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SECULARIZATION AND ITS IMPACT ON HABITUS FORMATION
James R. Lewis, PhD jlewis21@kent.edu
Kent State University, Indiana Wesleyan University, Ohio, U.S.A.
Spiritual Fitness, Culture and Well-Being
Across recent conflicts since the beginning of the 21st century, the U.S. military has been
something of a social laboratory rich with opportunity to explore impacts of intense stressors on
personal well-being and resilience. The increasingly prevalent context of secularization and
pluralism of U.S. American society and its military also provides a rich setting for exploring
changing roles of religion and spirituality in public discourse in relation to resilience and
wellness. This project is part of a dissertation exploring the dynamics of spiritual fitness and
resilience formation in this changing context. The dissertation from which this work is drawn,
was catalyzed by my own work as a U.S. Army Chaplain with suicide in the military, and is an
interdisciplinary study utilizing tools and insights from across the fields of the social sciences,
education and the humanities in order to explore impacts of public life and culture in shaping
these formative dynamics.
This study reflects my observations as to how spiritual fitness as here described
contributes to the physical, mental, ethical and relational well-being of Service Members
enduring the intense stressors of prolonged conflict. This project is an effort to facilitate positive
contributions to public discourse pertaining to roles of religion and spirituality in public
educational efforts toward resilience formation in emerging generations. Observations growing

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from this research suggest that both distinct religious discourse, as well as the broader public
secular discourse, would benefit from a clarification, perhaps a change, in how concepts of
pluralism and plurality of religious and spiritual traditions can uniquely contribute to personal
wellness and resilience formation.
Secularization and Well-being—Quiet connections
Charles Taylor observed in A Secular Age that “Every person, and every society, lives
with or by some conception(s) of what human flourishing is: what constitutes a fulfilled life,
‘what makes life really worth living,’ what would we most admire people for?”1—what in this
conference might be thought of as “well-being.” He likewise observed that these frameworks
and conceptions have been historically rooted in and essentially tied to religious belief. But that
the predominant public framework has:
changed from a condition in which belief was the default option, not just for the naïve but
also for those who knew, who considered, talked about atheism; to a condition in which
for more and more people unbelieving construals seem at first blush the only plausible
ones….the presumption of unbelief has become dominant in more and more (social)
milieu.2
Taylor summarized the impact of these changes not merely in terms of interesting social
facts, but as deeply impacting the viability of frameworks of meaning formed by public socio-
cultural infrastructure:
1 Taylor, A SecularAge, 16.
2 Taylor, A SecularAge, 12, 13.

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It is this shift in background, in the whole context in which we experience and search for
fullness, that I am calling the coming of a secular age…we have to understand the
differences between these options not just in terms of creeds, but also in terms of
differences of experience and sensibility.3
This reflects a foundational sea-change from the background picture of Aristotle and his heirs
through the many centuries and up to 20th century Christendom, in which the world’s apex and
center were found in the Divine,4 to a world without a meaningful apex or center at all.
Central to and accompanying those changes in theo-centric and religio-centric habitus,
were changes in understanding and habitus of religion itself as well, reflected in the increasing
move away from the central place in religion of any doctrinal orthodoxy, toward a centrality of
subjectivized personal, often merely esthetic experience as the heart and soul of religion. This
move is both integral to the development and evolution of that which is now called “spiritual,”
and becomes in large part a product of, and contributing to “constructivist” or “post-modernist”
ideas about religion in the late twentieth century, in which “The signal attribute of the modern
stage of religious evolution, according to Bellah, is cultural and personal freedom.”5 But while
this paradigmatic change certainly has its merits and its champions, I argue in this project that it
is also foundational to the issues I identify in this project with the concept of accidie, at the heart
of growing challenges to what is now being called “Spiritual Fitness” in the U.S. Army.
Building on Taylor’s foundation, I argue in this study for what appears to be an under-
recognized relationship between these changes in public formation processes and what is now
being observed as an increased rate of suicide in the U.S. Army. A result of the emerging
3 Taylor, A SecularAge, 14.
4 Taylor, A SecularAge, 60.
5 Taylor, A SecularAge, 42.

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secular age becoming more thoroughly established in and conveyed through public school
classrooms--at least anemic, if not devoid of spiritual language-- seems to be a loss of consensus
on and cultivation of common frames by which suffering, moral ambiguity and existential crises
could be cast as meaningful in public discourse. I argue that this loss of consensus on habits of
mind and dispositional habitus seems to have begun to undermine the capacity for resilience and
increase the vulnerability of emerging generations of Soldiers to the heightened frequency and
intensity of the existential challenges indigenous to military operations.
Taylor uses the years 1500 and 2000 as landmark dates to explore what he asserts is a
unique move in culture to a secularism previously unknown. He summarizes the difference
between these landmark dates as follows:
the difference would then consist in this, that whereas the political organization of all pre-
modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in,
or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free
from this connection…. Put in another way, in our ‘secular’ societies, you can engage
fully in politics without ever encountering God… but this would have been inescapable
in earlier centuries in Christendom… In those (pre-1500) societies, you couldn’t engage
in any kind of public activity without ‘encountering God’… in these societies, religion
was ‘everywhere,’ was interwoven with everything else, and in no sense constituted a
separate ‘sphere’ of its own.6
He described how dramatic the differences between the socio-cultural context where
belief and living within a theistic framework was inescapable, to where that undergirding
6 Taylor, A SecularAge, 1, 2.

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framework is not only absent, but where maintaining metaphysical frameworks become difficult
and often problematic.7 Built into the argument across this project is the assertion alongside
Taylor’s, that this form of a “secular” age is a new cultural development:
Against this kind of story, I will steadily be arguing that Western modernity, including its
secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and
related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.8
Secularization in America
The conveyance in previous generations of a relatively universal locus meaning—and
understanding of the content of what we might now call “wellness”-- based in (various)
Constantinian Christian comprehensive doctrines with the full weight of social support, seems to
have been normative across Western culture through the American and French Revolutions. The
change from socially located, Constantinian Christian frameworks of meaning that had been
central to the normative frameworks of social and personal formation, to a real plurality of
competing and mutually exclusive comprehensive doctrines, peacefully (relatively speaking)
coexisting in the same political space with at least some claim to “equal” validity, is dramatic.9 I
argue that this complex, multi-dimensional socio-cultural transformation in how formation is
understood, and how people are formed in to public sphere, is highly pertinent to the current
concern with suicide in the U.S. Army, as well as other early 21st c. challenges in wellness.
7 Taylor, A SecularAge, 3.
8 Taylor, A SecularAge, 22.
9 However, on the global scale, the forced imperialism of the modern era, the Cold War of the 20th century, the
ideological terrorism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, are all exemplary of where mutually exclusive
comprehensive doctrines fuel deadly conflict—the kind of ongoing conflict liberalism attempts to overcome—but
that’s anotherproject!

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Though the dynamics the term describes have much deeper roots, Peter Berger 10 brought
the term “secularization” into popular discourse since the 1960s to describe the dynamics of the
dramatic shift from a common culture to the current plurality of coexisting cultures. Most of
contributing to the dynamics of secularization, Taylor and others address are quite familiar, yet
their individual and combined roles in moving society and culture away from being thoroughly
religious to being noticeably secular for all, and thoroughly secular for many, may not be so
evident:11
1. Emergence of revivalism-- while religious in orientation, also moved the heart of
epistemology from church, scripture, reason, to individual emotionalism, subjectivism,
and to leadership that is charismatic and sensationalist more so than rooted in stable
religious institutions.
2. The Romantic Movement, then the indigenous American Transcendentalism-- also moved
popular epistemology toward emotionality and led to the introduction of new religious
movements, hence opening culture to spirituality outside of institutional churches. This
dynamic broadened the concept of “choice” in religion, while continuing to embrace
what is to later be called the “spiritual.”
3. The “closing of the frontier” and the emergence of industrialization--both in its
“sensationalism” and non-traditional/religious epistemology, as well as its emphasis on
future rather than past, and worldly leisure and wealth rather than suffering, directs minds
away from religiosity. As industrialism and its impact grew in the United States,
associated urbanization, massive immigration starting mid-19th c. and a plethora of other
10 Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy:Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion,(New York: Doubleday,
1967).
11 This list is merely representative, not exhaustive, as noted by many observers.

