“Spiritual, but not religious.” It’s become something of a cliché. Indeed, it is now so well established as a category in the British psyche that it even turns up in research surveys, usually half way between Christian and atheist.

Are you happy with the label Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim? No. But, nor are you happy to call yourself an atheist, or a sceptic, or an unbeliever. You believe in something, something there, something “out there”. If you worship at all, it is at the altar of the unknown God.

That’s a big ‘if’, of course. Worship is not something anyone readily admits to doing these days. It is too religious, too institutional, too hierarchical. If I believe there is ‘something there’, I am also pretty sure that it is not something that wants, still less demands, worship.

And, yet, in spite of my discomfort with worship, with church (especially when it has a capital ‘C’) and with religion, particularly in its institutional forms, I am no less uncomfortable with the opposite. I cannot believe this is all that is. Not only does that not make sense to me, leaving too many questions unanswered. It doesn’t make sense for me. It fails to comprehend all I have experienced, all I have felt, all I have done, my sense of who I am, of who other people are.

So I am caught in this liminal space: spiritual, but not religious, or as the late, great political theorist Ronald Dworkin said in his last and posthumous book, just published, in the space of “Religion without God”.

All this will, I suspect, be familiar to you. It intuitively makes sense as a representation of our age. And it is well documented in social research. The number of people who say they believe in God or a Higher Power stands at around 60% today (depending on how you ask the question) compared to around 75% a couple of decades ago. By contrast, the proportion of people who say they believe in the existence of the human soul has hardly changed over the last generation at around 60%. And the proportion who say they believe in “God as a universal life force” or believe in reincarnation or in any number of more esoteric spiritual beliefs has actually increased.

This is belief but it is belief in my own things on my own terms; bespoke belief rather than belief off the peg.

Over ten years ago now I conducted a research project for LICC into the barriers and bridges to faith today, looking at why people did and didn’t believe what they did, and what, if anything, might be done about it. It was a fascinating, if on occasion bruising, experience and one in which I heard the carefully calibrated difference between religiosity and spirituality explained in great detail.

Spirituality was personalised. “I reckon spirituality would be more about yourself and what you would eternally want to believe,” one young man from London told me. “It’s very personal and I think each person has got their own idea,” said a young woman from Nottingham.

But not just personal: also malleable, individualised and fluid in such a way as to prevent it from ever being used to impose, or even effectively guide, anyone else. Indeed, it wasn’t so much your right to choose what you believed, as you responsibility. Failing to exercise your choice was failure to fulfil your humanity; even to the extent that the capacity to choose was more important than that which was chosen. “I don’t want to be waltzed into believing something [because] it’s been there for a long time,” one respondent told me. “If I am going to believe in something I will pick my favourite parts of different religions or pick something that I have invented… that I feel comfortable with… Not what I’m expected to believe in.’

The critical thing is to make up your own mind, or as one of my younger respondents told me. “Religion is different for our generation than it is for older generations because they were perhaps brought up not to question things so much … we have been brought up to question society… [to] make up our own minds so that we are not so inclined to go to church without knowing.”

Now, I don’t want to dwell on this statement, except to say the idea that my generation is somehow more critically acute than previous ones is, I suspect, a myth that every generation tells itself.

Rather, I want to posit that, factually correct or not, this is our modus operandi. We don’t do God in the traditional sense, partly for intellectual reasons but more for socio/cultural ones, because God, in the religious sense, is readily associated with order, hierarchy and deference. But we are certainly not atheistic in our views, preferring instead to recognise a personalised and bespoke set of spiritual beliefs.

This puts cathedrals, and other major sacred Christian spaces, in a strange place. On the one hand, they epitomise hierarchy. They are large, ordered spaces, not designed by committee, and not bespoke to the individual. They are often regulated by patterns of worship that are not chosen or tailored to my needs, choices or tastes. They are often redolent of a past in which people knew their place. On the surface of it, they should not fare well in a culture of consumerised spirituality.

