BY PHILIP JENKINS

I recently posted on the sizable literature on the scientific explanations for religious behavior. As I noted there, “being human makes us naturally understand things in religious ways, even if we reject any formal or institutional religious affiliation. We are conditioned to look for things that we understand as holy, to project holiness onto particular people or places, to feel awe in their presence, to deny the reality of barriers separating life and death, and we will continue to do so even if all existing creeds have evaporated. … We need the holy, however we imagine it.”

But if religion as such is not going away, how far can we predict how things will change in what seems to be becoming a far more secular world? It is commonly remarked that institutional religion is in sharp decline around much of the world, and we will likely see the spread of a fairly thorough secularism, by no means only in the Judeo-Christian West. Buddhism is in steep decline in many of its traditional bastions, and even some Islamic nations are already showing the telltale signs of early secularization.

As the prophetic sign informs us in Blackwell’s bookstore in Oxford, “Religion is in the Basement.”

Such a sea-change of itself means that researchers need to pay special attention to non-institutional forms of religiosity, rather than speaking of a simple decline or evaporation of spiritual impulses as such.

But even in such circumstances, the habits of lived religion do not go away, even if they become detached from contexts that are formally defined by the religious label. Some will survive in the setting of unofficial and even unapproved spirituality, while others will be absorbed into secular settings.

As such trend develop, the “lived religion” approach acquires special value, not least in challenging the very common label of behaviors as “spiritual but not religious.” From a lived religion perspective, the counter would be that such actions are indeed “religious,” and we must not accept the simple and revealing equation of “religious” with “churches,” or with “willing to accept institutional definitions.”

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2023/12/lived-religion-and-the-futures-of-faith/