Spirits and Sources: How spiritual seekers embrace belief and build community

This project studies how religio-spiritual beliefs shape behavior, perception, and worldviews. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, it examines the mechanisms of belief change, the roles of belief and practice, and how belief content affects its formation and spread. Fieldwork focuses on spiritual people and communities in Glastonbury, England.

Previous social science research shows that people change their religio-spiritual beliefs for reasons of personal identity, social influence, spiritual inspiration, and more. Our project takes these factors into account, but pivots the focus to how on-the-ground, person to person learning shapes these big-picture existential belief systems. Our project treats culture, including religio-spiritual belief, as something that is transmitted between people, and that changes over time. Using this ‘cultural evolutionary’ approach, we aim to explain how spiritual but not religious (SBNR) beliefs and behaviours change over time as a result of cultural learning among individuals.

This project is important now because there is a growing movement of people away from organised religion and toward SBNR belief in the west.

Explanations for this change focus on increasing individualism, and the replacement of religious institutional support with secular options. These accounts lack an explanation of why spiritual belief persists, and how psychology links to societal-level changes in belief. Our project addresses both issues with research on how the context and content of belief learning contributes to the creation and transmission of spiritual but not religious beliefs.

Our project has four key objectives

First, what causes belief changes?

We aim to understand why people leave certain belief systems and when these changes occur. Unlike previous studies that only find links between events and beliefs, we treat belief changes as part of a person's life story. For example, this may include distressing events, feelings of insecurity, and shifts in social circles as life events that precede belief changes, rather than events that are caused by and come to follow changes in belief.

Second, what are seekers looking for?

We want to know why people are joining spiritual but not religious (SBNR) movements. By exploring their spiritual goals and activities, we'll come to understand how well these beliefs meet personal, social, and community-building needs. We expect peoples’ spiritual goals, and the benefits of their spiritual activities, to extend beyond the individual—supported by both social and community practices.

Third, how do beliefs compete for followers?

In personalized belief systems, how do spiritual seekers decide which beliefs to embrace, and which to bypass? Where beliefs are not packaged as dogma, these decisions are up to seekers to make for themselves. We believe the same mental heuristics that guide everyday learning also shape spiritual learning. For example, we expect that beliefs seen as rare and therefore special, taught by respected figures who draw authority from ties to ancient knowledge, or containing surprising or novel ideas are more likely to appeal to seekers as they pursue meaning through belief.

Finally, where do new beliefs come from?

Even "new" beliefs often claim ancient roots, especially where they are about the nature of existence and reality. We’ll trace the historical origins of such beliefs to see whether and how they elaborate on beliefs or principles from established religious traditions, cross multiple traditions, or are entirely new, created by the believers themselves.

Our project will advance the study of spiritual belief in several ways

1. While spiritual beliefs clearly impact people’s daily lives, we aim to show how everyday learning can lead to changes in entire worldviews and even create new beliefs. We’ll explore this by connecting learning patterns to how beliefs spread and where they come from.
2. We’re committed to intensive, time-consuming fieldwork. This type of research has been very effective in understanding non-Western religions, and we plan to apply it to spiritual but not religious (SBNR) beliefs in the West. Unlike many studies today that rely on quick, low-cost online surveys, our approach gathers rich, detailed data by spending time with participants. This allows us to track the timing and speed of belief changes more accurately, to paint a more detailed picture of how spiritual seekers make meaning, and to involve participants and groups in the research process as we build a new understanding.
3. We’ll challenge the common belief that SBNR followers mainly seek personal spiritual fulfillment, not social or community support—and the ideal that spiritual belief functions in isolation from community more generally. We think this view is outdated, based on studies of isolated individuals from the “me generation” in the U.S. Our research will test this idea within a diverse, community-based setting in Glastonbury, where spiritual belief is the norm and collective celebrations and rituals are held throughout an annual cycle.