But, on the other hand, they do fare well, very well, and it is interesting to examine why. This is the point at which I need to give you some detail about Spiritual Capital, the research project Theos and the Grubb Institute conducted for Anglican English cathedrals in 2011/12 with an eye to understanding their present and encouraging their future. Just by way of background, we conducted three surveys as part of the overall project…

·         speaking to several hundred people who worked in, around and with six case study cathedrals;

·         interviewing nearly 2,000 people who had recently visited one or more of those case study cathedrals, at some point and for any range of reasons;

·         and finally interviewing about 1,000 or so members of the general public in a nationally representative survey as a means of getting overall opinions on cathedrals in general rather than specific named or visited ones.

I shan’t bore you will the full details of the research findings, which you can read in the Spiritual Capital report, which can be downloaded, but I do want to give you some highlights, particularly as they pertain to the future of our sacred spaces.

The findings obvious refer specifically to Anglican cathedrals in England and would, no doubt, differ if applied to Catholic cathedrals, or Abbeys, or other sacred spaces. Indeed, it is important to realise, as we did from the six case studies we conducted, that the findings differed significantly between different Anglican cathedrals in England. Nevertheless, the results should serve as a rule of thumb for our complex attitudes to significant Christian sacred space in Britain.

The first point to make is that they were very popular. We found that 27 per cent of the resident adult population of England (i.e. excluding overseas tourists) visited a Church of England cathedral at least once in the last 12 months. Exact numbers of overseas tourists are fiendishly difficult to measure but there is good reason to believe that had we been able to do so, it would have pushed up the overall visitor numbers, particularly in some areas, very considerably.

Who was visiting? Well, the stereotypical answer would be elderly people, with time and opportunity and perhaps a cultural affiliation to Anglicanism, and indeed the over 65s were the most represented age group. However, the second most represented were the youngest adult group, men and women aged 18-24. Similarly, around a fifth of 18-34 year olds had visited in the last 12 months, as had a fifth of people in lower socio-economic groups. The appeal was broad across the demographic spectrum.

Visitors were inevitably Christian, you might think, but you would be wrong. Christians were more likely to be visiting and Anglicans most likely, but a quarter of people belonging to non-Christian religions had made a visit over the previous 12 months, as did nearly a fifth (18%) of people who say they belong to no religion at all.

Most significantly with regard to this point, cathedrals had a particular reach into what you might call ‘peripheral’ groups, meaning those that are a long way from, and even hostile to, religion. A sixth of people (15%) who never attend a religious service as a worshipper (meaning not even “less than once a year”) had visited a cathedral in the previous twelve months, as had the same proportion of confirmed atheists, and a quarter of those who once believed in God but no longer do so. Cathedrals seemed to reach the parts – or at least some of them – that many other ecclesiastical buildings cannot reach.

So far, so encouraging: cathedrals reach a lot of people and in particular a lot of people that other Christian edifices don’t reach. But what does ‘reach’ mean here? The X-Factor reaches a lot of people but that doesn’t mean it is anything more than entertainment, to use the word loosely. Just because cathedrals attract visitors, that doesn’t mean they are connecting with them in any meaningful Christian way. All these figures could be taken merely as confirmation that cathedrals are successful tourist destinations. That would not, however, be the right conclusion to draw.

The people we interviewed were open about visiting cathedrals as tourist attractions, but most were also clear that the appeal lies beyond that. So, for example, while a third of people agree that “cathedrals are an easy place to get in touch with the spiritual”, a quarter of people who never attend church feel the same way. Over a half (59%) of church non-attenders within the local survey agreed that, “the cathedral gives me a greater sense of the sacred than I get elsewhere”.

Now, it’s important to recognise that this was not a universal experience. 30% of people agreed with the statement, ‘I come here to appreciate the history and architecture of the cathedral, not for any religious/sacred experience’. In other words, there were plenty of people who were happy to identify themselves as purely secular tourists. Nevertheless,

-          84% of self-identifying secular tourists still agreed with the idea that they get a sense of the sacred from the cathedral building;

-          79% that they got a sense of the sacred from the cathedral music;

-          56% that they experienced God through the calm and the quiet of the cathedral space;

-          and 88% saw it as “a place of sanctuary irrespective of what you believe.”

In other words, even those who arrive as tourists, don’t necessarily leave as tourists.