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phenomena changed the way people and communities existed, which reduced social and
cultural homogeneity and dependence on traditional and religious habits of mind, ethos,
etc., and contributed to the move of society further away from religio-centric living.
4. The emergence of the Common School movement provided a new realm of common
social experience in school rather than in church, where the focus was on assimilation
and preparation for future life more so than a primary emphasis on conveying religious
content.
5. With industrialization, pluralization, and emergence of growing “scientific/naturalistic”
worldviews, emphasis on “spiritual” formation moved to personal formation; citizenship
became democratized to be inclusive of others outside of the homogenous Calvinistic
Protestant ekklesia.
6. Emerging communications technologies, from telegraphs to trains, telephones, movies
and emerging electronic media, linked communities as never before and increased the
abundance and influence of secular brokers of opinion and experience (as opposed to
communal attitudes being largely shaped by religion and religious leaders), moving the
center of intellectual and attitudinal influence further from religious sources.
7. The emergence of humanistic disciplines in 19th c.—those that are focused on the human
experience rather than the Divine Order-- medicine, political science, economics,
anthropology, sociology, and the continued evolution of those disciplines, as well as the
development of psychiatry, psychology and social work in 20th c.—and exploring
processes dealing with human issues, problems and organization as non-religious arenas
and concerns—all shifted the intellectual world to predominantly secular habits of mind.

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8. Broad social changes in religion weakened its unified voice, which had conveyed a
hegemonically accepted religious worldview across the culture, giving way to the
predominance of a culturally normative “scientific” worldviews across popular and
academic cultures.
9. Popular media growth and affordability at the popular level-- novels, magazines,
newspapers, movies, radio, led to more time, energy and focus expended away from theo-
centric thought.
10. Popular media of various sorts glamorizing everything urban, de-legitimating rural and
traditional life ways, where religious, communal and traditional frameworks have always
held the most sway.
11. Similar processes of secularization taking intellectual root more broadly in Europe earlier
in the 19th century provided alternative ways of thought that, while they had fed
American intellectual elites for generations, merely provided foundations for the growing
popularization of American secularization, more evident toward the end of the twentieth
century.
12. WW I, and WW II both broadened popular experience in many ways, facilitating
“cosmopolitanization.” “Christian nations” at war with one another, causing untold death
and suffering, fomented an “existential vacuum”12 growing in all parts of Western culture,
though earlier in Europe and later in America.
All of these facets of social change have been both reflected and are manifest in changes
in social, cultural and personal habits of mind and dispositional habitus. The predominant socio-
12 Frankl, 108.

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cultural shift away from habitus centered on social faith practices and dispositions fostered and
validated by popular experiences of institutional forms of religion, toward more individualistic
and secular habitus in which religion in both its institutional and subjectivized “spiritual” forms
was growing less central and more optional for social life, is the paradigm shift Taylor identifies
as the move to a “secular age.”13
While the above list is drawn mainly from the American experience, they follow the
pattern of the European processes of secularization which preceded these phenomena in
America, and with some variance, is often also reflected in developing countries around the
globe. These processes included movements of social focus away from church life,14 changes in
conceptualizations of how both “religion” and “spirituality” themselves are understood, and
included as well, the roles of religion and spirituality in individual and social life. All of these
shifts together set the stage for, and are manifestations of the sociological changes reshaping
American culture and the process of secularization that followed.15
Religion’s loosening monopoly over spirituality and wellness
In the cultural paradigm of Catholic Christendom16 up until the 16th century
Reformation, the world in all its facets was understood to be not only theo-centric, but Church17-
centric as well. Reflecting a move away from this hierarchical and communal, church-centric
13 This is in a nutshell,the theme of Taylor’s argument in his book, A Secular Age.
14 This brief comment summarizes an analysis I have systematically traced in more detail in earlier study,bringing
togethera range of interdisciplinary sources also cited in this work, and all listed in the bibliography, to include
Taylor, Berger, Kennedy, Wuthnow,Crunden, Pratt, Durkheim, Cremin, Hervieu-Leger, and Sweet.
15 Robert Wuthnow, America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2005), 24-25.
16 I earlier used the broader term “Constantinian Christian Culture,” which would be inclusive of the centuries of
various forms of “established” Protestant regimes. This term would be related to but distinct from “Catholic
Christendom” as here used,which was shattered by the Reformation.
17 Church with a capital “C” in this project will refer to the Roman Catholic Church as a human, socio-political
institution, without reference to it as a theological entity.

