IS BEING “SPIRITUAL” ENOUGH WITHOUT BEING RELIGIOUS? A STUDY OF VIOLENT AND PROPERTY CRIMES AMONG EMERGING ADULTS

• Author: AARON B. FRANZEN,SUNG JOON JANG
• Date: 01 August 2013
• Published date: 01 August 2013
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12013

IS BEING “SPIRITUAL” ENOUGH WITHOUT

BEING RELIGIOUS? A STUDY OF VIOLENT

AND PROPERTY CRIMES AMONG

EMERGING ADULTS∗

SUNG JOON JANG

Department of Sociology and Institute for Studies of Religion

Baylor University

AARON B. FRANZEN

Department of Sociology

Baylor University

KEYWORDS: spirituality, religiousness, emerging adulthood, violent

crime, property crime

Although prior research has had a tendency to confirm a negative

association between religiousness and crime, criminologists have been

slow to incorporate new concepts and emergent issues from the scientific

study of religion into their own research. The self-identity phrase “spiri-

tual but not religious” is one of them, which has been increasingly used

by individuals who claim to be “spiritual” but disassociate themselves

from organized religion. This study first examines differences in crime

between “spiritual-but-not-religious” individuals and their “religious-

and-spiritual,” “religious-but-not-spiritual,” and “neither-religious-nor-

spiritual” peers in emerging adulthood. Specifically, we hypothesize that

the spiritual-but-not-religious young adults are more prone to crime

than their “religious” counterparts, while expecting them to be differ-

ent from the “neither” group without specifying whether they are more

or less crime prone. Second, the expected group differences in crime

are hypothesized to be explained by the microcriminological theories

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the

Wiley Online Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2011.51.

issue-3/issuetoc.

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2012 annual meeting of

the American Society of Criminology, Chicago, IL. The authors are grateful

for insightful comments and suggestions of the three anonymous reviewers and

the Editor-in-Chief. Direct correspondence to Sung Joon Jang, Department of

Sociology, Baylor University, One Bear Place #97326, Waco, TX 76798 (e-mail:

Sung Joon Jang@baylor.edu).

C2013 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12013

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 51 Number 3 2013 595

596 JANG & FRANZEN

of self-control, social bonding, and general strain. Latent-variable struc-

tural equation models were estimated separately for violent and prop-

erty crimes using the third wave of the National Longitudinal Study of

Adolescent Health. The overall results tend to provide a partial support

for the hypotheses. Implications for criminology and future research are

discussed.

“‘I’m spiritual but not religious’ is a cop-out,” says Miller (2012: para.

2), an author on the CNN Belief Blog. Being “especially prevalent in

the younger population in the United States,” (para. 2) he opined, “the

spiritual but not religious reflect the ‘me’ generation of self-obsessed,

truth-is-whatever-you-feel-it-to-be thinking, where big, historic, demand-

ing institutions that have expectations about behavior, attitudes and

observance and rules are jettisoned yet nothing positive is put in replace-

ment” (para. 17). Gallup (2003) echoed this portrayal of the increasingly

common religious/spiritual self-identity based on a national poll showing

“evidence of the focus on self in spirituality” (para. 4) among Americans,

which he attributes to “the influence of individualism [that] extends into

American spirituality” (para. 6). Although young adults are known to be

more religiously unaffiliated than their older counterparts (Pew Research

Center, 2010), thus, likely being more crime prone, this identity has never

been examined in terms of its implication for criminology.

Criminologists have rarely studied spirituality as a separate concept from

religiousness or religion, but this may have been partly because of data con-

straints (Johnson and Jang, 2010). That is, a crime survey typically contains

only a small number of “standard” religion items (e.g., service attendance

and religious salience besides denomination) and infrequently, if ever, items

reflecting spirituality. In addition, criminologists have been slow in not only

collecting new data but also in creatively reinventing existing data to ad-

dress current issues in the scientific study of religion as they intersect with

the interdisciplinary study of crime. We intend to do the latter by focusing

on the emergent group of American adults who call themselves “spiritual

but not religious” to examine this religious/spiritual identity’s relevance for

criminology.

To address the issue, we first examine differences in criminal offenses

between “spiritual-but-not-religious” individuals and their “religious-

and-spiritual,” “religious-but-not-spiritual,” and “neither-religious-nor-

spiritual” counterparts. Specifically, the “spiritual but not religious” are hy-

pothesized to be at higher risk of committing violent and property crimes

than their more religious (i.e., “religious and spiritual” and “religious but

not spiritual”) peers, whereas they are expected to be different in the risk

from the “neither-religious-nor-spiritual” ones. Furthermore, the expected

group differences in crime are hypothesized to be explained by general

IS BEING “SPIRITUAL” ENOUGH? 597

theories of crime: self-control, social bonding, and general strain theory. To

test the hypotheses, we estimate separate latent-variable structural equa-

tion models for violent crimes and property crimes, analyzing the third wave

of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health)

data collected when respondents were young adults. Given the unfamiliar-

ity of the concept of “spirituality” as distinct from religiousness in criminol-

ogy, we begin with a discussion of the two concepts.

“SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS”

In 1918, Georg Simmel (1997: 20) wrote that in a modernizing culture,

people are drawn to mysticism, a highly individualized religious belief or

“way of life” because it allows “the fixed definition and delimitation of reli-

gious forms to be suspended” when the more “objectively defined” religious

life is no longer satisfying. Some people become dissatisfied with institution-

alized religion and take on highly individualized religious beliefs. Although

the relative importance of the individualized and institutionalized dimen-

sions of religion has ebbed and flowed since Simmel’s day, the former di-

mension has come to be increasingly referred to as “spiritual” as opposed

to as “religious,” conveying at least partly different meanings (Idler et al.,

2003; Miller and Thoresen, 2003; Underwood and Teresi, 2002).

Initially, some theorized that the religious and spiritual dimensions of

faith were largely independent of each other (Wuthnow, 1998), but re-

search has uncovered evidence of an overlap between the two. For example,

Zinnbauer et al. (1997) found that the term spirituality was most often de-

scribed in personal or experiential terms, whereas religiousness was used in

relation to institutional beliefs and practices, such as church membership

or attendance and commitment to the belief system of organized religion.

However, based partly on spirituality and religiousness being “modestly”

correlated (r=.21), they concluded that the terms are “not fully inde-

pendent” (p. 561) and thus should not be thought of as mutually exclusive

categories but as concepts tapping different dimensions of faith with a fair

amount of overlap between them. This conceptualization is further backed

by other scholars (Good, Willoughby, and Busseri, 2011; Hill et al., 2000;

Schlehofer, Omoto, and Adelman, 2008), and they note that most Ameri-

cans consider the two concepts as related but distinct from each other (Mar-

ler and Hadaway, 2002). For this reason, Dougherty and Jang (2008) found

more than half of Americans (57 percent) to be “religious and spiritual”

and approximately one quarter (27 percent) to be either only “religious”

(17 percent) or only “spiritual” (10 percent) with the remainder (16

percent) being neither.