Secularization on Pause? Ambiguity in American Religious Life

The following is a guest post by Zaid Adhami, associate professor of religion at Williams College and author of Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith, publishing next week.

“America’s secularization is on pause,” proclaimed the New York Time’s Lauren Jackson in a piece published last month inaugurating a yearlong project titled, “Believing.” The monthly newsletter is meant to probe the most recent trends of religious belief and affiliation in the United States. Based on the latest survey results, Jackson states: “For the first time in decades, America’s religiosity is remaining stable.” In the previous few decades “around 40 million Americans left churches, and the number of people who say they have no religion grew to about 30 percent of the country.” Yet now, the number of Americans who identify as Christian has grown slightly in the past few years. Furthermore, “almost all Americans—92 percent of adults—say they have a spiritual belief, in a god, human souls or spirits, an afterlife or something ‘beyond the natural world.’” She identifies such trends as a “major, generational shift.”

There are a number of reasons for this shift, Jackson asserts, such as the insecurity produced by the pandemic. But the primary reason she points to is that “Americans simply haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion.” She shares her own narrative of growing up a devout Mormon, leaving the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in early adulthood, but struggling to fill the void. “Nothing has felt quite like that chapel in Arkansans.” Jackson sees her personal experience reflected in national trends. “My story maps onto America’s relationship to religion over the last 30 years.” Much of her focus therefore is on those who have left the religious tradition they grew up with and have “worked to build rich, fulfilling lives outside of faith.” Yet, like herself, many of those people find themselves dissatisfied and “longing to believe in something.”

This is just the latest reporting on a well-rehearsed subject that has been of great interest in the past few decades. But as I demonstrate below, the assumptions behind Jackson’s narrative of “secularization on pause” are mistaken. I would argue instead that the ambiguous, seemingly contradictory trends of American religious life in the past few decades are a reflection of the growing centrality of personal authenticity to our culture. This is the subject of my book, Dilemmas of Authenticity, which examines the pervasive anxieties around a “crisis of faith” in US Muslim communities. In the book, I tell the stories of individuals who express doubt and disillusionment in relation to their religious belief, while also analyzing broader communal discourses about an “epidemic” of Muslims losing their faith. I ultimately show that the cultural imperative of personal authenticity can both produce deep doubt while also serving as the grounds to affirm tradition.

From the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth, the expectation of mass secularization was taken for granted in both academic and popular attitudes towards modernity. This dominant narrative posited that modern progress—with its scientific rationality, technological advancement, and freedom from the shackles of tradition and authority—was leading to the inevitable decline and even demise of religion. By the 1990’s, while most scholars had finally recognized that the straightforward demise of religion in modernity was by no means some guaranteed destiny, there were developments in the United States that seemed to once again raise the specter of mass secularization: the dramatic rise in the number of Americans who did not identify with any religion. These religiously unaffiliated individuals (often referred to as the “nones”) have been steadily increasing in survey results since the 1990s, reaching almost one third of the country in recent years. The rise of the nones has arguably been the most widely discussed religious trend in the US in the last few decades. While there is of course nothing inevitable or automatic about modern secularization, this trend of disaffiliation has been one clear (though imperfect) sign pointing to some kind of precarity in existing forms of religious belonging and belief.

But the statistics from the past few years that Lauren Jackson points to (the modest uptick in those identifying as Christian, the slightly slowed growth in the number of nones, or the pervasive self-reported belief in something spiritual) should not be interpreted as some new phenomenon in which religion is now making a comeback and countering earlier trends of secularization. The fact of the matter is that trends in American religious life have been fundamentally ambiguous for decades. As the sociologist of religion Wade Clark Roof observed around the turn of the century, “some indicators point to institutional religious decline, others to a profound spiritual ferment.” This observation has remained true 25 years later. While the rise of the nones has been one story we have heard about extensively, another (perhaps equally common) narrative is that our era is one marked by religious resurgence: from overflowing megachurches and the rise of Evangelicalism, to the growing political power of the Religious Right. That’s not to mention the vast proliferation of eclectic spiritualities and occult practices outside the bounds of organized religion, a “renaissance” or “new great awakening” in its own right, marked by a “kaleidoscopic panoply of spiritual traditions, rituals, and subcultures.”

