SECULARIZATION AND ITS IMPACT ON HABITUS FORMATION

James R. Lewis, PhD jlewis21@kent.edu

Kent State University, Indiana Wesleyan University, Ohio, U.S.A.

Spiritual Fitness, Culture and Well-Being

Across recent conflicts since the beginning of the 21st century, the U.S. military has been

something of a social laboratory rich with opportunity to explore impacts of intense stressors on

personal well-being and resilience. The increasingly prevalent context of secularization and

pluralism of U.S. American society and its military also provides a rich setting for exploring

changing roles of religion and spirituality in public discourse in relation to resilience and

wellness. This project is part of a dissertation exploring the dynamics of spiritual fitness and

resilience formation in this changing context. The dissertation from which this work is drawn,

was catalyzed by my own work as a U.S. Army Chaplain with suicide in the military, and is an

interdisciplinary study utilizing tools and insights from across the fields of the social sciences,

education and the humanities in order to explore impacts of public life and culture in shaping

these formative dynamics.

This study reflects my observations as to how spiritual fitness as here described

contributes to the physical, mental, ethical and relational well-being of Service Members

enduring the intense stressors of prolonged conflict. This project is an effort to facilitate positive

contributions to public discourse pertaining to roles of religion and spirituality in public

educational efforts toward resilience formation in emerging generations. Observations growing

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from this research suggest that both distinct religious discourse, as well as the broader public

secular discourse, would benefit from a clarification, perhaps a change, in how concepts of

pluralism and plurality of religious and spiritual traditions can uniquely contribute to personal

wellness and resilience formation.

Secularization and Well-being—Quiet connections

Charles Taylor observed in A Secular Age that “Every person, and every society, lives

with or by some conception(s) of what human flourishing is: what constitutes a fulfilled life,

‘what makes life really worth living,’ what would we most admire people for?”1—what in this

conference might be thought of as “well-being.” He likewise observed that these frameworks

and conceptions have been historically rooted in and essentially tied to religious belief. But that

the predominant public framework has:

changed from a condition in which belief was the default option, not just for the naïve but

also for those who knew, who considered, talked about atheism; to a condition in which

for more and more people unbelieving construals seem at first blush the only plausible

ones….the presumption of unbelief has become dominant in more and more (social)

milieu.2

Taylor summarized the impact of these changes not merely in terms of interesting social

facts, but as deeply impacting the viability of frameworks of meaning formed by public socio-

cultural infrastructure:

1 Taylor, A Secular Age, 16.2 Taylor, A Secular Age, 12, 13.

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It is this shift in background, in the whole context in which we experience and search for

fullness, that I am calling the coming of a secular age…we have to understand the

differences between these options not just in terms of creeds, but also in terms of

differences of experience and sensibility.3

This reflects a foundational sea-change from the background picture of Aristotle and his heirs

through the many centuries and up to 20th century Christendom, in which the world’s apex and

center were found in the Divine,4 to a world without a meaningful apex or center at all.

Central to and accompanying those changes in theo-centric and religio-centric habitus,

were changes in understanding and habitus of religion itself as well, reflected in the increasing

move away from the central place in religion of any doctrinal orthodoxy, toward a centrality of

subjectivized personal, often merely esthetic experience as the heart and soul of religion. This

move is both integral to the development and evolution of that which is now called “spiritual,”

and becomes in large part a product of, and contributing to “constructivist” or “post-modernist”

ideas about religion in the late twentieth century, in which “The signal attribute of the modern

stage of religious evolution, according to Bellah, is cultural and personal freedom.”5 But while

this paradigmatic change certainly has its merits and its champions, I argue in this project that it

is also foundational to the issues I identify in this project with the concept of accidie, at the heart

of growing challenges to what is now being called “Spiritual Fitness” in the U.S. Army.

Building on Taylor’s foundation, I argue in this study for what appears to be an under-

recognized relationship between these changes in public formation processes and what is now

being observed as an increased rate of suicide in the U.S. Army. A result of the emerging

secular age becoming more thoroughly established in and conveyed through public school

3 Taylor, A Secular Age, 14.4 Taylor, A Secular Age, 60.5 Taylor, A Secular Age, 42.

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classrooms--at least anemic, if not devoid of spiritual language-- seems to be a loss of consensus

on and cultivation of common frames by which suffering, moral ambiguity and existential crises

could be cast as meaningful in public discourse. I argue that this loss of consensus on habits of

mind and dispositional habitus seems to have begun to undermine the capacity for resilience and

increase the vulnerability of emerging generations of Soldiers to the heightened frequency and

intensity of the existential challenges indigenous to military operations.

