Are you religious or spiritual? Or are you both?
These are the questions that more people are pondering as New Age thought and spirituality move to a prominent place in American life.
National polls long have found that the majority of Americans describe themselves as religious. But during the past decade, polls also have revealed a growing interest in spirituality, which has been loosely defined as a sense of connectedness that makes life more meaningful.
With the increasing public interest in spirituality, some have questioned whether spirituality is edging out mainstream religion in American culture.
So for its spring 2001 issue, the quarterly magazine Spirituality and Health: The Soul/Body Connection commissioned a top national pollster to ascertain where American adults fall on questions of religion and spirituality.
One of the points the poll hoped to address was whether the rise in spirituality means that mainstream religion is on its way out.
"The answer is a resounding 'no' to conflict and 'yes' to compatibility," says Robert Owens Scott, the magazine's editor in chief.
Scott says he found the results both surprising and inspiring, with 59 percent of those polled describing themselves as both religious and spiritual.
"We are living through a spiritual renaissance," Scott says. "The word means rebirth. What's being reborn is our sense of ourselves as spiritual beings, deeply connected and open to one another and to something greater than ourselves.
"People are putting their sense of connectedness at the heart of things, from work to family. They want their jobs and relationships to be more meaningful."
The national poll was conducted by Blum and Weprin Associates, pollsters who have been used by NBC News and the New York Times. They gathered data from adults ages 18 and up.
Respondents were given a list of activities and asked which they considered spiritual.
Ninety-one percent saw praying as a spiritual activity, while 81 percent saw attending worship services as spiritual. A slim majority (52 percent) said making love is a spiritual activity.
"In our culture," Scott says, "an interest in spirituality has moved to the center of things. In scientific culture we feel rather fragmented. The empirical, analytical approach that modernism gives to our lives ... is not the whole picture."
Scott says that people tend to associate spirituality with positive, humane and freeing sorts of activities.
"Spirituality has always been a part of religion," Scott says, "but when you look at the way religion has been practiced during the past 50 years, with an emphasis on what church or which denomination, it has often left out the inner work of transforming lives. People are putting that back into religion and going into churches and shaking things up."
Most importantly, Scott says, the findings suggest that spirituality gives people who are deeply rooted in their traditions an openness to learn from other religions and dispels an "exclusivist understanding."
"I think the world is much smaller," Scott says. "A generation ago, you wouldn't encounter people from different religions and would tend to think of them as strange or exotic when it would come up in conversation.
"But when you get to know someone personally it is very hard to see their path as inferior."