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culture, the beginnings of secularization were rooted in the ideas of the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment,18 and brought into popular manifestation through the sixteenth century
Reformation. Integral in this process was the radical thought coming from the Reformation,
wrought first by Martin Luther, in which the grounding of legitimate authority for “Truth”19
moved from the hierarchical Church centered in the authority of the Pope, to the concept
emerging of the individual as a legitimate arbiter of Truth. And from the Enlightenment heritage,
secularization started by shifting the focus of human eyes, first from God in Heaven to God
immanent, which eventually moved from a focus on the things of God, onto merely temporal and
human concerns.20
It is within this world of Truth, accessed through Christian scripture as
individually discerned through the essential tool of reading, that American civilization and its
concurrent cultural assumptions was born:
The most important single fact about American civilization is that it began in England as
a revolutionary religious and political movement. This conjunction of British
background, political means and religious ends proved capable of survival in a
wilderness, and of dominance over a large geographical area... to set a cultural tone
accepted in most quarters as 'American' until well into the twentieth century.21
Struggling for literal survival in the American wilds, far from European intellectual
centers, the predominance of religiously legitimizing language in popular and academic culture
18 Taylor, A SecularAge.
19 Truth with a capital “T” is also used intentionally in this project as in reference to the concept of a distinctly
positivistic Divine Truth, which was understood to be radically different than what might today be understood as a
merely relative, contingent,constructed and contestable “truth” claim. I hope my practice of capitalizing the term to
make this clarification is less distracting than the frequent use of quotation marks would otherwise be.
20 Taylor, A SecularAge.
21 Crunden, xv.

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suggests that American civilization stayed focused much more on scriptural Truth accessed
through individual literacy, than showing much interest in Enlightenment rationalist and
empiricist developments in the Old World. Additionally, the first Great Awakening in the less-
than-staid American frontier, and with significant influence from emotional evangelicalism, set
the cultural stage for a highly subjective and individualistic culture.22
The Transcendentalists and their European Romanticist roots, through the emergence of
secular print industry across the 19th century,23 contributed to the shift in popular epistemology
from scripture and rationality to subjective emotional experience. In Emerson’s words, “The
foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should
we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?”24 Their emphasis on the individual and
variability of human experience, to include a range of means for accessing the Divine, also
introduced the exploration of “Eastern spirituality” into the American experience. With the
massive immigration across the 19th century, the end of slavery, and the rise of industrial cities,
America experienced the beginnings of real demographic diversity. All of these shifts together
set the stage for the sociological changes reshaping American culture and the process of
secularization that followed.25
Modern thought in public education is rooted in philosophies of pragmatism that emerged
in the late 19th century, in which early thinkers continued relocating grounds of meaning. As
distinct from former religious rootedness, “Pierce gives the community of inquiry a large role to
22 Crunden.
23 I made a rather extensive study ofthis dynamic in an earlier study preparatory, but not a part of this dissertation.
In a nutshell, “popular literature” and widespread literacy spread dramatically across the United States as a part of
the communications revolution in the 19th c., so that from the mid-18th c. where “popular literature” barely existed,
and the only literature popularly familiar may have been the Bible, a range of literatures, genres,newspapers,
magazines, novels and were common and accessible in even frontier towns by the end of the 19th c.
24 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” In Alfred R. Ferguson, ed., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol.
1: Nature, Addresses and Lectures, (Cambridge, Mass:The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 7.
25 Wuthnow, 24-25.

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play in determining the ultimate meaning of reality itself.”26 William James further developed the
anthropocentric framework of pragmatism, carrying Pierce's foundational thought further:
The educational consequences are immense. First, if essences are but teleological
weapons of the mind, then what of the essence of human beings? The answer is obvious;
we do not have an antecedently existing essence. Instead, each individual must work out
the essence of their existence within the culture they happen to find themselves.27
By John Dewey's time at the end of the 19th and in the early 20th century, the broader
populace generally seems to have still held to a religious worldview. But Dewey made
significant moves, both in furthering the groundwork for the discourse of an untethered
spirituality, and in moving the locus of meaning formation from religion to education. He was
overtly attempting to lay the groundwork for an untethered discourse of the spiritual in his work,
A Common Faith:
A religion... always signifies a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind of
institutional organization, loose or tight. In contrast, the adjective 'religious' denotes
nothing in the way of a specifiable entity, either institutional or as a system of beliefs. It
does not denote anything to which one can specifically point as one can point to this and
that historic religion or existing church…. It denotes attitudes that may be taken toward
every object and every proposed end or ideal.28
Or as Dewey summarized earlier: “there is a difference between religion, a religion, and the
26 Jim Garrison and Alven Neiman. “Pragmatism and Education,” (The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of
Education, edited by Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith & Paul Standish. Ch. 1, pp. 21-37 (Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 2003), 22.
27 Garrison, 24.
28 John Dewey, A Common Faith, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 9-10.