Taylor uses the years 1500 and 2000 as landmark dates to explore what he asserts is a

unique move in culture to a secularism previously unknown. He summarizes the difference

between these landmark dates as follows:

the difference would then consist in this, that whereas the political organization of all pre-

modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in,

or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free

from this connection…. Put in another way, in our ‘secular’ societies, you can engage

fully in politics without ever encountering God… but this would have been inescapable

in earlier centuries in Christendom… In those (pre-1500) societies, you couldn’t engage

in any kind of public activity without ‘encountering God’… in these societies, religion

was ‘everywhere,’ was interwoven with everything else, and in no sense constituted a

separate ‘sphere’ of its own.6

He described how dramatic the differences between the socio-cultural context where

belief and living within a theistic framework was inescapable, to where that undergirding

framework is not only absent, but where maintaining metaphysical frameworks become difficult

6 Taylor, A Secular Age, 1, 2.

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and often problematic.7 Built into the argument across this project is the assertion alongside

Taylor’s, that this form of a “secular” age is a new cultural development:

Against this kind of story, I will steadily be arguing that Western modernity, including its

secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and

related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.8

Secularization in America

The conveyance in previous generations of a relatively universal locus meaning—and

understanding of the content of what we might now call “wellness”-- based in (various)

Constantinian Christian comprehensive doctrines with the full weight of social support, seems to

have been normative across Western culture through the American and French Revolutions. The

change from socially located, Constantinian Christian frameworks of meaning that had been

central to the normative frameworks of social and personal formation, to a real plurality of

competing and mutually exclusive comprehensive doctrines, peacefully (relatively speaking)

coexisting in the same political space with at least some claim to “equal” validity, is dramatic.9 I

argue that this complex, multi-dimensional socio-cultural transformation in how formation is

understood, and how people are formed in to public sphere, is highly pertinent to the current

concern with suicide in the U.S. Army, as well as other early 21st c. challenges in wellness.

Though the dynamics the term describes have much deeper roots, Peter Berger 10 brought

the term “secularization” into popular discourse since the 1960s to describe the dynamics of the

7 Taylor, A Secular Age, 3.8 Taylor, A Secular Age, 22.9 However, on the global scale, the forced imperialism of the modern era, the Cold War of the 20th century, the

ideological terrorism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, are all exemplary of where mutually exclusive comprehensive doctrines fuel deadly conflict—the kind of ongoing conflict liberalism attempts to overcome—but that’s another project!

10 Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

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dramatic shift from a common culture to the current plurality of coexisting cultures. Most of

contributing to the dynamics of secularization, Taylor and others address are quite familiar, yet

their individual and combined roles in moving society and culture away from being thoroughly

religious to being noticeably secular for all, and thoroughly secular for many, may not be so

evident:11

1. Emergence of revivalism-- while religious in orientation, also moved the heart of

epistemology from church, scripture, reason, to individual emotionalism, subjectivism,

and to leadership that is charismatic and sensationalist more so than rooted in stable

religious institutions.

2. The Romantic Movement, then the indigenous American Transcendentalism-- also moved

popular epistemology toward emotionality and led to the introduction of new religious

movements, hence opening culture to spirituality outside of institutional churches. This

dynamic broadened the concept of “choice” in religion, while continuing to embrace

what is to later be called the “spiritual.”

3. The “closing of the frontier” and the emergence of industrialization--both in its

“sensationalism” and non-traditional/religious epistemology, as well as its emphasis on

future rather than past, and worldly leisure and wealth rather than suffering, directs minds

away from religiosity. As industrialism and its impact grew in the United States,

associated urbanization, massive immigration starting mid-19th c. and a plethora of other

phenomena changed the way people and communities existed, which reduced social and

cultural homogeneity and dependence on traditional and religious habits of mind, ethos,

etc., and contributed to the move of society further away from religio-centric living.

4. The emergence of the Common School movement provided a new realm of common

11 This list is merely representative, not exhaustive, as noted by many observers.

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social experience in school rather than in church, where the focus was on assimilation

and preparation for future life more so than a primary emphasis on conveying religious

content.

