Spirituality and Politics: How do spiritual Americans talk about politics?

• In Event: 40469 - Religion and Politics

Abstract

The intersection of religion and politics is widely discussed, as religion can have very real political consequences. The question of how Americans’ religious commitments align with their political identity and behavior has received significant attention. However, how Americans align their spiritual commitment with their political identity and behavior has remained largely absent from the discussion. To attend to the complexities of the intersection between spirituality and politics, we consider spirituality as a dimension of religious practice (Ammerman 2022). Practice is rooted in shared mental representations, or cultural schemas, that are transposable to different contexts (Leschziner and Brett 2021, Sewell 1992). We aim to understand how spirituality intersects with politics by examining the transposable character of the cultural schemas that guide discourse on spirituality and politics. In this article, we draw on qualitative interview data from the American Voices Project to examine discourse on spirituality and politics. We focus on one particular intersection between spirituality and politics that emerged in our data, the rejection of party affiliation among some spiritual Americans. We find that two schemas anchor how these people talk about both with spirituality and politics: (1) an understanding of institutions limiting or constraining the individual and (2) the understanding that there exists a natural order of the world. For the spiritual individuals who reject party identification, these schemas shape how they talk about both spirituality and politics. By exploring this one way in which spirituality intersects with politics, we demonstrate how spirituality as practice is not bound to a singular context and we provide an insight into how spirituality influences political identity and behavior among a group of Americans who express a kind of “critical distance” from mainstream institutions.

Authors

• Lena Kunjan, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

• Penny Edgell, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities