Spirituality: What Does it Mean and to Whom?

Abstract

While there is increasing interest in the topic of spirituality, scholars have limited data on its meaning among ordinary Americans. Based on an open‐ended question in a new nationally representative survey, this article documents the elements that make up people's views of spirituality. We find that theism is the dominant focus of American spirituality, with a relatively small percentage of people offering exclusively immanent descriptions. Cognitive and relational orientations are more prominent than behavioral or ethical orientations. Using latent class analysis, we identify seven distinctive views of spirituality that vary considerably in their prevalence and social profiles. Binary logit regression shows that spiritual self‐identification, belief in God, and worship attendance are the religious factors most strongly associated with views of spirituality. Among sociodemographic predictors, significant associations with gender, race, education, and income are limited or absent. In contrast, the influences of age and political ideology are more substantial.

Multidimensionality of Spirituality: A Qualitative Study among Secular Individuals

“…Hence, our data rebuts the claim that spirituality is highly focused on the self or even an egocentric form of religiosity (e.g., Hackbarth-Johnson and Rötting 2019;see Carey 2018;Chandler 2008) but rather reflects a feeling of being connected to a divine being and fellow humans. This is supported by results from earlier studies that found that a vertical connection to a higher spiritual being remains important within the spirituality concept (Piedmont 2004;Steensland et al 2018).…”

“…On the other hand, ethics, which was the least frequently reported dimension, was simultaneously the dimension of the highest individual importance. This result of a low frequency and high importance at the same time could clarify prevailing contradicting views on spiritual ethics (Carey 2018;Chandler 2008;Eisenmann et al 2016versus Berghuijs et al 2013Steensland et al 2018). Consequently, the concurrent consideration of frequency and importance, which lies at the heart of Huber's Centrality concept and scale, is of significant interest to spirituality research.…”

“…Which values and ethical beliefs people who define themselves as 'spiritual, but not religious' or 'rather spiritual than religious' consider important in their lives is controversially discussed (Chandler 2008;Comte-Sponville 2009). Some approaches regard an ethical dimension to be the center of the spirituality concept (e.g., Carey 2018;Eisenmann et al 2016), while others locate it at the margins of it (e.g., Berghuijs et al 2013;Steensland et al 2018). We want to raise the question if non-religious or atheist individuals report an orientation toward values in their everyday lives that can be explicitly reported or etically defined as spiritual.…”

“…The benefit of this broad definition of spirituality is the incorporation of more secular forms of spirituality (see Schnell 2009), i.e., the horizontal and the depth dimensions of connectedness. Therefore, Bucher does not only use the prominent two dimensions of vertical and horizontal spirituality (e.g., Piedmont 2004;Steensland et al 2018;Streib and Hood 2016) but also adds a third depth dimension. He even defines self-transcendence as the ability of humans to go beyond themselves, which is a precondition to feel connected on a horizontal and vertical dimension, and as a result to expand and actualize the own self.…”

“…While some researchers refer to spirituality as a personality dimension (Emmons 1999;Piedmont 1999), others consider spirituality to be an intelligence dimension (King and DeCicco 2009) or a more general cognitive orientation (MacDonald 2000), and yet others conceptualize spirituality as an attitude towards purpose and meaning of life (see Koenig 2008). In recent years, emic approaches have been attracting scientific attention in the way that spirituality is defined by study participants (Altmeyer et al 2015;Berghuijs et al 2013;Eisenmann et al 2016;Keller et al 2013;Steensland et al 2018) with inconsistent results depending on the religious-cultural background of the respondents that urge for meta-analytic studies.…”