5. With industrialization, pluralization, and emergence of growing “scientific/naturalistic”

worldviews, emphasis on “spiritual” formation moved to personal formation; citizenship

became democratized to be inclusive of others outside of the homogenous Calvinistic

Protestant ekklesia.

6. Emerging communications technologies, from telegraphs to trains, telephones, movies

and emerging electronic media, linked communities as never before and increased the

abundance and influence of secular brokers of opinion and experience (as opposed to

communal attitudes being largely shaped by religion and religious leaders), moving the

center of intellectual and attitudinal influence further from religious sources.

7. The emergence of humanistic disciplines in 19th c.—those that are focused on the human

experience rather than the Divine Order-- medicine, political science, economics,

anthropology, sociology, and the continued evolution of those disciplines, as well as the

development of psychiatry, psychology and social work in 20th c.—and exploring

processes dealing with human issues, problems and organization as non-religious arenas

and concerns—all shifted the intellectual world to predominantly secular habits of mind.

8. Broad social changes in religion weakened its unified voice, which had conveyed a

hegemonically accepted religious worldview across the culture, giving way to the

predominance of a culturally normative “scientific” worldviews across popular and

academic cultures.

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9. Popular media growth and affordability at the popular level-- novels, magazines,

newspapers, movies, radio, led to more time, energy and focus expended away from theo-

centric thought.

10. Popular media of various sorts glamorizing everything urban, de-legitimating rural and

traditional life ways, where religious, communal and traditional frameworks have always

held the most sway.

11. Similar processes of secularization taking intellectual root more broadly in Europe earlier

in the 19th century provided alternative ways of thought that, while they had fed American

intellectual elites for generations, merely provided foundations for the growing

popularization of American secularization, more evident toward the end of the twentieth

century.

12. WW I, and WW II both broadened popular experience in many ways, facilitating

“cosmopolitanization.” “Christian nations” at war with one another, causing untold death

and suffering, fomented an “existential vacuum”12 growing in all parts of Western culture,

though earlier in Europe and later in America.

All of these facets of social change have been both reflected and are manifest in changes

in social, cultural and personal habits of mind and dispositional habitus. The predominant socio-

cultural shift away from habitus centered on social faith practices and dispositions fostered and

validated by popular experiences of institutional forms of religion, toward more individualistic

and secular habitus in which religion in both its institutional and subjectivized “spiritual” forms

12 Frankl, 108.

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was growing less central and more optional for social life, is the paradigm shift Taylor identifies

as the move to a “secular age.”13

While the above list is drawn mainly from the American experience, they follow the

pattern of the European processes of secularization which preceded these phenomena in

America, and with some variance, is often also reflected in developing countries around the

globe. These processes included movements of social focus away from church life,14 changes in

conceptualizations of how both “religion” and “spirituality” themselves are understood, and

included as well, the roles of religion and spirituality in individual and social life. All of these

shifts together set the stage for, and are manifestations of the sociological changes reshaping

American culture and the process of secularization that followed.15

Religion’s loosening monopoly over spirituality and wellness

In the cultural paradigm of Catholic Christendom16 up until the 16th century Reformation,

the world in all its facets was understood to be not only theo-centric, but Church17-centric as

well. Reflecting a move away from this hierarchical and communal, church-centric culture, the

beginnings of secularization were rooted in the ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,18

and brought into popular manifestation through the sixteenth century Reformation. Integral in

this process was the radical thought coming from the Reformation, wrought first by Martin

13 This is in a nutshell, the theme of Taylor’s argument in his book, A Secular Age.14 This brief comment summarizes an analysis I have systematically traced in more detail in earlier study, bringing

together a range of interdisciplinary sources also cited in this work, and all listed in the bibliography, to include Taylor, Berger, Kennedy, Wuthnow, Crunden, Pratt, Durkheim, Cremin, Hervieu-Leger, and Sweet.

15 Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 24-25.

16 I earlier used the broader term “Constantinian Christian Culture,” which would be inclusive of the centuries of various forms of “established” Protestant regimes. This term would be related to but distinct from “Catholic Christendom” as here used, which was shattered by the Reformation.

17 Church with a capital “C” in this project will refer to the Roman Catholic Church as a human, socio-political institution, without reference to it as a theological entity.

