Spiritual, Not Secular

On the diversity of irreligion

For my irreligious readership, how likely are you to use the term ‘atheist’ to describe your beliefs? Or, more broadly, what do you think about ghosts, astrology, psychedelic drugs, or transcendental meditation? We seem to believe that modernity is not religious, because we don’t often see religion as it was once practiced. Instead, we assume that citizens of Western countries are enlightened materialists, interested in scientific truth, with no mind for superstition. It may indeed be the case that institutional religion has fallen to the wayside, but interestingly, so has scientific atheism. Most people, in fact, are caught between the two.

In Britain, for example, about 38 per cent of people claimed “no religion” on the 2021 census. Godless Scotland claimed an even higher percentage, at about 51 per cent. The term “no religion”, however, is an enormously broad category to encompass over half of the spiritual beliefs of all Scottish people. One category can’t include both your new-age pseudo-Buddhist aunt and your nihilist God-is-dead tutorial colleague. And neither of these are truly materialist atheists in the same mold as Alex O’Connor and Richard Dawkins, even if they don’t turn up to Church of Scotland services.

The Dutch, also lapsed Calvinists, have a term for this kind of spiritual-but-not-religious diversity. They call the beliefs between atheism and religion ietsisme, literally meaning “somethingism”, and consider it a distinct phenomenon from agnosticism or atheism. Ietsisme is technically the opposite of nihilism, as a belief in an undefined “something”. It’s a notion that doesn’t fit well on a religion-irreligion binary, which means that the 30 per cent of Dutch people that call themselves ietsers (“somethingers”) are often miscategorized. 

I venture to guess that about the same percentage of ietsers exist in Britain, whether they would use the term or not, and that lumping them together with convinced atheists overlooks a large part of religious identity in this country. Confessional identities — that is, membership to religious organisations like churches and mosques — has broken down, but religious belief has become a kaleidoscopic patchwork with few guidelines to characterize it. 

The diversity of “irreligion” may explain some phenomena, like self-help books, that sociologists, historians, and philosophers of religion have struggled to account for. Your aforementioned aunt’s shelf of New Age spiritual self-help fills a certain gap in the market for spiritual guidance. The same goes for astrology, Jordan Peterson, and hustle culture. Among people at large, the ‘something’ in ‘somethingism’ risks being misidentified as self-help or wellness, or worse yet, productivity.

Ietsisme doesn’t have to lead to these things. That ‘something’ which gives meaning to life can be family, moral acts, artistic projects, even political causes, and most ietsers probably lead satisfying lives. Rather, the fracturing of spiritual identities necessarily implies that some people will choose poor subjects of religion, anything from self-help or joining a cult. In addition, a culture so extremely individualistic as our own is more likely to push people toward less healthy subjects of faith. 

It seems clear now that institutional religion cannot provide the social function it once did, and that ietsisme is here to stay. For those of us that go to church (or mosque, or temple, etc.) it might be helpful to remember that most of the people we engage in dialogue with aren’t secular materialists, but spiritually curious people with some form of religious beliefs. More broadly, we all ought to consider the religious diversity of the irreligious, and the fact that the atheist/theist divide isn’t so clear cut. For better or for worse, religious identity has shattered into almost as many fragments as there are Brits. Let’s hope we can rejoin the pieces around worthwhile beliefs.

Image from Wikimedia Commons