Moving On: Rethinking the Role of Spirituality in Modern Life
Updated: Sep 3
Last year, I enrolled in an entrepreneurial incubator called START. The program is designed for people in the religious/non-profit world.
Every participant is given a mentor. Mine happened to be Dr. Jack McGourty from Columbia University, who teaches courses on entrepreneurship.
The goal of the program is to test your business idea against potential customers. Is what you’re offering something people want/need?
My original idea was to create an online platform designed to connect spiritual seekers with spiritual leaders via livestream technology.
I envisioned leaders from every religious, spiritual and philosophical background running live, interactive sessions on the platform.
The session could be about any topic of interest to the leader, but generally, a leader would discuss ideas and practices that help seekers learn about the leader’s approach to religion, spirituality or their worldview.
Seekers join sessions to listen, ask questions and engage with the leader. In exchange, the seekers who attend the leader’s sessions are encouraged to donate tips or pay an entrance fee.
It’s kind of like an OnlyFans for spirituality. A centralized platform where any question about religion, philosophy or spirituality can be answered by experts.
I figured it was a win/win. Leaders could develop a following from around the world and seekers could engage spirituality on their own terms.
The cost of developing this platform was tens of thousands of dollars, so before I raised large amounts of capital, I needed to ask a fundamental question: Is this a platform something people would actually use?
The Interviews
Our first task was to set up interviews with potential customers.
The questions we developed in these interviews were never supposed to address our idea directly.
Instead, we were to ask questions adjacent to the idea that would allow participants to discuss whether the product I wanted to create was something they would use.
However, before we developed these questions, we were supposed to imagine the typical customer who I believed would be drawn to my platform. Below are some of the qualities and characteristics I felt would apply:
They grew up within religious institutions in childhood.
They have mostly abandoned religious affiliation in adulthood.
They are religiously agnostic.
They are both intellectually and spiritually curious and want to learn more.
They long for a community of likeminded people with whom they can discuss these ideas.
After I envisioned my typical customer, I worked with Dr. Jack to develop a set of questions for my interviews. Below are some of the questions I asked:
What was your experience with religion as you were growing up?
Tell me about a time when you felt a strong spiritual connection or had a meaningful spiritual experience. Walk me through what happened and how it felt.
Walk me through the last time you considered attending a church or religious service. What went through your mind as you were deciding?
Walk me through a typical day from when you wake up to when you go to bed. Where might spiritual practices fit in, and what gets in the way?
Think about the times recently when you've tried to do something spiritual—maybe meditation, prayer, reading, or something else. Tell me about what happened and what made it easier or harder to follow through.
Tell me about what you did yesterday evening after all your responsibilities were done. Walk me through how you spent that time and how you felt about those choices.
You can tell by these questions that I’m trying to suss out how my potential customers feel about religion and where they experience spirituality.
The incubator required five interviews, but Dr. Jack told me that if I really wanted a statistically viable sample, I would need to conduct around twenty.
I set to work and reached out to various people I knew who I believed were good candidates for utilizing my platform.
The Feedback
What Dr. Jack made clear is that for these interviews to yield good results, I needed a variety of people from diverse backgrounds.
The demographics were mixed: Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, middle class, upper middle class, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, European, African American, moderate to highly educated.
Honestly, the information I gleaned from these interviews shocked me. I’ve spent my entire adult life dedicated to promoting religion in some form or another.
What these interviews taught me is how wrong my perspective has been about religion and spirituality in the 21st century. Here are the big takeaways I discovered from my interviews:
They are not looking for religious spirituality to be repackaged in a different format. They are DONE with religion.
For them, spirituality is embodied not externalized (as it is with institutional religion).
They experience spirituality in spaces they deem sacred and allow them to feel in touch with their body (yoga, line dancing, nature, singing music, etc.)
Although some people experience connection when they use their phones, the vast majority use their phones to disconnect from the world.
They are seeking connection with people in the real world with whom they can have conversations about things that matter to them in an open and non-judgmental way.
They do not have time in their lives to add one more thing to their to-do list.
I have to admit that the first insight floored me. I always assumed that for people who had left their religion behind, they did so because they found their religion out-of-touch with the real world.
I figured that if you could repackage religion in a relevant manner, they would consider reintegrating religion back into their lives.
Instead, what I discovered is that, aside from the occasional holiday service, almost everyone I interviewed had ZERO desire to regularly engage with institutional religion.
