Sometimes I wonder… is, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” really a fear of self-examination due to insecurity? Might that kind of response be a fear of falling short?
I know there are a myriad of reasons why someone might say that sort of thing, and the numbers who do are ever growing. A culture that continues to separate itself from any sense of common religious understanding will only grow in religious or “spiritual” insecurity. People will not know where to turn or how to make competent judgments about what may or may not be legitimate thoughts or expressions of “faith” or “religion” or “spirituality.”
I wonder if because of a growing spiritual insecurity among people and a resulting growing fear of being judged as falling short or embarrassed by not even knowing the basics of a particular faith, that rather than throwing themselves into a gulf of unknowing, of perhaps failure, of perhaps a complete overturning of lives that cling only to some kind of shaky security, that people would rather respond with, “I’m spiritual, but not religious?”
To say such a thing recognizes that inner draw to the spiritual life (I would say the wooing of the Holy Spirit to inter into the Life in Christ, but that’s me), the inner hunger to know God (however a person at the time understands that), but relieves the person from having to enter into a peculiar or particular world that s/he is, for the most part, completely unfamiliar with. That is very intimidating! It relieves people from having to put forth the effort to understand – what one is currently experiencing, even if not very good or satisfying or life-giving, is sometimes preferable to the unknown. But, it also leaves them in a place where their spiritual longings are never really satisfied. They roam around in a cloud hoping to find that “thing” that will making everything okay, but often settle at the moment for money, for loveless sex, for fame, for a weak and often illusional propping up of self-esteem.
Enabling people to feel secure enough and comfortable enough to enter into the questioning and the seeking and the learning is such a way that God can do the work necessary to open their hearts and minds to the Life in Christ is essential, but it is done not by dumbing down the essence of the Faith, nullifying the requirements, or lessening the call for high standards – that ends in nothing. It is, to a great degree, simply living in integrity, honesty, and forthrightness in the understanding that we are a peculiar people, but people with the answer in Christ for what ails the world.

I haven’t looked at the specifics, but this seems to be a rather large research project with a significant study set (24,900).
Profile of all U.S. Megachurches
Hartford Institute for Religion Research

