A brief note on this paper accompanies part one here. Part two is here. Part three, here.

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

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With many interpreters of our current cultural situation, I see an appreciation for spirituality as a strikingly widespread interest, including and especially among my students and those with and to whom they theologize and minister. One need not reduce the many faces of spiritual self-identification to one definition to appreciate that for many reasons, many of our students want to taste the meaning of their relationship to what might claim them, a wanting that tends to have students looking for ways of overcoming religious divisions, of articulating shared ethical commitments, and of putting things together in a practical way that makes sense for their immediate felt relationships. (It is important to note that not all research bears this out, such as the recently-published book by Christian Smith with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (Oxford, 2009)). There are critics and endorsers of this turn to spirituality, but I think that an attention to practices helps us hold this research, and relate in theological education to our students, in a promising way. Unfortunately, some of the literature on the popular practice of spirituality lacks interest in practice models in theology, focusing much more on what young adults do and do not “know about their faith” or “their religion,” the frequently-condemned scourge of religious illiteracy.

That spirituality is now typically formed and informed, even transformed, outside religious institutions; and secular music plays a substantial role in the formation of identity and spiritual navigation for many if not most young adults in the West and in the Western-influenced globe. Robert Wuthnow’s recent research on generational differences in American religious and spiritual practice found that with regard to the arts, “the most notable generation gap is in preference for contemporary pop/rock music. Nearly four-fifths of young adults in their twenties say they especially like it; fewer than one-fifth of adults age 65 and older do.” Other kinds of music, such as classical and country, are generally favored more by older adults than by younger adults. This includes those who especially like Christian music and gospel music” (Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 130). Moreover, according to Wuthnow, music is the second-most popular source for finding spiritual answers today (after the Christian tradition). It fell to one respected Catholic commentator recently to render public what many scholars themselves in the AAR have already shown, that today’s students of theology are “usually far more catechized by pop culture than by the church,” (John Allen, “Navigating the Future of Theology,” National Catholic Reporter, 14 November 2008, p. 2a ) and the form of pop culture that seems to be most widespread and influential in everyday Western life is secular music (see Tim Blanning, The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians, and Their Art (Belknap/Harvard, 2008)).

It is thus important for theological education to search out a way of appreciating the “extra-ecclesial” formation going on today. This is of particular importance in Catholic culture, wherein easily a majority of Catholics in particular and perhaps Christians in the mainline denominations, in the U.S. at least, are what I would call “secular Christians.” Secular Christians are those raised and/or baptized as Christian who cannot find Christianity as their central life project. They find themselves having to deal with their Christianity, and to do so as an irremediable aspect of their identity, but whom “we” in theology and especially in the churches might be tempted to call (and who often learn to call themselves) “nonpracticing,” “nominal,” “religiously illiterate,” “relativistic,” “inactive,” or “fallen away.” Their “existential hierarchy” of truths, to use Rahner’s language, the deepest sense they make of life, does not match up with what many of us might take to be the Catholic objective hierarchy of truths. Many here would say that secular Catholics are putting something in place of church, like sports, work, leisure. They are the ones who may have left the Church intentionally, scandalized or disappointed, but more often have just drifted away. (And they may not be who we think they are. According to recent research, the fastest growing group within Hispanic/Latino/as are “seculars,” most of whom were raised Catholic.) Secular Christians are trying to live their secularity, which often includes their own sense of spirituality, with much more investment than their ecclesiality. They constitute one oceanic and silent penumbra of the church. They are in no way simplistically relativistic. They are often judged, however, as cultural victims. They, and many like them who are only moderately affiliated, at best, with religious institutions, do not necessarily lack for a spiritual life, and indeed may have things to teach us about the power of extra-ecclesial formation, especially under popular music, for the shaping of sense and desire.

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