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religious; between anything that may be denoted by a noun substantive and the quality of
experience that is designated by an adjective.”29 That distinction today might be reflected in the
newer language of “spiritual but not religious,” or what, in 2003, Alexander and McLaughlin
began describing as “untethered spirituality.”30
Dewey's description includes what is now the common reference to “religion” as having
an institutional basis. However, that need not be construed as “institutional” in a brick and
mortar sense, as being related to a physical or legal social location. The Supreme Court Torcaso
v. Watkins decision in 1961 in what is probably the most well-known of case law to do so, builds
jurisprudence that recognizes such “institutions” need not be distinct legal nor social entities.
Their opinion made precedent in that case that the lack of corporate status is no hindrance to an
“institution” being construed as being a “religion”: “Among religions in this country which do
not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism,
Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others.”31
Diversity, plurality and pluralism
Secularization, secularism, pluralism and diversity are all related terms relevant to this
broader cultural move from Western culture built and centered around religion, to the relatively
recent invention of a secular liberal democracy. These often overlooked dynamics are quite
relevant to the changing shape of formation through public education.32
29 Dewey, A Common Faith, 1-3.
30 Hanan Alexander and Terance H. McLaughlin, “Education in Religion and Spirituality,” ch. 20 in Nigel Blake,
Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith & Paul Standish, eds. The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education (Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 2003).
31 Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961).
32 The literaturepertainingto education and growing diversity is in itself,quitebroad. This exploration of
literatures of diversity in education in no way attempts to be complete, but again,merely an overview of leading
voices and related concepts to provide further context for this discussion.

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Martin Marty is one of the most prolific of authors on religion in America over the last
half of the 20th century. In his work, he distinguished “diversity” as the fact of variety, from
“pluralism” as what a society does with that variety.33 Many authors discuss pluralism as an
outgrowth of assumptions of individual autonomy, such as the “minimalist autonomy” that Reich
posits as foundational to “the good:” the “right” of individuals to make their own un-molested
choices, including choices pertaining to religious matters.34
Though consensus among the many writers addressing this area does not seem apparent
in the terms or definitions being used for pluralism, plurality and diversity, nor on how to live in
diversity, a rough consensus might be identified between “pluralism”--cast in various ways as
some form of intentional engagement between persons and groups of various perspectives-- and
“diversity” or “plurality.” Both “diversity” and “plurality” are often used to describe a “mere”
coexistence of differing perspectives in the same political space, which may or may not involve a
range of forms of engagement between groups. Feinberg described a common form of this
distinction:
Political and educational plurality take different forms, and some of these must be
distinguished from normative, democratic pluralism. In normative pluralism multiple
communities, existing side by side and whose members have equal status regardless of
their communal affiliation, are recognized as a desirable social state and promoted both
politically and educationally. Mere plurality may exist where one group maintains
33 Martin E. Marty, “Pluralisms,” in Annalsof the American Academy of Political and Social Science,612(1), July
2007, 14-25, Sage Publications.
34 Rob Reich, “Minimalist Autonomy,” in Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalismin America, Chapter 4, pp. 89-
112, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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political, legal and economic dominance while providing limited rights to other cultural
or religious groups.35
Philosophers and educators often insist on languages of prescribed normativity--in some
version or other such as described here by Feinberg, asserting that the public sphere “must”
embrace, move toward, and engage in--various stripes of “pluralism,” in preference to the “mere
plurality” as here pejoratively cast.
Spirituality and Wellness becoming untethered
For most of human experience across cultures, societies have developed formal religious
institutions that addressed areas and questions of life which we commonly describe with words
like “spiritual,” and “wellness,” and many thinkers have gone so far as to identify these domain
as being a universal human concerns. Conveyed through formal institutions that generally
include versions of orthodoxy for their foundational meaning systems, those institutions most
frequently addressing spirituality and related understandings of wellness are generally referred to
as institutions of “religion.” However, society and cultures have changed to where religious
institutions no longer have the same roles in society.
For most of the history of Western culture, regardless of one’s affiliation or regularity of
religious participation, religious institutions have provided the normative frameworks of identity
and meaning for the populace, as well as habits of mind, of how people perceive and think about
their world and experience. But as depicted with Taylor and others in discussing how the process
of secularization has transformed ways of experiencing the world, the emergence of the secular
35 Walter Feinberg, For Goodness Sake:Religious Schools and Education for Democratic Citizenry,(New York:
Routledge, 2006), 154.