My continuing attempt to articulate what I’m thinking (painful, I know).
For over the last few thousands of years, since Abraham and our shared belief that he and Sarah were the beginnings of God interacting with humanity in ways that we historically understand, from the “trickle” of a stream that began with Abraham has develop a large and slow flowing river we call the Tradition (nothing to do with “traditionalism”).
Still waters run deep!
It is easy in a cursory way to see this river as being almost stagnant, but if we look ever more closely we recognize that, indeed, it is moving with a strength and a surety that is unequaled. The river is going in a direction, it is steady, it is powerful to those who take the time to understand it. There can be all kinds of analogies, but this is where I will go.
Despite how Man tries to control this river by building levies or barriers or dams and so on, the river will not be contained by the mere efforts of men and women. It will flow where it will flow. It will accomplish what it will accomplish, despite our most strenuous efforts to divert its affects.
People enter the river, people exit the river, while many on the banks misunderstand the purpose and power of the river. Others curse the river because it cannot be contained or controlled or manipulated by the designs of Man. The river flows where it will.
Eddies develop both within the river and just off its banks. What gets caught in the eddies has a very difficult time escaping, even as the river continues to flow, even as the eddies stay in the same place, even as some thing caught in an eddy, die.
Those who enter the river must learn to navigate its course. They must get their “river-legs” (or “sea-legs” or “subway-legs,” you get the meaning). They must learn to swim, well. They must learn to “listen” as the river “speaks.” They can fight against the current if they wish, but normally to their own detriment. We have seen again and again throughout the history of the last few thousands of years those who self-assuredly enter the river thinking they know, thinking they’ve figured it all out, only to meet their end. The river confounds the thinkings and the doings of Man’s best efforts.
At the heart of the Tradition, is this: Redemption – the reestablishment of relationship between God and man first-off and then the re-enabling of men and women to be in right relationship with one other. I’ve heard older river people talk about their relationship with a river, as if personified. For us who claim Christ, living waters now feed the river that maintains and is the Tradition. It is a relationship through which we are absolutely changed, transformed, re-formed out of the “worldly systems” that work on us and mold us (form us) in ways contrary to the Life in Christ – life as intended from the beginning and made possible, again. If we regard the Tradition honestly, I think, we will see that this relationship is established, developed, and nurtured through disciplines that when interred into have their way with us – God’s way. We are re-formed! We are enabled to experience God and life anew.
I think over the last century, particularly the last 50 odd years (and really since the dawn of the Enlightenment), we increasingly have given ourselves not to relationship, but to kinds of teaching, kinds of philosophies, kinds of theories, kinds of politics, kinds of methods, kinds of confessions, kinds of acts that all in the end still work contrary to the will of God in our communities and in our lives. Rather than give ourselves over to the re-forming disciplines of the Tradition, we give ourselves to the Ideas of Man – even ideas that attempt to help us explain all this god stuff.
So, we fight, we argue, we demean, we cast dispersions, we torture and kill over these ideas of ours as we move further to the edges of the banks of the river until we find ourselves caught up in eddies. We swirl around and around as our attention and our eyes focus on ourselves only, and we get nowhere. We keep on in this way until we don’t even recognize that we are no longer moving with the river, slow and deep.
Part of the great Tradition, a least as my understanding of our experience in Anglicanism might suggest, is to debate and argue about all manner of things. I think this is partly due to our Jewish heritage, remaining, among many other things. After all, iron sharpens iron. A river rubs a jagged rock smooth. Yet, instead of remaining in the main flow of the river, we find ourselves in eddies. We find ourselves in eddies of identity politics, political correctness, fundamentalism of the left and right, philosophies and theologies that have more to do with the hermeneutic of doubt and disbelief born out of giving ourselves to the Systems of this World rather than giving ourselves to the disciplines that keep us squarely in the river, on course. To stay the course is to allowing us to be re-formed, to be reshaped so that we know well how to navigate, how to swim, how to be in right relationship with God and one another.
So much of Anglicanism and The Episcopal Church are caught in eddies of our own making. The river continues, and we are seeing renewed expressions of the passing on of the Tradition to emerging generations. It is the same Tradition, the river continuing to flow, but experienced anew by new generations. Yet, we remain in our eddies because frankly at this point we have become blind to our own plight. In some ways, our eddies are more comfortable to us than re-integrating back into the river – even though to remain means stagnation, exhaustion, and a withering death.
I’m tired of it all. I’m tired of fighting. I want to step back into the river. I want to find people who want to dive in, head first. I want to be with people who are intentional in giving themselves to the transformative power of the Tradition, even if at present I or we don’t feel like it, or cannot ascend intellectually to what the Tradition demands, but that we think not too highly of ourselves and realize that there is far more to understand and to experience than we have thus far. We allow God to have his way with us.
Instead of coming to the Tradition and the classic Christian disciples and thinking we have to re-interpret them to fit into a “Modern world,” why don’t we engage the Tradition and the disciplines and allow them to reinterpret us! We yield in humility, rather than demand the Tradition yield to our great intelligence, our great coming-of-age.
There is nothing new here… all this is as old and tested as the slow moving river. I want the river, not the eddies. I want the relationship, not the systems, even as I try to understand it all through systems of thought. A “systematic theology” is important to consider, but it is secondary to the relationship. There is nothing sentimental about any of this, nothing nostalgic, nothing about longing for a past “golden era.” There is a gazing forward as the river flows, and I wish to give myself to the learning of how to swim, how to navigate, how to be in the midst of a deep and slow moving river of Tradition. Step out of the controversies and the fighting, out of the eddy, and into the living waters of the river.

