Since the 1960s a fierce debate has raged among scholars seeking to assess the puzzling state of Americans' religious commitments. In one corner are the experts (historians, sociologists, and a host of other specialists) who characterize Americans as the most conspicuously religious people of the Western world. From the other corner, an equally formidable scholarly contingent sees a secularized society in which religious institutions are increasingly marginalized. Both sides muster a good deal of evidence, and the debate is far from being resolved.

What is and has been clear, however, is that in every town, city, and county, Americans are foraging for new forms of meditation, home-spun wisdom, and formulas for ecstatic experience that can patch easily into a highly individualistic, customized religious life. Impassioned, often undisciplined questers, with little respect for boundaries, theological underpinnings, or tradition, these seekers are very much in the American grain, but they seem to many observers to be a larger presence than ever before. Snatching up books, attending seminars and workshops, they represent an enormous, informal, rudderless congregation that somehow flourishes without committees, flea markets, bake sales, budgets, building campaigns, or denominational ties. Worshiping in the church of the Mysterium Tremendum, a placeless space without cornerstones or choirs, a mind-boggling arena where God answers to many names, they gather in disposable communities, retreat centers, and small groups of all sorts.

Ask them what they believe, and seekers will say, as if repeating the cardinal creed: "I am not religious. But I am very spiritual." Ask them about their practices, and prepare for tales of angels or shamans; natural health remedies and psychology; warriors and wolves, new rituals, mysticism, holy texts, and various forms of meditation. Audio- and videotapes, cds, and Tibetan bells call them to worship. They speak of feng shui, 12-step groups, promise-keeping, desert fathers, Sophia, and sometimes, perhaps, Buddhism, Catholicism, Benedictine community, and Depak Choprah all in the same breath.

According to its promoters, this First Church of the New American Pastiche will become the dominant way of religious life in the twenty-first century. (Some are calling it "a Second Reformation.") Critics argue that the hurly-burly between and beyond organized religion's borders reflects the worst kind of consumerism. The pastiche practice, they complain, issues not from a spiritual wellspring, but out of spiritual crisis.

The best place to start getting a handle on all this is a book just published by the University of California Press, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s, by the distinguished Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow. His work, the product of a three-year effort funded by the Lilly Foundation, examines every available survey produced about Americans' religious habits, attitudes, and practices across the past five decades, and interprets hundreds of hours of contemporary interviews with men and women from around the country who have willingly offered their stories to Wuthnow's teams of graduate-student scribes.

In the hands of a lesser scholar, the data might have crumbled like dry clay, but Wuthnow describes their shape and texture with convincing precision. In one slim volume, at once critical and optimistic, mocking and sympathetic, Wuthnow has provided much-needed insight into the tensions squirming at the heart of the contemporary American religious experiment. Americans, he asserts, are now experiencing nothing less than "an altered sense of the sacred" and "a profound change in spiritual practices." The very meanings of religious commitment and community appear to have undergone redefinition. And there is no turning back.

As a window into a world of what might be described, optimistically, as soul-making, After Heaven observes Americans in the act of "reshaping deep religious traditions in ways that help make sense of the new realities of their lives." In its own way, the book does what Robert Bellah's best-selling Habits of the Heart did in the 1980s to reflect the national character by intensive sociological study—and goes a step further, offering an alternative to the "inconsistent and even bizarre formulations" that mark the current trend toward religious pastiche.

Wuthnow's single most striking insight is that the governing metaphor for religious life in the United States has shifted dramatically in the past 50 years from revered images of a domestic spirituality, where people were once patiently nurtured by ordinary habits of family life in specific places like the church and home, to a more dynamic, eclectic, and deeply personal metaphor of seeking. Of course, the prevalence of seeking is hardly news, but Wuthnow reinvigorates that now-tired metaphor by putting it in the context of its sharp departure from the metaphor of dwelling. "A traditional spirituality of inhabiting sacred places," he writes, "has given way to a new spirituality of seeking."

