Keynote Session: Tom Smith "Spirituality and Religion: Trends and Cross-National Comparisons"

Spirituality is an ancient and core construct of the existential lives of humans and the religions they have formed. It has manifested itself in many ways across societies and religions from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the spirit animals of shamans, the kami of Shintoism, the mysticism of Kabbalah, the whirling dervishes of Sufism, and the Holy Spirit of the Christian trinity. Despite its long historical presence, spirituality has been undergoing important changes and growth in recent decades. Some scholars even see the expansion of spirituality as challenging secularization theory’s contention that modernization inexorably diminishes religion as education in general and science in particular undermine religious belief and many governments take over many social functions of religions such as caring for the ill and needy. They argue that modernization tends not to destroy religion, but to transform it and that spirituality has emerged and grown as a result.

Of course spirituality and religion are closely intertwined concepts. This paper disentangles them by looking at them in comparative perspective, by comparing a person’s spirituality to their religiousness. First, recent trends in spirituality vs. religion are examined. Second, the correlates of spirituality vs. religion are studied. Finally, the role of spirituality and religion is analyzed across societies.

This paper uses three datasets: 1) NORC’s General Social Surveys for 1998, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018, 2) the Fetzer 2020 Study of Spirituality in the United States and 3) the International Social Survey Program’s Religion IV Study, 2018-2020.