Ross Douthat cites a Pew Forum report that includes an eye-opening chart, which shows the percentage of Americans who report having had “a religious or mystical experience” — and shows that number climbing from 22 percent in 1962 to 48 percent this year:
During the Bush era, you would often hear secular-minded liberals pining for the days before the religious right came on the scene — a halcyon era, in their telling, when religion and politics were strictly separated, evangelicals were strictly marginal, and people kept their faith to themselves. This always struck me as an uncommonly silly sort of nostalgia, since in most respects institutional religion was considerably more powerful, both politically and culturally, in pre-1970s America than it is today. Back then, Americans went to church more frequently, held religious leaders in higher regard, and hewed to more conservative moral views. The “religious right” didn’t exist in anything like its current form because its values were consensus values, and didn’t require a specific faction to defend them.But as the Pew chart suggests, there is one sense in which religion was less influential in mid-century American life than it is today, and that’s the realm of personal mystical experience. Slightly more people went to church in 1962, but many fewer people went out looking for their own private encounters with the numinous. This isn’t a surprising correlation, since the traditional Christian churches tended to either discourage mystical freelancing or (in the case of Catholicism) encourage it only within the framework of monastic discipline. The churches constrained and channeled Americans’ religious impulses; their declining influence let a hundred mystic flowers bloom. Christianity became less culturally powerful, but religion itself — whether you were a tongues-speaking Pentecostal, a Gaia-communing pantheist, or some combination thereof — became much more freewheeling and intense.
Razib adds some thoughts from Nicholas Wade (The Faith Instinct):
Higher religion is built on the foundations of primitive religion, as institutional religion becomes less powerful in the lives people in the Western world people seem to be reverting back to their cognitive “default” settings. More often when you strip away adherence to theology you do not get atheism, you get animism.