18 Taylor, A Secular Age.

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Luther, in which the grounding of legitimate authority for “Truth”19 moved from the hierarchical

Church centered in the authority of the Pope, to the concept emerging of the individual as a

legitimate arbiter of Truth. And from the Enlightenment heritage, secularization started by

shifting the focus of human eyes, first from God in Heaven to God immanent, which eventually

moved from a focus on the things of God, onto merely temporal and human concerns.20

It is within this world of Truth, accessed through Christian scripture as

individually discerned through the essential tool of reading, that American civilization and its

concurrent cultural assumptions was born:

The most important single fact about American civilization is that it began in England as

a revolutionary religious and political movement. This conjunction of British

background, political means and religious ends proved capable of survival in a

wilderness, and of dominance over a large geographical area... to set a cultural tone

accepted in most quarters as 'American' until well into the twentieth century.21

Struggling for literal survival in the American wilds, far from European intellectual

centers, the predominance of religiously legitimizing language in popular and academic culture

suggests that American civilization stayed focused much more on scriptural Truth accessed

through individual literacy, than showing much interest in Enlightenment rationalist and

empiricist developments in the Old World. Additionally, the first Great Awakening in the less-

19 Truth with a capital “T” is also used intentionally in this project as in reference to the concept of a distinctly positivistic Divine Truth, which was understood to be radically different than what might today be understood as a merely relative, contingent, constructed and contestable “truth” claim. I hope my practice of capitalizing the term to make this clarification is less distracting than the frequent use of quotation marks would otherwise be.

20 Taylor, A Secular Age.21 Crunden, xv.

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than-staid American frontier, and with significant influence from emotional evangelicalism, set

the cultural stage for a highly subjective and individualistic culture.22

The Transcendentalists and their European Romanticist roots, through the emergence of

secular print industry across the 19th century,23 contributed to the shift in popular epistemology

from scripture and rationality to subjective emotional experience. In Emerson’s words, “The

foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should

we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”24 Their emphasis on the individual and

variability of human experience, to include a range of means for accessing the Divine, also

introduced the exploration of “Eastern spirituality” into the American experience. With the

massive immigration across the 19th century, the end of slavery, and the rise of industrial cities,

America experienced the beginnings of real demographic diversity. All of these shifts together

set the stage for the sociological changes reshaping American culture and the process of

secularization that followed.25

Modern thought in public education is rooted in philosophies of pragmatism that emerged

in the late 19th century, in which early thinkers continued relocating grounds of meaning. As

distinct from former religious rootedness, “Pierce gives the community of inquiry a large role to

play in determining the ultimate meaning of reality itself.”26 William James further developed the

anthropocentric framework of pragmatism, carrying Pierce's foundational thought further:

22 Crunden.23 I made a rather extensive study of this dynamic in an earlier study preparatory, but not a part of this dissertation.

In a nutshell, “popular literature” and widespread literacy spread dramatically across the United States as a part of the communications revolution in the 19th c., so that from the mid-18th c. where “popular literature” barely existed, and the only literature popularly familiar may have been the Bible, a range of literatures, genres, newspapers, magazines, novels and were common and accessible in even frontier towns by the end of the 19th c.

24 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” In Alfred R. Ferguson, ed., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 1: Nature, Addresses and Lectures, (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 7.

25 Wuthnow, 24-25.26 Jim Garrison and Alven Neiman. “Pragmatism and Education,” (The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, edited by Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith & Paul Standish. Ch. 1, pp. 21-37 (Malden, MA:

Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 2003), 22.

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The educational consequences are immense. First, if essences are but teleological

weapons of the mind, then what of the essence of human beings? The answer is obvious;

we do not have an antecedently existing essence. Instead, each individual must work out

the essence of their existence within the culture they happen to find themselves.27

By John Dewey's time at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century, the broader

populace generally seems to have still held to a religious worldview. But Dewey made

significant moves, both in furthering the groundwork for the discourse of an untethered

spirituality, and in moving the locus of meaning formation from religion to education. He was

overtly attempting to lay the groundwork for an untethered discourse of the spiritual in his work,

A Common Faith:

