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Reimagining Sacred Spaces For Religious “Nones”

Dec 26, 202413 min read

Updated: Jan 22

A spiral of stained church glass panes, seems to be from an angle looking up at a rooftop of a church.
Source: Spiritual Fit Club

Enjoy this episode from the archives.


In this episode, we discuss trends from the Pew Research Center's latest findings on religious identification, revealing that 28% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated "nones" - those who describe themselves as "nothing in particular" when asked about their religion. Given this significant shift, we explore how communities are reimagining sacred spaces for a changing world. From converting churches into community centers to embracing eco-therapy and nature-based practices, we examine how people are finding meaning in unexpected places. Join us as we contemplate what it means to create inclusive spiritual spaces in an increasingly diverse society.





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Episode Transcript:

Sue: Hello everyone, it’s Sue here. Happy holidays! We are in the middle of planning some exciting things for the new year, so for now, here's an episode from our archives from earlier this year. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy!


Sue: Welcome to Signal Shift, by Horizon Shift Lab. We're your hosts, Lana Price, Raakhee Natha, and Sue Chi. Each episode, we explore the latest signals in technology, culture, and society, uncovering insights that will impact our daily lives in the future. Join us as we shift perspectives, explore possibilities, and delve into real changes in our world. Curious to learn more? Go to horizonshiftlab.com.


Sue: Hi everyone. I'm Sue Chi and I'm joined by my co-host Raakhee Natha and Lana Price. Each episode, we dive into the signals and trends that are shaping the future and explore how they resonate in our own lives and in broader society. And today, we're continuing a variation on the theme. And so we're talking about the future of spirituality, which is in the broadest sense of the word. 


We're talking about maybe people searching for more meaning, deeper connection to the wider world, to our lives. So I'm really excited to see the signals that you're picking up on and how it connects to things that we've already talked about. So who would like to share first?


[1:31]


Lana: I really enjoyed this one and doing some research on the signals. And so my signal is related to the future of church buildings. 


And so there's a couple of things at play here. So recently in December, the Pew Research Center released a report on spirituality among Americans. And so among its findings is that we have been experiencing, for almost 20 years, a decline of Christianity in the US. So of people who identify as Christians, it used to be close to 80%. And now it's like at 60%. And so there's a decline on that front. And there's an increase on people who identify as “nones”, meaning they don't identify with any religion. But we still have, as an American society, overwhelmingly people identify as spiritual, but they are not identifying necessarily specifically as religious and religious, meaning they pray, but also regularly attending religious services.


So one of the implications on this is on the future of church buildings. And so now churches, not just in the US, but around the world, who have land and who have a building, but they have a declining congregation. And so the financial model of a church is really, individual donations play a big part in it. We have historically tithing where congregations pay a percentage of or individual congregants will pay 10% of what we know as tithing of their income to the church. 

And so there's a reckoning happening when basically churches have high overhead because they have a fixed structure, which is a building that has ongoing costs, but they don't have enough of that income to pay for the buildings. And so they're having to decide how do they sustain buildings in these very innovative ways.


And so one signal that I found is from a church in Edinburgh, which is the Greyfriars Church, was opened in 1912. And in 2016, they decided to convert the church into a non-denominational community center. And so they got this huge community-wide initiative, which was like between the church, the banks, the city philanthropy, to completely redesign, they hired an architecture firm, completely redesigned the whole function of the church to be a community center, and it was recently completed in 2022. 


And so now it is a flexible workspace, a community hub, an event space, and they specifically made their sanctuary non-denominational. And so, which I think is right, an interesting response to the”nones”, right, where people don't identify with their religion, but still want to have a space to go.


And so, but obviously this took like a huge amount of effort, and what I'm reading into it is that it's like a project that was bigger than the church alone could do, right? So they had to get all of these other stakeholders involved. And so I think that's a really interesting, I think it really speaks to a lot of the other conversations we've been having about space and redesign of spaces and what it means to have community, and I think in this respect, even the idea of a church as being associated with a building, like that whole just decoupling those things now, and reimagining it in the future.


Sue: Yeah, I also like the, I guess just the idea that we continue to talk about the lack of the “third place,” right? And this is a really great way if you have the assets and the land to be able to redefine it for something that sounds like is needed in a lot of spaces again, just to have a place for people to go to and to be with each other. So I really like that image.


[6:52]


Raakhee: I'll go into my signal, yeah, because I attended, I was curious about atheism as well. And it is increasing, it's, I think it's, the rise is, it was, you know, it's a small increment, right? But I think from, this is now between 2007 and 2012, the proportion of Americans who said they’re atheists rose from 1.6% to about 2.4%. So there is an increase, and I think it's still a small trajectory, but you're seeing that and you're seeing a decline of religion, right? 