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age has changed this normative religious cultural mindset,36 without emplacing a new normative
mindset that has any comparable cultural consensus.
Emerging as a part of this process of secularization has been the intentional and
overlapping discussions in education, in medicine, and other fields addressing religion and
spirituality as distinctly different domains. Researchers from many fields express the
universality of these concerns in a variety of ways, regardless of religio-spiritual heritage.
Bringing her own inter-disciplinary background, inclusive of law, religion and medicine, Parks is
exemplary of this line of thought:
To be human is to seek coherence and correspondence. To be human is to want to be
oriented to one's surroundings.... The mind does not passively receive the world but rather
acts on every object and every experience to compose it, organizing its various parts into
a whole.37
Parks’ research argues that these frameworks of meaning and coherence are in the domain of
faith and spirituality.
Alexander and McLaughlin first wrote using the term “untethered spirituality” in 200338
to describe the distinction between religious and spiritual discourse that has become integral to a
broad interdisciplinary conversation in recent decades. I would make further clarification,
though, to Alexander and McLaughlin’s significant observation of the distinction between
religious and spiritual language. From this untethered way of thinking, spirituality tends to be
thought of in many fields as rather nebulous, highly subjective, and a phenomenon of
36 This assertion is in a nutshell, the argument Taylor makes in A Secular Age that has provided a common reference
across this project.
37 Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning,
Purpose and Faith (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,2000, 2011), 27.
38 Alexander and McLaughlin.

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individuality. However, I argue that the social39 rootedness and expression of practices and
language pertaining to that which is referred to as religion and the spiritual, is inextricably
intertwined with the concerns for spiritual fitness that are central to this study.
I would certainly agree with Alexander and McLaughlin that it can be helpful and quite
appropriate, sometimes even necessary, to distinguish the two concepts of religion and
spirituality, and that spirituality can, in fact, be untethered from religion. However, based on
consistent observations from a range of demographic studies both in the United States and world-
wide, it is accurate to say that most people consider themselves religious in some way.40 And as
spirituality is a consistent, integral theme in the language of all predominating religions,41 it
seems to be much more reasonable to assume that for most people, spirituality is not untethered,
but integrally linked, either to the religion they practice, or at least rooted in how spirituality is
understood in the religion of their own personal or cultural heritage, even if that religion is no
longer regularly practiced.42
While philosophical thought has fulfilled that place of meaning-making for some, the
language of the “spiritual” seems to have a much broader resonance and receptivity across
popular culture. That being the case, the language of “spiritual fitness” in relation to lived
integrity with foundational frameworks of meaning, would seem to be more broadly useful and
39 That these changes are social dynamics, rooted and conveyed as part of the “public” socio-cultural infrastructure,
as opposed to merely “private and personal” individual tastes as the religious and spiritual domains are often
construed,is a central theme to this project.
40 Diana Butler-Bass, Christianity After Religion:the end of church and the birth of a new spiritual awakening (New
York: Harper-Collins, 2012), a range of surveys from Pew and others,all point to the ongoing broad popularity of
religious practice and identification across traditional religions, both within the United States and on a broader
global scale.
41 Not that the CONTENT of spirituality is consistent across religions, but the consistency lies in the concept of
spirituality as having the function of the personalized, subjectivized practice of religious piety that is related to, but
distinct from the external and institutionalized forms of any given religion. I go into more detail in demonstrating
this common theme in previous work leading to this dissertation.
42 Wittgenstein.