A religion... always signifies a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind of

institutional organization, loose or tight. In contrast, the adjective 'religious' denotes

nothing in the way of a specifiable entity, either institutional or as a system of beliefs. It

does not denote anything to which one can specifically point as one can point to this and

that historic religion or existing church…. It denotes attitudes that may be taken toward

every object and every proposed end or ideal.28

Or as Dewey summarized earlier: “there is a difference between religion, a religion, and the

religious; between anything that may be denoted by a noun substantive and the quality of

experience that is designated by an adjective.”29 That distinction today might be reflected in the

newer language of “spiritual but not religious,” or what, in 2003, Alexander and McLaughlin

began describing as “untethered spirituality.”30

27 Garrison, 24.28 John Dewey, A Common Faith, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 9-10.29 Dewey, A Common Faith, 1-3.30 Hanan Alexander and Terance H. McLaughlin, “Education in Religion and Spirituality,” ch. 20 in Nigel Blake,

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Dewey's description includes what is now the common reference to “religion” as having

an institutional basis. However, that need not be construed as “institutional” in a brick and

mortar sense, as being related to a physical or legal social location. The Supreme Court Torcaso

v. Watkins decision in 1961 in what is probably the most well-known of case law to do so, builds

jurisprudence that recognizes such “institutions” need not be distinct legal nor social entities.

Their opinion made precedent in that case that the lack of corporate status is no hindrance to an

“institution” being construed as being a “religion”: “Among religions in this country which do

not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism,

Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others.”31

Diversity, plurality and pluralism

Secularization, secularism, pluralism and diversity are all related terms relevant to this

broader cultural move from Western culture built and centered around religion, to the relatively

recent invention of a secular liberal democracy. These often overlooked dynamics are quite

relevant to the changing shape of formation through public education.32

Martin Marty is one of the most prolific of authors on religion in America over the last

half of the 20th century. In his work, he distinguished “diversity” as the fact of variety, from

“pluralism” as what a society does with that variety.33 Many authors discuss pluralism as an

Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith & Paul Standish, eds. The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 2003).

31 Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961).32 The literature pertaining to education and growing diversity is in itself, quite broad. This exploration of

literatures of diversity in education in no way attempts to be complete, but again, merely an overview of leading voices and related concepts to provide further context for this discussion.

33 Martin E. Marty, “Pluralisms,” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 612(1), July 2007, 14-25, Sage Publications.

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outgrowth of assumptions of individual autonomy, such as the “minimalist autonomy” that Reich

posits as foundational to “the good:” the “right” of individuals to make their own un-molested

choices, including choices pertaining to religious matters.34

Though consensus among the many writers addressing this area does not seem apparent

in the terms or definitions being used for pluralism, plurality and diversity, nor on how to live in

diversity, a rough consensus might be identified between “pluralism”--cast in various ways as

some form of intentional engagement between persons and groups of various perspectives-- and

“diversity” or “plurality.” Both “diversity” and “plurality” are often used to describe a “mere”

coexistence of differing perspectives in the same political space, which may or may not involve a

range of forms of engagement between groups. Feinberg described a common form of this

distinction:

Political and educational plurality take different forms, and some of these must be

distinguished from normative, democratic pluralism. In normative pluralism multiple

communities, existing side by side and whose members have equal status regardless of

their communal affiliation, are recognized as a desirable social state and promoted both

politically and educationally. Mere plurality may exist where one group maintains

political, legal and economic dominance while providing limited rights to other cultural

or religious groups.35

Philosophers and educators often insist on languages of prescribed normativity--in some

version or other such as described here by Feinberg, asserting that the public sphere “must”

34 Rob Reich, “Minimalist Autonomy,” in Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in America, Chapter 4, pp. 89-112, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).35 Walter Feinberg, For Goodness Sake: Religious Schools and Education for Democratic Citizenry, (New York:

Routledge, 2006), 154.

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embrace, move toward, and engage in--various stripes of “pluralism,” in preference to the “mere

plurality” as here pejoratively cast.

Spirituality and Wellness becoming untethered

For most of human experience across cultures, societies have developed formal religious

institutions that addressed areas and questions of life which we commonly describe with words

like “spiritual,” and “wellness,” and many thinkers have gone so far as to identify these domain

as being a universal human concerns. Conveyed through formal institutions that generally

include versions of orthodoxy for their foundational meaning systems, those institutions most

frequently addressing spirituality and related understandings of wellness are generally referred to

as institutions of “religion.” However, society and cultures have changed to where religious

institutions no longer have the same roles in society.

