Chronicling Our Mix-and-Match Spiritual Quest

Some 95% of all Americans insist that they believe in God in one way or another, or so we learn at the very outset of “Shopping for Faith” by Richard Cimino and Don Lattin. In fact, the authors cite surveys that suggest we are actually getting more religious as the 20th century comes to an end. Yet the definition of what we mean by “God”--and the ways in which we seek to find our way to God--are growing ever more diverse, ranging from Zen meditation to Scientology, from Kabbalah to the Promise Keepers, from a cliff-side Roman Catholic hermitage in Big Sur to a New Age seminar in a crowded hotel ballroom.

“Americans,” the authors observe, “love to ‘mix and match’ religion.”

Cimino is the editor of “Religion Watch,” a newsletter that reports on trends in contemporary religion, and Lattin is the religion writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Together, they have come up with a savvy appreciation of where we are now and where we are heading in the restless search for spiritual truth. What “The Popcorn Report” does for consumer culture, “Shopping for Faith” now does for America’s religious culture.

“As the new millennium dawns, one way to understand American religion and chart its future is to see the world of faith like any other product or service in the U.S. economy,” the authors explain. “Today’s diverse religious landscape has been compared to a busy marketplace where competition thrives and seekers shop.”

The notion that “God is dead,” a theme of some theologians and the media in the 1960s, was premature, or so the authors insist. Over the last two decades, “faith has survived and flourished,” perhaps because of the search for “an anchor of meaning in an unstable world.” But the search has taken many Americans out of churches and synagogues and beyond the confines of organized religion.

“For many Americans,” the authors point out, “spirituality has become a private affair.”

To find their way through the varieties of religious experience in what they call “post-denominational” America, the authors have focused on a few individuals and couples whose experiences are emblematic of the trends they describe.

Thus, for example, we meet a middle-aged woman named Miriam, the granddaughter of a rabbi, whose spiritual journey started with drugs--”That LSD trip gave me my first experience of divinity inside my own being”--and continued with Buddhism and Taoism under the tutelage of Ram Dass, a correspondence course from the Self-Realization Fellowship, a sojourn with a “metaphysical Christian sect” and a discipleship in India under Baghwan Shree Rajneesh.

“There was lots of criticism from people saying I was just jumping from one group to another,” admits Miriam. “But this is all beyond the mind’s consideration. It’s the energetic link between you and the divine.”

Miriam is one of the more outlandish examples of a spiritual seeker, but such testimonials allow us to see the human face of the sociological and statistical trends that Cimino and Lattin describe so insightfully--the “divorce between religion and spirituality,” the preference among baby boomers for “a mystical experiential stance” rather than membership in an organized church, the way Americans are drawn to “spiritual practices that not only connect them with the sacred but fix things.” And the authors have summarized their conclusions with a series of boldface sentences and paragraphs that serve as signposts for the reader.

“The ‘pick and choose’ approach to faith, the desire to ‘take from it what is wonderful and good,’ will continue in the coming century,” goes one such pronouncement. Another predicts: “In the new millennium, peace may finally come to science and religion. . . . The search for spiritual truth and the [quest] to understand the cosmos are converging.”

“Shopping for Faith” comes with a CD-ROM that contains the entire text in searchable form and links to additional resources on the Internet. Somehow, after following the authors to the cutting edge of religion, it is not surprising to find the book on the cutting edge of publishing technology too.

Some earnest seekers who find their way to “Shopping for Faith” may be left wondering whether an authentic quest for spiritual truth can be equated to a shopping trip to a “religious marketplace.” But, to their credit, the authors concern themselves only with an inventory of the spiritual resources that are available, and they make no value judgments about the choices we may make.

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Times Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “Moses: A Life” (Ballantine).