Modern Britain is “spiritual” but not religious. That’s the headline finding of an opinion poll, and accompanying report, released this week by the Christian think-tank Theos. The ComRes poll – which confirms a trend identified in several previous surveys – found that well over half those questioned (59%) said that they believed in some kind of spiritual being or essence. There were substantial, though minority, levels of belief in specific concepts such as spirts, angels and “a universal life force”, whatever that is. One for the Jedis, perhaps.
Even a third of people who described themselves as non-religious were prepared to own up to having some such ideas, while a mere 13% – and only a quarter of the non-religious – agreed with the statement that “humans are purely material beings with no spiritual element”. And more than three-quarters of the survey agreed that “there are things that we cannot simply explain through science or any other means”.
Theos seems to be impressed by the apparently limited appeal of scientific materialism, seeing in it evidence that hardline atheism of the Richard Dawkins variety has little popular appeal, despite the high media profile it has garnered in recent years. Its director, Elizabeth Oldfield, writes that it is “notable is that those same voices have not managed to convince us that humans are purely material beings, with no spiritual element”. The implication is that there’s a huge untapped reservoir of spiritual longing and that it would be wrong to attribute the decline in religiosity in this country, stretching back decades, to a spread in actual unbelief.
Yet it’s hard to see much comfort in these figures for the future of religion. To return to the headline figure, the 77% who believed that some things couldn’t be explained “through science or any other means.” Any other means, presumably, includes religion itself. And even many scientists doubt that science is close to explaining some natural phenomena. Consciousness, for example, is often called the “hard problem” because even in the age of MRI scanners it remains profoundly elusive. A sense that life has mysteries, that there are things – love, for example – that will always remain beyond a reductive scientific explanation, doesn’t necessarily make someone religious. The poll found quite low levels of belief in more specifically religious concepts: a mere 13% believed in Hell (Heaven was twice as popular, implying a national spirituality skewed towards the feelgood), while a quarter believed in angels and around a third in life after death.
Take the findings about the power of prayer. An equally small proportion (17%) believed that prayer could “bring about change for the person or situation you are praying for” as believed that prayer had no effect whatsoever. By far the most popular view was that prayer “makes you feel more at peace”. Such an idea of prayer as a kind of therapy is of course at least as compatible with atheism as it is with religious conviction.
It’s wrong, I think, to equate the kind of nebulous “spirituality” that surveys such as this latest one invariably discover with either a yearning for religion or as a debased survival of it (as in the famous remark attributed to GK Chesterton that when people stop believing in God they will believe in anything). Organised religion is at least as much a form of communal belonging as it is a vehicle for private spiritual fulfilment. Its specific doctrines and often arbitrary codes of conduct, to say nothing of its claim to pronounce on matters of private and public morality, have very little to do with such basic questions as the existence of God or whether there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by Richard Dawkins. “Spirituality” may often take a religious form or employ language that we think of as religious, but it makes more sense to think of it as being just part of the human condition – even if a minority of people are indifferent or positively hostile towards it.
Another point is that words like “spirituality”, and even “God”, are infinitely flexible, capable of accommodating everything from the most devout religious belief to purely scientific wonder at the beauties of the cosmos. The other day, Oprah Winfrey told an atheist guest on her show who had spoken in such terms that if she believed in “the awe and the wonder, and the mystery, then that is what God is” and “I don’t call you an atheist.” But the guest, Diana Nyad, responded that it was quite possible to have a spiritual sense without God; “there’s spirituality because we human beings, we animals, we plants and maybe even the ocean and the stars, we all live with something that is cherished and we feel the treasure of it.”
Even Richard Dawkins is prone to making similar declarations. In The God Delusion, for example, he wrote that “a quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief.” For many people of course there is a natural connection, but the Theos survey, like others, would imply that it is often quite weak.
An interesting question is the extent to which “spiritual” ideas impact on people’s lives in modern Britain. The Theos survey discovered that 40% of the sample (and a small majority of women) had at some time engaged in a “New Age” activity – for example, a Tarot card reading or a Reiki healing session. These activities seem to be equally popular with those who describe themselves as religious and those who do not, which may trouble more orthodox members of the clergy. But these findings don’t prove that spiritual matters questions are more than peripheral to most people’s day-to-day existence, most of the time – or that they think much about them when they aren’t answering loaded questions from pollsters.
We could well, in fact, be looking at the kind of “benign indifference” that Kate Fox, in her bestselling Watching the English, identified as the default national response to matters of spirituality and religion. Theos can portray their findings as a challenge to the New Atheists, imagining that they are on a mission to convert a naively believing world to godless materialism (as a minority of them, perhaps, are). But if anything it’s even worse news for traditional religion. It seems that the churches have shed their congregations despite the fact that atheist materialism remains a minority taste. What this suggests is that much of religion’s former success derived from social convention rather than inherent human spirituality, which can survive anything, including disbelief in God.
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