These findings were from among the respondents who had visited the cathedral at some point in the last 12 months. There was a fair number of non-believers and secular tourists in among these, as we have seen, but even so, you might think that this sample were still slightly biased in favour of cathedrals. After all, they might be non-believers and secular tourists but they had still at least visited a cathedral at some point in the last year.

Others, who hadn’t made a visit, were more likely to be more hostile. This it true, but again only partially so. The National Survey – where we interviewed a nationally representative group of people who had not necessarily come into contact with a cathedral or sacred space of any description in the recent past – provides a useful comparison. This told us that 36% of people said that they thought, “cathedrals could offer an experience of God to those who don’t believe” (29% disagreed), and 31% that “cathedrals are an easy place to get in touch with the spiritual” (25% disagreed) This is a more balanced answer and reminds us not to get carried away in our enthusiasm but it is still positive and encouraging.

So, two points made so far.

-          firstly, that cathedrals and, I would argue by extension, many sacred Christian spaces have a wide appeal across the public, not restricted to certain ages or religious beliefs, and

-          secondly, that this appeal is not limited to the appeal of the tourist or secular visitor, but that there is a palpable sense of at least the spiritual potential of these places.

Again, just to be clear, this does not mean that the appeal and the spiritual significance is equal across the board. Cathedrals did, it seems, have a problem attracting people from lower socio-economic groups.  And there was a sizable minority that was sure that their cathedral experience was an uncomplicatedly secular one. Nevertheless, the general trend was towards the potential for widespread spiritual engagement.

How was this manifested? How did sacred spaces make connections with visitors? How was the spiritual made real? Well, this is in one regard an unanswerable question. Every cathedral or sacred space is different and every spiritual experience is different. You generalise at your peril. But generalise we did, not least because ‘it’s complicated’ is not really a satisfactory answer to come up with at the end of a research project.

Broadly speaking, four factors emerged as important to forging the connection between sacred space and visitor. The first and the most important, or at least pervasive, was the sense of historical continuity. This was not, note, simply a sense of history.

Castles and stately homes exude a sense of history. But a sense of history is not enough. That was then, but this is now. How mediaeval lords chose to defend their lands, or regency beaus to dispense their cash might be very interesting. But it is hard to see its relevance to me today.

What was striking about cathedrals was not that they were old but that they were old and still alive.They spoke of continuity, of ideas, beliefs and commitments that were bigger then the single human life, bigger than the vicissitudes of everyday experience, bigger than contingency, bigger than circumstance, big enough to be relevant to people 600 years ago and to (at least some) people today.

This is a powerful testimony. Of course, just because these ideas remain relevant to some people today that doesn’t mean they are necessarily relevant to me as a visitor. But nonetheless the impression is a strong one. What goes on here went on before I was born and will go on – God willing – after I die, moving my grandchildren, just as it moved my grandparents, and theirs before them.

What, after all, do have I common with the masons who once laboured here, the townsfolk who once worshipped here, the priests who once trod these now-smoothed stones? Nothing – except the fact that their hopes, and fears, their aspirations and joys, set in music and stone so long ago still resonate with me, a sense that it both reassuring and unsettling. In the words of one diocesan lay staff member we interviewed, “When I sit in the Cathedral and see all that has been lavished by mankind in their worship of God down the centuries, the weight of history – it is a very spiritual moment.”

The second reason, closely, linked to the first, and in one sense the most obvious was the architecture. In this regard, cathedrals today – or many of them – do what the mediaeval ones were always intended to do; namely, lift the eyes, and the heart, to heaven.

Thus, with reference our first point, not only are these places which speak of beliefs that transcend the temporary, but they speak of commitments that do so, commitments that have resulted in architecture that is soaring and transcendant at one and the same time as being human and intimate.

One of the people interviewed for our research described the experience of taking an atheist friend from Germany to the cathedral during his visit at Christmas. At the end of the week his friend told him “I don’t believe in God, but I now believe there could be one”.

A third, and again, strongly linked reason lies in the music and especially the choral music. Now this is, of course, a contentious topic and it was recognised as such by some of our interviewees. Some had real questions about the relevance of English cathedral music to future generations and wanted a greater variety of musical styles reflecting the diversity of the music in the worship of the surrounding churches.

