life.
Everything suddenly seemed to make sense. I look back to those few
moments as the most real and important in my life.
D. No one in our family
went to church; I barely tolerated the religious education at
school.
About two years ago while
on holiday, I went for a walk along the beach. It was a fine day, the sea,
cliffs and sky were perfect. I had often seen that
particular place before, but on this day I felt somehow
strange.
I was alone. It was as if time stood
still. I could think of
nothing, I only felt I was ‘somewhere else’. I was part of something
bigger and absolutely beyond me. My problems and my life
didn’t matter at all because I was such a tiny part of a great
whole. I felt a
tremendous relief. I was
aware of feeling the beauty of everything that was there for
eternity. I don’t know how long I stood there; it could have
been two minutes or twenty.
I have never forgotten
that day. Because of
that experience I have become extremely interested in
different types of religions and philosophies and have found
many descriptions of experiences similar to mine.
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Lit. ‘that art thou’ -- ‘The primary message of the Upanishads is that this can be done by meditating with the awareness that
one's soul (atman) is one with all things. Thus whoever
knows that one is Brahman (God) becomes this all; even the
gods cannot prevent this, since that one becomes their soul (atman). Therefore whoever worships another divinity,
thinking it is other than oneself, does not know.’ (Beck, loc. cit.)
[6] The master work
documenting this phase is Viller et al 1932.
It is what Lonergan calls the insight into
insight, what Husserl describes as the transcendental
reduction in which the very processes by which
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parallels in some types of Eastern
meditation.
[18]‘Have you ever been aware of, or influenced by,
a presence or a power, whether you call it God or not, which
is different from your everyday self?’
[19]Unfortunately, Hardy’s question was not included in
the ESS nor the US version of the WUSS.
[20]The closest parallel question in the AVES in
Australia was ‘Importance of God in life’.
[23] The effects of
age and gender are independent. Although women predominated
in the sample, they were represented proportionately in both
age groups; it is not the case that a higher proportion of the
older age group were female.
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