When it comes to the rise of the nones specifically, many studies have pointed out that the statistics in question do not indicate a straightforward move away from religion, or that those who are religiously unaffiliated exhibit a total lack of engagement with religious traditions and communities or spiritual concerns and practices. Rather than complete disinterest or antagonism to “religion” or “spirituality,” these studies show a substantial proportion of people engaging with religious traditions, ideas, practices, and communities in very individualized or ambivalent fashion. Such individuals do not feel bound by formally authorized or institutionalized forms of religious belonging and observance. This reflects what Roof called a “spiritual marketplace” and “quest culture” in his characterization of American religion in the late twentieth century, with its emphasis on individual seeking and fluidity, pragmatic and therapeutic modes of spirituality, as well as heightened attention to “inwardness, subjectivity, the experiential, the expressive, the spiritual.” The shift toward such individualized, authenticity-centered spirituality has been a common narrative in the study of American religion. 

The fact of the matter is that trends in American religious life have been fundamentally ambiguous for decades.

My own book contributes to the rich literature that has traced these now-familiar transformations in American religion. Dilemmas of Authenticity offers an in-depth ethnographic exploration of the ambiguous demands the ideal of authenticity places upon individuals, and the role of that ideal in the dynamics of religious commitment and doubt. In so doing, I focus on a specific demographic that has largely been unexamined within this terrain, in two key respects: firstly, the book considers how these trends of religious individualism play out among a non-Christian, predominantly non-white community, which grapples with this individualist ethos in light of its own distinct traditions and histories while also dealing with its own unique set of racialized political conditions as a deeply stigmatized minority. Secondly, the book considers how trends of religious individualism and personal authenticity play out among those firmly committed to and bound by a particular communal tradition and identity, rather than the more common attention to the religiously disaffiliated, the “spiritual but not religious,” or experimental spiritual seekers with fluid religious identities.

Regarding the first of these areas, the story of late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century American religious individualism has, by default, generally been a White, Christian or post-Christian story. Whether identified as an “age of authenticity,” a “spiritual marketplace,” a “spirituality of seeking,” a “new Great Awakening,” or a corrosively individualist “Sheilaism,” this general picture tends to evoke images of White middle-class America, taken to be reflective of an unmarked “American religion.” In moving away from this focus on “unmarked” or “generic” (White, post-Christian) American spirituality, I show how American Muslims, as a non-Christian and predominantly non-white, deeply racialized and minoritized religious community, experience the legacy of these dominant discourses. I highlight how this community, which is heavily invested in its own traditions (often in opposition to “the West”), has its own forms of parallel pressures and impulses toward authenticity, which converge and diverge in complex ways from the normative, white, post-Christian drive to authenticity.

In addition to its whiteness, normally the ethos of personal authenticity in contemporary US religion is usually thought of in terms of “spiritual seekers”—so-called New Age spirituality, the “spiritual but not religious,” the religiously unaffiliated, and liberal spiritual traditions and movements, all of which are overtly committed to an ideology of individualism and self-realization, defining themselves against “organized religion.” But my focus in this book is not on such self-consciously individualist manifestations of personal seeking, but rather on those who are invested in “confining” themselves to a bounded, communally-defined tradition and form of life. Their path is not one that necessarily prioritizes individual freedom and seeking, yet despite this, we still see trends and pressures of authenticity, fragmentation, and individualization very much at play. While such pressures can lend themselves to doubt, crisis, and even abandoning religious commitment entirely, that is by no means necessarily so. This book analyzes how Islamic faith-commitment and piety are lived out within such conditions, and the complex ways Muslims navigate the pressures of personal authenticity. 

In this vein, Dilemmas of Authenticity offers a window into some of the lived dynamics of how people maintain their commitment to a specific, communally-defined identity or form of life despite their reservations and ambivalence about normative expectations within that community. I show how the imperative of being an “authentic individual” can serve as both a driver away from as well as a grounds for religious commitment. I thus take the ambiguities of personal authenticity as the explanatory key for understanding why doubt becomes a source of intense anxiety and crisis in our world, as well as how people maintain faith commitment despite such unsettling doubt.