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appropriate than language of “philosophical fitness.”
The Therapeutic Arts “discover” spirituality in frameworks of meaning
The rapidly growing field of the humanistic, as distinct from the organic or medicinal
domains of the healing arts, has in recent decades been the home for a growing literature on
spirituality in relation to wellness, as exemplified by contributions from psychology, nursing,
occupational therapy and social work. Early reference to the connection between frameworks of
meaning from the field of philosophy into the therapeutic disciplines comes from the work of
Albert Ellis in Rational Emotive Therapy.43 I mention these roots here to point to the modern
bridge Ellis provides between philosophy and the healing arts, based in the ancient notion from
Aristotle, Chrysippus and others who thought of philosophy as “an art concerned with curing the
diseased soul, and that the philosopher is the physician of the soul.”44
Because of their emphases on tools for healing and wellness, researchers writing on roles
of spirituality in relation to wellness have been able to focus on the more common and
observable functions of religion and spirituality, rather than getting lost in the plethora of varying
subjective content of the spiritual, where so much confusion and ambiguity arises. Many from
these therapeutic disciplines distinguish between that which is “religious” and that which is
“spiritual” as two different sets of social phenomena that are related, but not synonymous.
Authors typical of this perspective whose work I've explored also tend to include as
central to their concerns, the task of making or discerning meaning and purpose in life as being a
43 Thomas Jarrett, "Warrior Resilience Training in Operation Iraqi Freedom: Combining Rational Emotive Behavior
Therapy, Resiliency, and Positive Psychology," in The Army Medical Department Journal,July-September 2008,
www.cs.amedd.army.mil/AMEDDJournal/2008julsep.pdf , 32-38.
44 As quoted in Gretchen Reydams-Schils, “Social Ethics and Politics,” in Marcel Van Ackeren, ed. A Companion to
Marcus Aurelius, Blackwell Companionsto the Ancient World, (Chichester, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 456.

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central organizing theme of that which is spiritual. These authors include: Donica, Farrar, Wong
and Vinsky, Greasley Chiu and Gartland, Zinnbauer and Pargament, Park, Moreira-Almeida &
Koenig, Tanyi, and the American Occupational Therapy Association.45 Each one of these in their
writings cite additional lists of authors writing along similar lines, suggesting that the work from
their colleagues in this direction is quite rich and extensive. While differing in various ways,
these authors tend to have a strong strand of continuity in what I would call the socio-functional
roles of spirituality. Ruth Tanyi writes from a nursing perspective:
Spirituality is an inherent component of being human, and is subjective, intangible, and
multidimensional. Spirituality and religion are often used interchangeably, but the two
concepts are different. Spirituality involves humans’ search for meaning in life, while
religion involves an organized entity with rituals and practices about a higher power or
God. Spirituality may be related to religion for certain individuals, but for others, such as
an atheist, it may not be.46
Tanyi's description explicitly states two essential facets of this discourse that others often assert
as well, though less concisely or less directly: Spirituality is quite often, though not always
connected with or rooted in religion, and secondly, that spirituality is a language with which
many atheists are often comfortable, though they might otherwise object to or reject the use of
religious language.
Wong and Vinsky's discussion intentionally sums up other research in order to develop
and offer a critical language for spirituality as distinct from “religion”:
Despite acknowledging the difficulties in defining terms like ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’,
45 To avoid an overly cumbersome footnote here, please see bibliography for further reference for these works cited.
46 Ruth A. Tanyi, “Towards clarification of the meaning of spirituality,” in Journal of Advanced Nursing (39 {5},
500-509, 2002), 500.

20. 20
many social work authors begin their discussion by marking spirituality off from
religion... Canda and Furman (1999)—two leading scholars in spirituality and social
work— write ‘Spirituality relates to a universal and fundamental aspect of what it is to be
human—to search for a sense of meaning, purpose, and moral frameworks for relating
with self, others, and the ultimate reality.’47
They further clarify by stating that what is usually called “religion” is discussed as being
inherently connected to human institutions that generally include, but are not limited to, facets of
spirituality.
I describe that which is spiritual here as being a socio-functional domain in order to
highlight two points: Firstly, the foundational meaning-making function spirituality plays in
persons' lives, and how they understand “wellness” on both the personal and social levels.
Secondly, in highlighting the distinctly social character of the construction of the language and
concepts of various expressions of spirituality. Though one's spirituality may be thought of as
highly personal, both philosophers and social scientists often emphasize that inherently social
tools are inescapable in constructing that which can be called spiritual. Peter Berger concisely
expresses the social nature of language and concepts such as what we call the “spiritual”:
Homo sapiens is a social animal. This means very much more than that surface fact that
man always lives in collectivities.... Much more importantly, the world-building activity
of man is always and inevitably a collective enterprise.... Men together (Berger's italics)
shape tools, invent languages, adhere to values, devise institutions, and so on. 48
47 Yuk-Lin Wong,Renita and Jana Vinsky, “Speaking from the Margins: A Critical Reflection on the 'Spiritual-but-
not-Religious' Discourse in Social Work,” (British Journal of Social Work {2009}39), 1343-1359.
48 Berger, 8.