And the reason that interested me is because what we do know about atheism is where societies are more advanced, educated, more stable, economically prosperous, you see that increase a lot, which is pretty interesting, right? And so the US, the US though, interestingly, still is a very religious country, and you know, religiosity is still very important here. But places like the UK, interestingly enough, Japan, certain countries, one may not have thought of, right? You see that decline and a move towards more scientific basis of understanding the world.


But in this comes from a really great BBC article where they look into this and studying, well, their evolution as well, where do we come from? Where does this concept of the spirit, the other, the immortal come from, right? And that's something that's really hard to peg, it's some of it does come from our evolution. We searched for meaning in the signs as we traverse the earth and build, and we couldn't explain a lot. We didn't have the tools and the signs too, so it was really easy to fall into that default of it's the heavens, it's the gods, it's nature, it's whatever it can be. But now science explains so many things, so it almost is like this counteract, right? It's so hard to predict what will happen that I know that there's definitely something in that space, right? Science is going to give us all these answers, and some of them might kind of uncover the veil of some of the things that we give other meaning to.


And I wonder what that will be like for people, I don't know if that means they'll be a continued rise in atheism, or what that will mean, there's so many different trends, on the other hand, witchcraft and paganism is growing in the United States. So that is a trend, right? And then that's completely on the other end of the spectrum, so this is an interesting topic. So those are some of the things that I found really hard to say, hey, you know, what is the future of spirituality, I don't know, especially in the United States.


Lana: You went in a totally different direction than I thought you were going to, because I thought when you were saying like, oh, as nations become more kind of stable and prosperous and educated, there has been a correlation with atheism; and I thought that this was going to lead to: that as things are so disruptive with like climate change and AI and like kind of all of our advances, you know, we have war, that people will revert that to religion was what I thought you were going to say. 


So then actually went that with more science and more discovery, people might have a different source of answers than where they, when they were turning to spirituality as a way to make meaning and to understand something that they can't understand. So I think that's really interesting.

Raakhee: You're right, the more I read, the more I was like, no one can, there's different types of data, but to put that together and say, this is what it looks like, we're just not there, right? Because there's all these interesting different signals. 


And part of it is that as humans, yes, when tragedy befolds us, when something bad happens, we do tend to turn to religion, like I think New Zealand, when they had that really bad earthquake, that particular town that had the earthquake, suddenly religion sparked up again, not the rest of New Zealand, they are also economically stable. So tend to fall into the “nones”, I guess, category or more spiritual and not religious. But that town kind of, you know, religion, like, yeah, just sparked up again there. I don't know historically, then what happened from there, if there’s data, like did it plummet again? Where did we land up? This contradictory practice.


Sue: That's fascinating. And I'm still reacting to one of the last things you said, Raakhee, which is that witchcraft and paganism is increasing also in the United States, which is a different kind of spirituality or religiosity. And it's kind of a variation on a theme I'm hearing in several of our conversations, which is just, it's, it's cliche, right? It's like, what's old is new again, but we're, we're claiming it as our own. 


And so what witchcraft may have looked like in the past, how it was reacted to in the past may not be what it means for people today, or maybe it does, I don't know. But that is interesting that the terms are the same, witchcraft, paganism, Christianity, like those terms have been around for centuries. So it's interesting with the different contexts and with these developments in science and AI, how people are claiming these, redefining, what these things mean and that they still have space, despite everything we know at this point.


Lana: I was at an event where someone introduced themselves as a neo-pagan. So I guess they're, they are, they're both acknowledging like that it's the old and the new together. And of course there wasn't, I think it begged the question, what does that mean? But we didn't, we didn't explore that, but it was a part of their identity that they wanted to claim and name in a very specific way. And so, so yeah, what's old is new again, and maybe with a new title.


Sue: That's right. And if you're listening out there and you identify this way, we would love to know, what does this mean to you? We're definitely learning at this point.


[13:53]


Sue: It's funny you mentioned the Pew survey, because that's, I also landed on that and saw this idea of the “nones”, but that it, I had assumed that it was like all the nones meant that there was, it was atheists or agnostics, but that actually no, still a majority of the nones had some sense of spirituality, which I thought was really interesting. 


And so to me, it, it led me to something I personally have been really curious about, which is this idea around eco-therapy and it's this connection of nature and just additional practices you have in nature. I landed on several articles from like Condé Nast Traveller to Vogue, just to say that eco-therapy, things like forest bathing, farm walking, what, what have you is like the next travel trend and that people will be doing these things.


And so it made me wonder, to your point Lana, if you're not experiencing and having a spiritual or a spiritual experience at, at like a church or a temple, where are you having it? And if it's in the woods, like, how does that redefine spaces for people? 


