Spirituality

Since the early 1980s, the topic of spirituality, considered by some analysts to be a postmodern offspring of religion, has gained ascendancy among social scientists representing academic disciplines such as sociology, psychology, and gerontology, and the counseling, medical, and nursing professions. This interest has been spawned by rapid changes in societal values, disillusionment with traditional religious institutions in meeting individual needs, a drop in public confidence in religion and religious leadership, and a new cohort of baby boomers who have been described as a generation of spiritual seekers. While religion has always served an individual and an institutional function, the institutional component has come to [Page 888]be seen as a fixed system of ideological beliefs and commitments that have failed to address the personal aspects of the human experience. Spirituality, on the other hand, is commonly regarded as an individual phenomenon, linked to concepts of transcendence, coherence, and purpose in life. In the following sections, social, theoretical, and methodological issues are addressed.

In North America in particular, a polarization of religiousness and spirituality has occurred, with the former often described as public, institutional, formal, authoritarian, and inhibiting expression and the latter as private, individual, subjective, inward, and freeing expression. While acknowledging the importance of religion and religiousness, the focus herein is on the construct of spirituality, the definitional problems and conceptual controversies, the challenges related to the measurement of spirituality, and the link between spirituality, health, and death attitudes.

Definitional Problems and Conceptual Controversies

The difficulty in the definition of spirituality emerges from the English language itself because of a lack of distinctiveness between the concepts “religiosity” and “spirituality.” This can easily be compared to the German language, in which the word geistig describes the “human spirit” or spirituality, while the word geistlich describes “the sacred or the divine” as embodied in the concept of religiosity. The inability to distinguish between terms has contributed to the confusion, inconsistencies, and a diverse set of definitions of spirituality and religiosity. This is true not only in the lay community, but within the scientific community as well.

Historically, the terms religiousness and spirituality were used interchangeably with no real distinction made between them. Religiousness was the preferred term, although definitions were varied and diverse. The most commonly cited definition defined religiousness as adherence to a set of ideological beliefs, rituals, symbols, and practices associated with a particular creed, denomination, or sect. Moreover, religiousness was seen as consisting of two aspects; namely, the intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness. Intrinsic religiousness refers to a personal experience in which the individual searches for the truth (i.e., religious faith) that may be applied to living life fully, while extrinsic religiousness refers to a rule-oriented religious system that seeks external gain from religious experiences, such as fulfilling one's social needs to include social status and social interaction.

With the rise of secularism, multiculturalism, and disillusionment with religious institutions came a shift toward the concept of spirituality. Current definitions of spirituality have ranged widely, depending on one's theoretical or professional perspective. For social scientists, spirituality involves a search for the sacred. Individuals who practice psychotherapy, on the other hand, tend to view spirituality as the subjective experience of the sacred, while health care educators and professionals consistently assess spirituality as a person's internal sense of purpose, coherence, and a search for meaning in life. Despite the lack of a consensual definition, many analysts include the elements of transcendence, meaning and purpose in life, inner strength, connectedness, higher power, and caring relationships into their perceptions of spirituality. In attempting to consolidate such diverse views, one analyst recently defined spirituality as a motivational-emotional construct that refers to a desire to seek and to maintain meaningful integration within oneself (innerconnectedness), with other people and the world (human compassion), and with a sacred force outside oneself (connectedness with nature). In effect, spirituality is a personal quest for ultimate meaning, for a relationship with significant others, and with a transcendent force or higher power.

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