21. 21
Therefore, even when conceptual language is used to describe private internal processes, the
language used is still a social product, and must have some broader resonance beyond the
individual using it, lest it be meaningless and useless in shaping and conveying thought.
Spirituality as the domain for frameworks of meaning
My research in this area suggests that this growing crisis of suicide in the Army may be
related to unintended inadequacies in publicly conveying functional meaning systems to
emerging generations that are related to secularization. Viktor Frankl suggested this correlation
more than fifty years ago:
The existential vacuum which is the mass neurosis of the present time, can be described
as a private and personal form of nihilism; for nihilism can be defined as the contention
that being has no meaning....There is a danger inherent in the teaching of man's
'nothingbutness,' the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological
and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of
man makes him into a robot, not a human being.49
Within the formerly hegemonic American “Christian culture,” meaning structures had
been constructed, maintained and conveyed across generations through the chains of memory of
established religions. Hervieu-Leger discussed this role of religion rather extensively, and began
to provide some conceptual clarity between the institutional and sociological structures of
distinct religions as related to, but separate from, the substantive role religiosity, piety, or
spirituality holds of providing foundational frameworks of meaning.50 But in the current
49 Frankl, 131.
50 Hervieu-Leger, 9-81.

22. 22
pluralistic framework of American liberalism, jurisprudence cannot support that continued social
practice.
An additional product of this same secularization is the emergence of the domain of the
spiritual as being distinct and not necessarily tethered to the domain of religion in which it had
formerly always resided as an undifferentiated facet.51 But “neither the atheist teacher nor the
atheist pupil can legitimately claim to be able to side-line spirituality. On the contrary, the
rejection of God makes the question of the ultimate meaning and purpose of life all the more
significant.”52 Frankl's lifetime of research suggested this need for functional meaning structures
is an inherent facet of our humanity:
The most fundamental questions of life such as those dealing with the origins, meaning,
and purpose of life; with how we are to live together; with the nature of human
possibilities and limitations; with how people learn; and with what are our responsibilities
to each other are essential and central elements of spiritual discourses.53
Echoing Frankl’s work in post-WWII Europe, I have found in the American context
decades later, a common, observable, functional, social use of terms related to spirituality across
a range of fields. Through that common function of spiritual language, spirituality seems to most
often be used in reference to where foundational frameworks of meaning are grounded,
sometimes referred to as the domain of existential concerns. Therefore, rather than making any
attempt to define the term or to explore spirituality in any broader sense, “spirituality” is only
being addressed in this study in terms of the function of the apprehension or construction,
51 Alexander and McLaughlin.
52Andrew Wright, Spirituality and Education,(London:Routledge/Falmer, 2001), 47-57.
53 David E. Purpel, “Educational Discourse and Spirituality,” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (Winter2005),
116.

23. 23
cultivation and support of foundational frameworks of meaning found in the domain of that
which is called “spiritual.”
“Spiritual fitness” is a relatively new way to describe what is and has always been at the
heart of the religious support work of military chaplaincy and civilian religious institutions
across traditions for many centuries. However, what spiritual fitness means in this relatively new
secular age Taylor discussed merits further investigation. How recent dynamics of secularization
have impacted socio-cultural infrastructure supportive of spiritual fitness formation, and what
that means in relation to social understandings and support of wellness seems to have been
poorly understood and explored.
This project has been an attempt to lay the groundwork, and offer ways to think, talk
about, and help identify these real concerns in ways that can appropriately engage, explore and
address these issues in our increasingly global context of plurality. “Well-being” is an attribute,
capacity or goal that has no patently evident nor socially consensual content. The understanding
of what “well-being” is, and how to socially cultivate wellness, can vary dramatically across
differing cultural foundations. Tools of a language of spiritual fitness are here offered to help
cultivate and foster sustainable and positive contributions to the dialogue between theology,
spirituality, culture and well-being.
(excerpted and adapted from James R. Lewis’ Kent State University PhD dissertation {Dec. 2015}: SPIRITUAL
FITNESS AND RESILIENCE FORMATION THROUGH ARMY CHAPLAINS AND RELIGIOUS SUPPORT,
available at:
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/pg_10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:kent1447863288

24. 24
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