The seekers practicing a dizzying variety of spiritual disciplines, from A to Z—"Akido to Zen," Wuthnow notes—are busily stitching together their very own Sacred Canopies. No longer gathering in community beneath the rafters of the local church, people increasingly create temporary spiritual shelters that they can pack and carry as they move like Bedouins around a postmodern desert. The feverish need to glean a hint of divine reality from a profoundly secular culture also brings angels into play, projects Christlike features on everything from maple-tree bark to pizza pies, and shifts the very grounding of sacred space from the permanence of home and churchyard to any fluid arrangement linking road, river, conference room, and mountaintop.

The interviews Wuthnow draws on allow him to trace with some precision the arc of American spirituality from the 1950s to the 1990s. His interview subjects frequently describe familiar "realities" that we have come to see as characteristic of a postmodern culture: the regular debunking of static truths, dramatic change at a dizzying rate, broken families, ever-changing jobs and habitats, experimentaton with drugs, disaffection with established norms, a shift in consciousness based on a grand narrative to one rooted in more personal stories. These personal narratives, though individual, yield surprisingly common themes that Wuthnow has seized upon to plot his interpretation.

What he finds is that the "core" religious narrative that people describe as they recount their experience of the 1950s is one where devotional practices occurred almost exclusively in the home or at church. Nearly 50 years ago, when enthusiasm for organized religion hit a peak, the fertility rate was 3.8 children per woman, half the population lived on farms or towns of fewer than 10,000, four out of ten people claimed to pray twice a day, and seven out of ten said grace with their families before meals. Domesticated spiritual practices, such as saying grace, reading Scripture with the family, or going to confession, which complemented the regular habits of family life, depended on the support of a structured, stable social environment.

In the 1960s and 1970s, with the emergence of the civil-rights movement, the counterculture, and antiwar turmoil, the core narrative shifted dramatically, raising up an expansive, increasingly personal image of freedom. Americans' well-grounded sense of the sacred gave way to "movements" of one kind or another. The influence of the self-help movement, for example, and of psychotherapeutic movements that encouraged self-esteem, self-acceptance, self-discovery, self-fulfillment, self-realization, and self-expression blended in the culture to promote a "spirituality of the inner self." Intensive seeking was under way everywhere, replacing, perhaps for good, the dwelling metaphor of the past. Wuthnow joins critics who worry about the seekers' lack of community and disdain for ancient wisdom (though he regards the conservative trends of the 1980s, personified in Ronald Reagan and manifest in the emergence of the New Right, as reflective of a sentimental longing for an irretrievably vanished past). He is deeply troubled by the "dabbling" nature of much of today's spiritual questing; he is concerned about the future of congregations and denominations; and he can be absolutely caustic in his assessments of the consumer fascination with angels and Hollywood-style Buddhism and spiritual "disciplines" that require no alteration in behavior. To his credit, Wuthnow does more than chide; indeed, he offers an antidote, one that could take advantage of a trend toward what he calls "practice-oriented spirituality," characterized most dramatically in the explosive small-group phenomenon, which requires individual responsibility and some involvement in religious institutions. "For the soul to be compelling," Wuthnow writes,

it must be rooted in authoritative traditions that transcend the person and point to larger realities in which the person is embedded. Only then is it possible for immediate moments (of sacredness) to be truly instances of eternity, rather than fragmented, self-indulgent experiences that do not add up to a meaningful life. Linking those traditions requires effort that is likely to compete with the business of daily life. It also requires self-interpretation and thus may depend on specialists whose knowledge of spiritual traditions is greater than that of the average individual.

It is in this practice-oriented spirituality—as exemplified by the growing interest in Centering Prayer groups, spiritual direction, and Benedictine communities—that Wuthnow sees an opportunity to reassert the importance of the Christian tradition, and to do so in ways that will offer meaningful choices to the mass of bewildered seekers wandering in a spiritual marketplace that promotes aimless, rambling, self-indulgent pilgrimages.

Gary Dorsey is the author of Congregation: The Journey Back to Church, just reissued in paperback by Pilgrim Press.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.