For most of the history of Western culture, regardless of one’s affiliation or regularity of

religious participation, religious institutions have provided the normative frameworks of identity

and meaning for the populace, as well as habits of mind, of how people perceive and think about

their world and experience. But as depicted with Taylor and others in discussing how the process

of secularization has transformed ways of experiencing the world, the emergence of the secular

age has changed this normative religious cultural mindset,36 without emplacing a new normative

mindset that has any comparable cultural consensus.

Emerging as a part of this process of secularization has been the intentional and

overlapping discussions in education, in medicine, and other fields addressing religion and

spirituality as distinctly different domains. Researchers from many fields express the

36 This assertion is in a nutshell, the argument Taylor makes in A Secular Age that has provided a common reference across this project.

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universality of these concerns in a variety of ways, regardless of religio-spiritual heritage.

Bringing her own inter-disciplinary background, inclusive of law, religion and medicine, Parks is

exemplary of this line of thought:

To be human is to seek coherence and correspondence. To be human is to want to be

oriented to one's surroundings.... The mind does not passively receive the world but rather

acts on every object and every experience to compose it, organizing its various parts into

a whole.37

Parks’ research argues that these frameworks of meaning and coherence are in the domain of

faith and spirituality.

Alexander and McLaughlin first wrote using the term “untethered spirituality” in 200338

to describe the distinction between religious and spiritual discourse that has become integral to a

broad interdisciplinary conversation in recent decades. I would make further clarification,

though, to Alexander and McLaughlin’s significant observation of the distinction between

religious and spiritual language. From this untethered way of thinking, spirituality tends to be

thought of in many fields as rather nebulous, highly subjective, and a phenomenon of

individuality. However, I argue that the social39 rootedness and expression of practices and

language pertaining to that which is referred to as religion and the spiritual, is inextricably

intertwined with the concerns for spiritual fitness that are central to this study.

I would certainly agree with Alexander and McLaughlin that it can be helpful and quite

appropriate, sometimes even necessary, to distinguish the two concepts of religion and

spirituality, and that spirituality can, in fact, be untethered from religion. However, based on

37 Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose and Faith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000, 2011), 27.

38 Alexander and McLaughlin.39 That these changes are social dynamics, rooted and conveyed as part of the “public” socio-cultural

infrastructure, as opposed to merely “private and personal” individual tastes as the religious and spiritual domains are often construed, is a central theme to this project.

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consistent observations from a range of demographic studies both in the United States and world-

wide, it is accurate to say that most people consider themselves religious in some way.40 And as

spirituality is a consistent, integral theme in the language of all predominating religions,41 it

seems to be much more reasonable to assume that for most people, spirituality is not untethered,

but integrally linked, either to the religion they practice, or at least rooted in how spirituality is

understood in the religion of their own personal or cultural heritage, even if that religion is no

longer regularly practiced.42

While philosophical thought has fulfilled that place of meaning-making for some, the

language of the “spiritual” seems to have a much broader resonance and receptivity across

popular culture. That being the case, the language of “spiritual fitness” in relation to lived

integrity with foundational frameworks of meaning, would seem to be more broadly useful and

appropriate than language of “philosophical fitness.”

The Therapeutic Arts “discover” spirituality in frameworks of meaning

The rapidly growing field of the humanistic, as distinct from the organic or medicinal

domains of the healing arts, has in recent decades been the home for a growing literature on

spirituality in relation to wellness, as exemplified by contributions from psychology, nursing,

occupational therapy and social work. Early reference to the connection between frameworks of

meaning from the field of philosophy into the therapeutic disciplines comes from the work of

40 Diana Butler-Bass, Christianity After Religion: the end of church and the birth of a new spiritual awakening (New York: Harper-Collins, 2012), a range of surveys from Pew and others, all point to the ongoing broad popularity of religious practice and identification across traditional religions, both within the United States and on a broader global scale.

41 Not that the CONTENT of spirituality is consistent across religions, but the consistency lies in the concept of spirituality as having the function of the personalized, subjectivized practice of religious piety that is related to, but distinct from the external and institutionalized forms of any given religion. I go into more detail in demonstrating this common theme in previous work leading to this dissertation.