Conversely, others pointed out that even were a modernisation of the music tradition to be deemed a good thing, the acoustics in their cathedral did not lend themselves to modern music and instruments. The research recorded that those responsible for the music (at least in the six case study cathedrals) were not necessarily opposed to experiments in modernisation. Indeed, among these case studies, there had been experiments to this effect.

So, for example, the Sunderland Premier League football club’s Carols of Light Service in Durham Cathedral in December 2011 involved not only the Durham choristers but musicians as varied as Alan Price, Kathryn Tickell and Clare Teal.  Similarly, in March 2007, Jools Holland, his Band and the Cathedral Choristers performed a new Mass setting he had composed, commissioned by the Bishop of Bath and Wells. It is fair to say that these experiments, and the issue overall, had aroused strong feelings, both positive and negative.

Such a sensitive debate aside, however, it is correct to say that the tradition of choral music was mentioned positively by many respondents and was one of the ways that the living tradition of the cathedral was embodied. One of the worshippers in a group we interviewed commented that “the music affects you quite physically”.

There were some quite moving stories of this nature.One interviewee, now a worshipper at a cathedral, described her journey to the cathedral as “remarkable”. When she was at university she had been a Marxist and when she returned home she had followed a guru. Her daughter was interested in singing and she agreed to her taking part in the cathedral’s ‘Chorister for a Day’ scheme. She went to hear her daughter sing in the cathedral.

“When she sang and I heard the liturgy, which up to that point I had dismissed, something like my heart opened. Maybe it was because my daughter was singing and I was able to hear it in a new way, but I also felt ‘Oh, I have come home’”.

This was a particularly personal and poignant story but it was clear that the music could affect many people spiritually and deeply.

Fourthly, and finally, there was the welcome. This may seem a minor thing when compared to soaring architecture and ancient choral tradition, but it wasn’t. Indeed, you might compare it to the cement between the stones. The building would still stand there without it, as impressive and imposing as it is, but it would be hugely vulnerable.

Without the welcome – or, let’s put this more broadly – without the human, relational element within all the music, the worship, the art, architecture and history, the cathedral would be a building rather than a Christian church; an ecclesiastical castle, so to speak, rather than an atrium to the kingdom of God.

This was not, of course, the language in which our interviewees spoke. But the sense of the importance of the welcome was strong, among visitors and cathedral staff and associates. In each of the case studies, those we interviewed talked about their sense that people were welcomed and invited in to experience the cathedral. Whilst this clearly was focused on those who came as ‘tourists’, there was an awareness that the cathedral often triggered unexpected spiritual experiences.

How exactly one dealt with that was a difficult matter. From the volunteers we spoke to it was clear that there was recognition of the need for sensitivity in knowing when to leave visitors space, when to offer information and how to respond when it was clear that someone was distressed or wanted to talk.

If there were moving stories about the way the building or the liturgy affected people, there were more about this pastoral element. One welcomer told us:

“I saw a man walking through the church, with his dog with him. He sat down in a chair and began to cry. I went over and sat beside him. He claimed he was the last surviving member of his boat…So he had come on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and wanted to say a prayer for his long lost companions. As I spoke to him it opened up a well of things for him.”

Here’s another:

On a winter afternoon, as the cathedral was about to close, a young girl approached two volunteers and asked whether she and her grandmother could come in for a few minutes. They had been to visit her grandfather’s grave and her grandmother was upset. The volunteers made the two of them welcome and left them to sit in a side chapel and light a candle.

An afterword to this story: after a little time the visitors left, saying thank you to the volunteers. Shortly afterwards the young girl came back and tried to give the volunteers a folded up £20 note. Their immediate instinct was to refuse it “because we don’t charge”.

This welcome and pastoral attention is the crucial element, pointing the essential need to ensure this was not simply a tourist experience but one that might turn the visitor into the pilgrim.

Why build cathedrals? Why preserve them, or any sacred space? Why worship? Why sing? Why celebrate? Why paint, or sculpt, or weave, or engrave, or create any of the things that litter a cathedral?

Ultimately, the answer must be love – love of God and love of neighbour – because the Christian will insist, because has God first loved us.

