On April 27, Jimmy Fallon opened his show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon with (among others) the following joke: “I read that 72% of 18 to 29 year-olds consider themselves more 'spiritual' than 'religious'...or in simpler terms, ‘way too hung over to make it to church’.”

 

With a young adult demographic, Fallon got huge laughs. The joke was funny, of course, because it was basically true. It unmasked the essential selfishness that marks the designation spiritual in contrast to religious. Everyone who utilizes this distinction might not be hung over every Sunday morning, of course; but it is clear that the term spiritual carries non-institutional, doctrinally flexible connotations. Recently this flexible, self-determining style – which has long been noted by theologians, social critics, and some philosophers – has been quantifiably substantiated by psychologists Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell,[1] as well as sociologists Christian Smith and Melina Lundquist Denton.[2] Smith and Denton refer to the ubiquitous religious views of most young people – teenagers in the case of their study – as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” The therapeutic designation means that they essentially see religion as a way to more fully realize themselves.

 

It’s not the term religion is necessarily more desirable. It does often carry with it the legalistic connotation of a means by which one makes him or herself acceptable to God. Rather, it is the sense that spiritual means self-determining and self-indulgent. So the irony is that the reference point for both religious and spiritual as identifying titles mean the same thing from the perspective of God. One is institutional, the other more autonomous; but both are means by which one gains something for oneself. 

 

In distinction, the gospel teaches us that we are only acceptable by God’s grace through Jesus Christ (cf. Galatians 2 – 4). While we certainly gain much in Christ, the story is not about us but about God coming for us (see, for example, the gospel summary in Acts 2 or Hebrews 1). More than that, the gain we have in Christ comes through the process of lives of self-sacrifice (2 Timothy 3:12-13). Therefore, the life shaped by the gospel is not religious in the sense that it gains anything from God; but it is religious in the sense that it centers around the people of God – the church – who live out the self-giving life together. And the gospel-life is not spiritual in the sense of autonomous; but it is spiritual in so far as it is driven by the Spirit of God – who gives us the strength to endure (2 Corinthians 4:13-18).

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