42 Wittgenstein.

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Albert Ellis in Rational Emotive Therapy.43 I mention these roots here to point to the modern

bridge Ellis provides between philosophy and the healing arts, based in the ancient notion from

Aristotle, Chrysippus and others who thought of philosophy as “an art concerned with curing the

diseased soul, and that the philosopher is the physician of the soul.”44

Because of their emphases on tools for healing and wellness, researchers writing on roles

of spirituality in relation to wellness have been able to focus on the more common and

observable functions of religion and spirituality, rather than getting lost in the plethora of varying

subjective content of the spiritual, where so much confusion and ambiguity arises. Many from

these therapeutic disciplines distinguish between that which is “religious” and that which is

“spiritual” as two different sets of social phenomena that are related, but not synonymous.

Authors typical of this perspective whose work I've explored also tend to include as

central to their concerns, the task of making or discerning meaning and purpose in life as being a

central organizing theme of that which is spiritual. These authors include: Donica, Farrar, Wong

and Vinsky, Greasley Chiu and Gartland, Zinnbauer and Pargament, Park, Moreira-Almeida &

Koenig, Tanyi, and the American Occupational Therapy Association.45 Each one of these in their

writings cite additional lists of authors writing along similar lines, suggesting that the work from

their colleagues in this direction is quite rich and extensive. While differing in various ways,

these authors tend to have a strong strand of continuity in what I would call the socio-functional

roles of spirituality. Ruth Tanyi writes from a nursing perspective:

43 Thomas Jarrett, "Warrior Resilience Training in Operation Iraqi Freedom: Combining Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, Resiliency, and Positive Psychology," in The Army Medical Department Journal, July-September 2008, www.cs.amedd.army.mil/AMEDDJournal/2008julsep.pdf , 32-38.

44 As quoted in Gretchen Reydams-Schils, “Social Ethics and Politics,” in Marcel Van Ackeren, ed. A Companion to Marcus Aurelius, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, (Chichester, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 456.

45 To avoid an overly cumbersome footnote here, please see bibliography for further reference for these works cited.

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Spirituality is an inherent component of being human, and is subjective, intangible, and

multidimensional. Spirituality and religion are often used interchangeably, but the two

concepts are different. Spirituality involves humans’ search for meaning in life, while

religion involves an organized entity with rituals and practices about a higher power or

God. Spirituality may be related to religion for certain individuals, but for others, such as

an atheist, it may not be.46

Tanyi's description explicitly states two essential facets of this discourse that others often assert

as well, though less concisely or less directly: Spirituality is quite often, though not always

connected with or rooted in religion, and secondly, that spirituality is a language with which

many atheists are often comfortable, though they might otherwise object to or reject the use of

religious language.

Wong and Vinsky's discussion intentionally sums up other research in order to develop

and offer a critical language for spirituality as distinct from “religion”:

Despite acknowledging the difficulties in defining terms like ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’,

many social work authors begin their discussion by marking spirituality off from

religion... Canda and Furman (1999)—two leading scholars in spirituality and social

work— write ‘Spirituality relates to a universal and fundamental aspect of what it is to be

human—to search for a sense of meaning, purpose, and moral frameworks for relating

with self, others, and the ultimate reality.’47

They further clarify by stating that what is usually called “religion” is discussed as being

inherently connected to human institutions that generally include, but are not limited to, facets of

spirituality.

46 Ruth A. Tanyi, “Towards clarification of the meaning of spirituality,” in Journal of Advanced Nursing (39 {5}, 500-509, 2002), 500.

47 Yuk-Lin Wong, Renita and Jana Vinsky, “Speaking from the Margins: A Critical Reflection on the 'Spiritual-but-not-Religious' Discourse in Social Work,” (British Journal of Social Work {2009}39), 1343-1359.

19

I describe that which is spiritual here as being a socio-functional domain in order to

highlight two points: Firstly, the foundational meaning-making function spirituality plays in

persons' lives, and how they understand “wellness” on both the personal and social levels.