And so to me, where it, where it took me to was, where are places we may have ignored in the past that are now going to become centers of activity. And so it made me think, for example, here there might be a lot of rural areas that people never appreciated, which may have gone the way of industry, but now have an opportunity to regrow natural forests, to regrow nature. 


And so it made me think, oh, like maybe those communities can band together and redefine what it looks like and actually have people attracted to these places. So it led me to think, is there going to be more protection of natural areas in places and that there might be even a stronger case for it than moving the way of development or something like that.


You know, that's been a constant struggle. But yeah, I just wondered how much of a trend is this going to be, that it might, it might sway some landscapes and environments to change the way they are. And so instead of maybe a major city becoming a major travel destination, you might have like a very small community becoming a huge travel destination instead.


So I actually had a type of experience like that yesterday where I was invited to, there's a local farmer here who invited me to his property to just have a tour, kind of experience it and then share a meal together. And so it was really cool, he guided me to this area that he has, which is a, I forget the term for it, but it's essentially a mushroom forest. And it was so magical. And I have never been in a space like that. And he just left me alone for a few minutes just to have peace and kind of be in the space and notice things. And then later we went back to the farmhouse and broke bread together and had a meal and talked, you know, and so in my mind, it's something like that where there might be a community who kind of can help foster an experience like that and then be available for afterwards, to kind of help share in that experience, especially if you need to talk to someone about what's happening. 


Sue: Sounds like to me, that was an example. If you think of, at least in the U.S. that farmland is declining, you know, life on a farm is rough these days, just the way it's been set up. And so, you know, is there this other opportunity for people to experience what it's like to grow, you know, and to live off the land and to, you know, really understand what it takes to do something like that. And thereby also like having this relational experience in places where we don't typically go anymore, especially if you live in a city. So yeah, that was one, one kind of idea that I had yesterday coming out of that experience.


[18:03]


Sue: Yeah, I'm curious, you know, it's the same basis of this Pew study, which is interesting in three different directions, really talking about kind of this redesigning of the space and what that what that can look like for communities, you know, talking about this possibility of discovery and science and under like just what are the possibilities that come out of that regarding spirituality or not. And then thinking about how communities can converge around this idea of spirituality and not in a specific building, but out in nature and what that could look like. And yeah, curious if, if you see any convergence happening between these three.


Raakhee: I don't know about convergence, but I think the lesson, which I think we're struggling with maybe explain some of our debates, our, our tensions, we have got to hold space for a multitude of even more and different beliefs and ideas and ways of being, using space and how we converge and how that makes sense for us and live alongside each other with that. 


And I think maybe that's most different maybe to the past because we had that, but it was two or three things. And now it's, it's going to be 10 or 15 things and we're a massive population. So hey, it should be right. But how do we learn to live with it? How do I learn to live with my faith and my beliefs, maybe, next to the person that I'm going to work with every day who is deeply embedded in science, which is proving all answers. Do I shut my eyes, do I open to it? Do I fight back? Do I, why? Why? 


Yeah, I think, I don't know, that lesson for me is having to, to live with a multitude of these things coming in us, different thoughts, beliefs, opinions and before, I don't know what that looks like Sue, though. I don't think it's going to be interesting, but I think the reality of the multitudes, yeah.


Sue: Yeah, that is so well said, Raakhee. I think that's the whole idea of this multiplicity. Being in presence wherever you are is, is one thing that will be shaping and continue to shape the future, just how, how you're talking about it, that's very well said.


Lana: Yeah, I agree. I see like a correlation here between something we've talked about before too, about minority majority also, like there's something here for me around like, to your point, Raakhee, like identity is shifting and like the ways that we've identified in the past as a nation are totally changing in every respect. And I think there's also something here around power, like you had mentioned the redefining of power and yeah, this kind of coming back to like, okay, how, how are we organizing ourselves if the ways that we used to identify or belong are changing?


Sue: Yeah, absolutely, Lana. As you were saying, the design piece to me is what stuck out is, Raakhee, to your point, as we become more ingrained in the practices that we have, and there are so many others, how do you be in a communal space with others or is there a danger that you just, you just are in this one community, kind of at the exclusion of lots of other exposure to lots of other things. 


And for me personally, I would love to see how you can design even just this place in Edinburgh, Lana, like I’d be so curious, how do you intentionally design a space for these multiviews of the world and of spirituality and to work together, to be social together, to have conversations like that. I think that could be a really great lesson.


Well, thank you all for joining us on this journey around the future of spirituality. Lots of questions, lots of things to ponder for the future, but yeah, really looking forward to our next topic. So thank you all and stay tuned.


[22:37]

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