sociologist Casey Homan<\/a>\u00a0wrote via email that he recognizes at \u201cleast two definitions of spirituality,\u201d one being meditating on the interconnected nature of the cosmos\u2014 without supernatural beliefs (such as ghosts), and the other integrates supernatural beliefs into the experience of spirituality.<\/p>\n\u201c[There\u2019s] declining religiosity with each new generation. Millennials are less religious than Generation X, Generation X is less religious than the Baby Boomers, and so forth,\u201d Homan said. He said that despite recent hype, the \u2018spiritual but not religious\u2019 phenomenon is not as new as you might think. \u201cI think that most people who are not particularly religious still do not feel ready to jettison their sense of spirituality,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s one of those things that remains [with] people even after they’ve decided that there’s no particular religion or denomination that they agree with.\u201d<\/p>\n
For 42-year-old Nelson, church attendance has been a central part of her life, growing up in what she describes as \u2018boisterous black churches,\u2019 which focused on community and song, not sinners. But she has noticed a movement away from church attendance and has seen how millennials, especially in Silicon Valley, pull away from it. \u201cPeople [don\u2019t think] you can cultivate spiritual wellbeing and be a technologist,\u201d she said. At the same time she has observed people seeking meaning in different ways\u2014 through yoga, journaling, diet \u2014 ways to \u2018feed their soul,\u2019 she said. That\u2019s the genesis of Soul Tour, a refuge for modern day spiritualism. \u201cSpirit is our limitless reservoir of inner electricity, what connects us to each other and to things beyond what we can see, taste, hear, smell or touch,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Her spiritual self-care includes daily meditations, hot tubs, and workouts \u2014 and she wants to bring her hard-won peace of mind to others. She\u2019s emphatic she\u2019s not starting a church, but a place for soul comfort. \u201cHow people conceive of God ranges very widely. Some believe in a personal God or higher power, others in a universal force,\u201d she said. \u201cI know many people who look to their yoga or SoulCycle teachers as go-to sources of wisdom and upliftment!\u201d<\/p>\n
This plays out on campus. In Berkeley’s 2016 survey of new students, 9% of freshman labeled themselves as \u2018spiritual but not associated with a major religion,\u2019 with 14% identifying as \u2018not particularly spiritual.\u2019 That 14% could have opted for \u2018no preference\u2019 (11%) or atheist or agnostic (16%). In 2013, Berkeley sociologists analyzed data from the 2012 General Social Survey and reported that 20% of people asserted no religion \u2014 a 150% rise since 1990. The lack of interest may have an impact on the academic setting as well. Last year Bob Jacobsen, Dean of undergraduate studies in the College of Letters and Science, announced that Berkeley had discontinued its religious studies program, due to lack of enrollment, not funding.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s clearly an opportunity in this void, a space for a new generation of spiritual leaders, and a world where access to the \u2018everything\u2019 can be via iPhone, chatbot, and IRL meetings. Nelson\u2019s hopeful this is where she can make a difference \u2014 on par with her modern-day spiritual leaders that include Alicia Keys and Jada Pinkett-Smith. \u201cI want to be a resource for peoples soul[s] and spirits, [those] seeking personal transformation, guidance, meaning, and joy,\u201d Nelson said. But for every Oprah there\u2019s a Gwyneth Paltrow-esque GOOP guru, using the banner of spiritual self-empowerment to sell pseudoscience.<\/p>\n
In Homan\u2019s case, he believes that millennials shift towards the spiritual stems from avoiding the stigma of being classed as an atheist or a Christian; one being seen as immoral, the other as politically conservative. \u201cIf you state that you’re spiritual but not religious, most people probably will neither assume that you’re immoral nor assume that you’re politically conservative,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s why I think of spiritual but not religious partly as a political and moral label.\u201d So a driver of how you label yourself causes the phenomena to exist \u2014 separate from what people really believe or follow. You can\u2019t get more millennial than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spirituality is the part of the human psyche that connects our imaginations to suppositions about the world around us.\u00a0 Such suppositions can be legitimate attempts to fill in unknown puzzle pieces with ideas that might fit provided those ideas have some connection to reality as opposed to wishful thinking.\u00a0 There is a difference. There is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=932"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":977,"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions\/977"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/godlessuniverse.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}