From a recent e-mail update for the Emergent Village (May 20, 2009):
What, Exactly, Is Theology?
By Tony Jones
an exclusive excerpt from the book
The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier (now available in paperback):

Some readers might be tempted, at this point, to say, ”All this talk of philosophy and theology is really a waste of time. Why bother with it? The only important thing is that we love Jesus. That’s it.”
Well, I submit that ”only loving Jesus” is a theology. It’s a paper-thin theology, a reductionistic theology. It’s a theology that avoids many things; for instance, (1) two millennia of argumentation over the nature of God, (2) the great difficulties in reading the Bible, and (3) all of the grief in the world. The refrain ”Can’t we all just love Jesus?” uses that unseemly word just (a word that we Christians use altogether too often in prayer: ”Father, we just ask that you would just be here with us tonight …”). Just is a term of minimization, of diminution, when used in this way. (Ironically, just can also be used to denote justice, which is at the very heart of the gospel.) But Jesus, the gospel, the Bible, theology, they’re never ”just” anything. They’re always more, much more, than we might think. These items (Jesus, gospel, Bible) should not be qualified with the adverbs just or only. The gospel is always more than we imagine, the Bible always has something for us greater than we expect, and Jesus is always beyond what we can conceive.
So we must refigure our theology. Too much bad theology has engendered too many unhealthy churches and too many people who don’t quite get the whole ”following Christ” way of life. Too much thin theology is responsible for too many Christians who practice the faith in ways that are a mile wide and an inch deep. The hope of emergents, their ministry, their message is, more than anything, a call for a reinvigoration of Christian theology—not in the ivy towers, not even in pulpits and pews, but on the street. …
Most human activity is inherently theological, in that it reflects what we believe to be the case about God—who God is, what God wants from us, how involved God is in the world, and so forth. The house I buy—where it is, how big it is, how much it costs—is a theological decision. It reflects what I believe about the following questions and more: Does God care where I live? Does God care how I spend my money? Does God favor the city or the suburbs? Does God care about energy use? Does God favor public transportation? Maybe I believe that God cares about none of these things, in which case my decision to purchase the biggest house I can afford in the nicest part of town reflects my theological belief that God is not concerned with such things. Similarly, decisions that are much more mundane also reflect our beliefs about who God is and how God interacts with us. Some people pray for a good parking spot when they’re driving to the mall. Others ask, ”If God is allowing genocide in Darfur, why would he intervene in the traffic patterns at my shopping mall?!?”
So theology isn’t just talk, and it’s not even just great works of art like The Allegory of Peace and War. Actors act theology and businesspeople work theology and stay-at-home moms change diapers and make lunch theologically. So human life is theology. Virtually everything we do is inherently theological. Almost every choice we make reflects what we think about God. There’s no escaping it.

Here’s the thing – too many of us come to this Christian thing, this faith thing, this religion thing, this church thing not with an intent to learn (really), not in humility believing that I (we) need to be instructed on things we know little about. Instead, we come with the perhaps insecure intent to justify, support, or confirm what we want to believe already. Our culture has come to the point where we believe we can think anything we want to be true and it is therefore true, for us, and it matters not whether anyone agrees or whether real-life counters what we want to believe.
The “learning process” has changed from one of acquiring new/more knowledge from people who know far more than I do that will change me and my perceptions of truth or reality, to a process of seeking out anywhere “facts” that support what I want to believe. Sadly, for many people the anti-culture anti-intellectualism of our time reigns and they would rather simply remain ignorant.
As such, instead of giving ourselves to a teaching that challenges our preconceptions and may well demand that we align our opinion or belief to an established “truth,” we instead try to overtly or subtly change the teaching of this “truth” so that it will match up with what we can only already conceive of. We rely upon our own understanding of what is possible or our own ability to correctly discern, rather than yield to a very old and established teaching that effectively extends to multiple cultures and languages and billions of people over two millennia.
I well understand the good and arduous process of wrestling with stuff, but that is different than asserting that what I want to be true therefore is, even if just for me. What happens if we say, “I don’t know” or “I am probably wrong,” and begin there? What would happen if we give ourselves to a process that will probably turn everything we rely upon upside down? What would happen if we looked back over these past 2,009 years and step aside our own hubris and considered that what has survived all these years of trial and persecution, this wisdom, just might have something to say to us of the Truth, of God, and of God’s ways for us – not just the limited and myopic vision that we cling to?