Spiritual but not religious in Britain

This article The Brains Behind Spirituality : RSA blogs makes some good observations. First, the big picture:

Post-Religious Britain: The Faith of the Faithless, a 2012 meta-analysis of attitude surveys by the thinktank Theos, revealed that about 70% of the British population is neither strictly religious nor strictly non-religious, but rather moving in and out of the undesignated spaces in between. While the power of organised Christian religion may be in decline, only about 9% are resolutely atheistic, and it is more accurate to think of an amorphous spiritual pluralism that needs our help to find its form.

In a sense nothing surprising there. What is interesting about that quote is the thought about the amorphousness needing to be given form. That becomes a reflection on the role of (organised) religion. The point being that religion  could have an important role to play:

we are relatively starved for forms of practice or experience that might help to clarify our priorities and uncover what Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan calls our immunity to change

 This is religion in the sense of something that gives form to spirituality in entities that have legal status and the ability to make collective action efficient and effective and which can help direct effort and educate participants and draw them into practices and perspectives that have proved helpful and healthy in the past. Of course that is religion at its best. Part of the problem is that many people in the early C21 are more aware of the negatives relating to religion: its vulnerability to capture by vested interests and misuse by office holders, its tendencies to bearing down on people in a life-diminishing way and its failures to help people to understand in terms relevant to their lives how spirituality can contribute to their flourshing. I myself tend to be suspicious of 'religion' for just these reasons. But I do balance my skeptical tendency in this with an awareness that corporisations do have a potential to marshal human collective efforts for the general good and well-being. Churches are, whatever else they may be, corporisations.
The article captures the situation thus:

those who value spiritual experience and practice are often suspiciously quick to disassociate themselves from belief in God and religion, as if such things were unbearably unfashionable and awkward, rather than perhaps the richest place to understand the nature of spiritual need

 The RSA article offers us an interesting foil to think about this:

is it not the sign of a spiritually degenerate society that many feel obliged to define their fundamental outlook on the world in such relativist and defensive terms? Compare the designations: ‘educated, but not due to schooling’ or ‘healthy, but not because of medicine’.

 Which helps us to note that the place for religious expressions in our kind of society has to be in relation to a bottom-up rather than hierarchical practice of religious spirituality. Hierarchy worked in a context where deference to perceived and institutionally-honoured expertise was normal. That's no longer our context.

Jonathan Rowson, the author of the linked to article, suggests that the fundamental issue of spirituality to which religion needs to address itself is

to know oneself as fully as possible. For many, that means beginning to see beyond the ego and recognise oneself as being part of a totality, or at least something bigger than oneself.

 I think that's probably right as far as it goes. It's a project that will seem too minimalist for many with more definite spiritualities and/or expressing their spirituality reasonably happily in the context of a religious corporisation. And part of the critique might be to ask why on earth we might want to start with that issue as the way into spirituality. The argument would presumably be that this is where, existentially, most people start. I wonder whether that is right. I suspect we might actually want to start with meaning-making in relation to our place in the universe with a view to supporting good, healthy and convivial living. In fact, putting it that way ties into the calling, as I see it, of corporisations in general to serve the individual and common good. And this in turn may relate necessarily to the shared noetic space that humans collectively generate which is is big part (I hypothesise) of the make-up of corporisations. That shared noetic space is what enables us to share our thoughts and to collectivise our acting in the world..

On this account, another function of 'religion' at its best would be to enable us to think ethically about our participation in corporisations and give us support to challenge and change them when they fall short of their purpose.