The second and third insights were equally as revelatory. When we drilled down into how they experienced spirituality, across the board they described feeling most spiritual in traditionally non-spiritual spaces.
They felt the most spiritually connected when they were doing specific activities that helped them feel in touch with their bodies. Often this included being in nature, exercising, or creating something like art, music or dancing with a group of people.
They felt almost no spiritual connection from external religious practices, like sermons, liturgies or institutional rituals. Moreover, due to the insular nature of religious communities, they often felt isolated and alone while attending services.
All of this information forced me to reassess my perspective—my potential customers have completely moved on from religion and have no interest in returning in any way, shape or form.
My app was DOA.
Rethinking Spirituality in Modern America
We all know from the statistics that institutional religion is experiencing a massive decline.
This is not news.
What I was not prepared for was how their lives had entirely shifted away from any consideration of religion.
Religion is not hovering somewhere in the background, waiting for the right moment to resurge into their lives. For most of the people I interviewed, religion barely registers.
Spirituality, on the other hand, is very important to them. They long and crave spiritual nourishment in their lives.
What is truly remarkable is how they have completely severed their sense of spirituality from religion.
I could hardly believe the interview data.
While they acknowledge that religion holds spiritual value for others, it doesn’t hold spiritual value for them. Several articulated they feel religion to be spiritually bankrupt.
The question is why?
There are myriad reasons, but the most powerful is their sense of spirituality transcends the narrow box offered by institutional religion.
In other words, they FEEL a spirituality inside of themselves that is so much greater than what their religion of origin allows.
For them, spirituality is an expansive idea, whereas spirituality in religion is restrictive. Religion puts limits and borders on what can be defined as spiritual.
By separating themselves from institutional religion, they have disavowed the notion that spirituality is confined to a synagogue, church, mosque or temple.
They carry their spirituality into the world through their bodies and find spiritual connection in people and places that are traditionally shunned by religion.
To be clear, their spirituality is very real and, in many cases, very deep. They have simply grown beyond the religious container of their upbringing.
Most importantly, now that they’ve tasted freedom, they have no desire to go back.
Where Do We Go from Here?
What I’ve discovered through this process is that American society is headed in two distinct directions in terms of religion.
On the one hand, there are those who appreciate the religious container. It gives them a structure and belief system that makes them feel safe.
To be clear, this is not inherently bad or wrong. Many of the members of my former congregation fit into this category. They are incredible people who have made the world a better place through their faith.
That said, the proportion of the population who appreciate the religious container is steadily shrinking.
On the other hand, there are those who have left their religious container. For this group, the spiritual value offered by religious institutions no longer feels relevant.
While they appreciate and often reflect fondly on their time growing up within institutional religion, their perspective is simple: the dividends are not worth the investment.
They receive as much or more spiritual nourishment from activities outside of institutional religion.
What they often lack is a community of like-minded people. Sadly, they know they won’t find that community inside of institutional religion, which is why they will never go back.
This is a growing proportion of the population and will eventually become the majority in educated, industrialized nations.
My goal is to help the people outside of the container find those like-minded people and create the community they long to find. This is what my company ProSocial is all about.
If you don’t mind, take a look at my website or watch the video below and let me know whether you think ProSocial might be right for you or a group of people you know outside of the container. Thanks for reading!
Thanks for the insight- the paragraph “What they often lack is a community of like-minded people. Sadly, they know they won’t find that community inside of institutional religion, which is why they will never go back.” Really struck me hard. We were trying to find community at a church environment but felt stuck in the middle of the younger crowd and the established group and never made a connection that went more than Sundays or being pushed into filling “spots” on a mission or service group to the support the church. Kept pushing on until Covid and just stopped trying at that- but we find spirituality in our walks and other activities but have never found the community. One…
TYSM for this detailed description of the qualitative study and this (growing) American demographic. My hot take is that there are two crucial points missing l, two blind spots in this analysis:
These people are not any more "done" with religion than somebody who never heard music is "done" with music. Maybe the musicians had tattoos or the music hall was stinky or whatever else turned them off... Religion is not about the security of a holistic belief system (it's only a part of it) it's first and foremost an ancient path to having mystical experiences of unity, and a mystical existence. Walking this path takes effort and "dividents" do not come as instant gratification
The other part is the…
I reallly don't know what you mean by spirituality. People can be good or bad, with or without "spirituality" - or religion..