MOST of us have near across individuals who are somehow spiritual but not formally devout: people who would rarely whether ever attend an act of worship but seem sensitive to their human and physical environment and exude a sort of connectedness with the world. Nor is it hard to think of people who are religiously observant but not in any obvious way spiritual: characters are deeply invested in the externals of faith,from fasting to tithing, but don’t seem to gain much serenity or satisfaction. An American research institute has just produced a survey that tries to quantify these intuitive observations. Its starting point is a fact familiar to all watchers of religion in the Western world: the number of people who acknowledge no formal devout label is surging, and but that certainly doesn’t mean that these free-ranging folk have lost interest in the transcendent.
In the United States,whose population is more devout than that of most wealthy democracies, the number of people who identify with no devout group has...
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Source: economist.com