All the above – the architecture, the choir, the liturgy, the icons, the memorials – all of it will be but a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal without love. Or to pick up on the examples just given, all the architecture, liturgy, and choral work will be as nothing if people are left grieving or alone or needy in the pews. The people we spoke to – and not simply the welcomers or guides – got this; they really understood the need to unfold Christian meaning, the story, the life, in their words and practices, and in their hospitality.

One local businessman, with no obvious Christian faith, put it this way:

“What is important is the ability the cathedral has to make people slow down for a minute and ponder … It allows you to think about others, to think about yourself, about things like guilt and the welfare of others – all of which come back to having faith in something … It’s about faith, not religion – it doesn’t force you to believe in God or believe in the Bible … It instils faith in people - allowing people to make up their own minds.”

It’s a beautiful sentiment and one that allows us to come full circle, at least in terms of quotations, in our argument.

“Religion is different for our generation”, one of my group of young female respondents told me ten years ago. “It’s about faith, not religion” the businessman in the cathedral said.

“We have been brought up to question society”, the respondent told me. “[The cathedral] doesn’t force you to believe in God or believe in the Bible”, the businessman said.

“[We have been brought up] to make up our own minds so that we are not so inclined to go to church without knowing,” she said. “It instils faith in people – allowing people to make up their own minds,” he said.

This is where the gravity of cathedrals, perhaps of all serious Christian sacred spaces, lies and also where, their future lies. Not just in their history. English heritage can do that. Not just in the architecture. Stately homes can do that. Not just in their music. Concert halls can do that. Not just in their artwork. Galleries can do that. Not even in the fact the people still transparently care for them and their contents. The National Trust can do that.

Perhaps it is that the history, the architecture, the music, the artwork are all united, find their common root – or, at least should do, in love. And love, to go back to St Paul, is patient and kind, it trusts, it protects, it hopes, it perseveres. It doesn’t turn away a grieving grandmother and her granddaughter. It comforts the traumatised veteran. It helps the spiritually-inquisitive mother to hear the music as if for the first time. It invites people in, and makes no demands on their coming in. It bids them join the chorus. It calls to them to eat at the table. Love will not force itself upon others but, in the manner of Christ and the rich young man, or with the disciples in John 6, when Jesus was being deserted and he asks the Twelve, “Will ye also go away?” it lays itself open, becomes vulnerable. It stands by people as they make up their mind, however long that takes. And it doesn’t denounce them if they choose another way.

And here I come to a final, but key, point. A place where people can make up their own minds is not by necessity a neutral place. It is not a secular place. It is not a place that refrains from making any judgements, from having any beliefs at all, in the doubly-mistaken assumption that perfect neutrality is possible and that it looks like secular humanism. Cathedrals are not neutral places. Sacred spaces, by definition, are not neutral spaces, still less secular-neutral ones.

They are places that speak of the specifically Christian hopes, loves, fears, and worries that have shaped the British imagination and landscape profoundly over the last millennium and more. The mistake we make in our time is to think that because a space is confessional – because it is held to be sacred by a particular group of people – it is necessary coercive. We imagine that because a space is founded, literally in these instances, on a concept of and commitment to the sacred, it demands a similar commitment of anyone who enters that space, and that this makes it necessarily coercive in some way. But that is not the case.

It is not the case theologically, where the very idea of hospitality entails inviting someone into space that is yours, to tend and pastor to their needs, without coercing them. And it is not the case practically, where, as our respondents indicated, they could sense the spiritual, “make up their own minds”, find the space to grieve, to celebrate, to think, to hope, without being forced to the altar or the confessional box.

This is the future of sacred space in Britain, and not – I should say – exclusively big or cathedral-shaped sacred space. The reason for my focus on that today is simply that that is were I have the conducted the research. This is not, I should emphasise by way of conclusion, a cop-out; a refusal to confront people with the gospel in favour of letting them have a little think about things.

Rather, it is an enactment of the gospel; a throwing open of the doors; an invitation to contemplate that which has and continues to inspire millions; an invitation to grieve with those that grieve and to celebrate with those that celebrate; an invitation to worship; an invitation to love.

Nick Spencer, September 2013

Image from wikipedia.com, available in the public domain.