The Spirituality of Atheist and “No Religion” Individuals in the Millennial Generation: Developing New Research Approaches for a New Form of Spirituality

Abstract

As of 2011, those who identify as non-religious represented a portion of Canada’s population 2.5 times larger than the combined total of those reporting as Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh, and Hindu, with no indication that the rate of growth for this population is subsiding. Despite this growing population, religiously unaffiliated spiritual millennials are going undetected in the academic literature, and there is confusion between contemporary understandings of spirituality and religiousness for both researchers and millennials. Researchers seeking to understand the spiritual lives of millennials have typically assessed the growth of this movement by the number of individuals who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” a phrase which emerged alongside the 1960s New Age movement to describe the so-called ‘spiritual seekers.’ This paper seeks to identify some of the sources of millennial spirituality, such as culture shifts during the 1960s and 70s and the secularization of the Canadian public education system, and to define a new form of spirituality unique to millennials. Alternative approaches to studying this group are proposed, and it is suggested that the phrase “spiritual but not religious” is no longer sufficient for understanding the spirituality of religiously unaffiliated individuals.