Secondly, in highlighting the distinctly social character of the construction of the language and

concepts of various expressions of spirituality. Though one's spirituality may be thought of as

highly personal, both philosophers and social scientists often emphasize that inherently social

tools are inescapable in constructing that which can be called spiritual. Peter Berger concisely

expresses the social nature of language and concepts such as what we call the “spiritual”:

Homo sapiens is a social animal. This means very much more than that surface fact that

man always lives in collectivities.... Much more importantly, the world-building activity

of man is always and inevitably a collective enterprise.... Men together (Berger's italics)

shape tools, invent languages, adhere to values, devise institutions, and so on. 48

Therefore, even when conceptual language is used to describe private internal processes, the

language used is still a social product, and must have some broader resonance beyond the

individual using it, lest it be meaningless and useless in shaping and conveying thought.

Spirituality as the domain for frameworks of meaning

My research in this area suggests that this growing crisis of suicide in the Army may be

related to unintended inadequacies in publicly conveying functional meaning systems to

emerging generations that are related to secularization. Viktor Frankl suggested this correlation

more than fifty years ago:

The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time, can be described

as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention

48 Berger, 8.

20

that being has no meaning....There is a danger inherent in the teaching of man's

'nothingbutness,' the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological

and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of

man makes him into a robot, not a human being.49

Within the formerly hegemonic American “Christian culture,” meaning structures had

been constructed, maintained and conveyed across generations through the chains of memory of

established religions. Hervieu-Leger discussed this role of religion rather extensively, and began

to provide some conceptual clarity between the institutional and sociological structures of

distinct religions as related to, but separate from, the substantive role religiosity, piety, or

spirituality holds of providing foundational frameworks of meaning.50 But in the current

pluralistic framework of American liberalism, jurisprudence cannot support that continued social

practice.

An additional product of this same secularization is the emergence of the domain of the

spiritual as being distinct and not necessarily tethered to the domain of religion in which it had

formerly always resided as an undifferentiated facet.51 But “neither the atheist teacher nor the

atheist pupil can legitimately claim to be able to side-line spirituality. On the contrary, the

rejection of God makes the question of the ultimate meaning and purpose of life all the more

significant.”52 Frankl's lifetime of research suggested this need for functional meaning structures

is an inherent facet of our humanity:

The most fundamental questions of life such as those dealing with the origins, meaning,

and purpose of life; with how we are to live together; with the nature of human

49 Frankl, 131.50 Hervieu-Leger, 9-81.51 Alexander and McLaughlin.52 Andrew Wright, Spirituality and Education, (London: Routledge/Falmer, 2001), 47-57.

21

possibilities and limitations; with how people learn; and with what are our responsibilities

to each other are essential and central elements of spiritual discourses.53

Echoing Frankl’s work in post-WWII Europe, I have found in the American context

decades later, a common, observable, functional, social use of terms related to spirituality across

a range of fields. Through that common function of spiritual language, spirituality seems to most

often be used in reference to where foundational frameworks of meaning are grounded,

sometimes referred to as the domain of existential concerns. Therefore, rather than making any

attempt to define the term or to explore spirituality in any broader sense, “spirituality” is only

being addressed in this study in terms of the function of the apprehension or construction,

cultivation and support of foundational frameworks of meaning found in the domain of that

which is called “spiritual.”

“Spiritual fitness” is a relatively new way to describe what is and has always been at the

heart of the religious support work of military chaplaincy and civilian religious institutions

across traditions for many centuries. However, what spiritual fitness means in this relatively new

secular age Taylor discussed merits further investigation. How recent dynamics of secularization

have impacted socio-cultural infrastructure supportive of spiritual fitness formation, and what

that means in relation to social understandings and support of wellness seems to have been

poorly understood and explored.

This project has been an attempt to lay the groundwork, and offer ways to think, talk

about, and help identify these real concerns in ways that can appropriately engage, explore and

address these issues in our increasingly global context of plurality. “Well-being” is an attribute,

53 David E. Purpel, “Educational Discourse and Spirituality,” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (Winter 2005), 116.

22

capacity or goal that has no patently evident nor socially consensual content. The understanding

of what “well-being” is, and how to socially cultivate wellness, can vary dramatically across

differing cultural foundations. Tools of a language of spiritual fitness are here offered to help

cultivate and foster sustainable and positive contributions to the dialogue between theology,

spirituality, culture and well-being.

(excerpted and adapted from James R. Lewis’ Kent State University PhD dissertation {Dec. 2015}: SPIRITUAL FITNESS AND RESILIENCE FORMATION THROUGH ARMY CHAPLAINS AND RELIGIOUS SUPPORT,

available at:

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/pg_10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:kent1447863288

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