Reply To: “I’m Spiritual, but Not Religious”

[Allison Schoonover]

I’m with Michael and Mark – the first thing I would do is to ask them to explain…I would think that people can mean very different things by saying that they’re “spiritual but not religious.” When my adult children say this (and they have), I’m pretty sure it means “I don’t really care enough to figure out what I think about God; I’ll worry about it later.” To be honest, I don’t know if I’m capable, as Michael said, of getting “into the issue of objective truth, and begin to explain why we believe Jesus is divine, a historical account of the establishment of his Church, and then show that the Catholic Church is that historical church.” I think I would spend most of the conversation listening and clarifying. Maybe at some point, I would find the opportunity to share the Kerygma. I read a really interesting article the other day about reaching young “nones” (no religious affiliation), and how some of them have absolutely no context for understanding ideas like sin and salvation. That’s kind of overwhelming to me. One thing that occurs to me is that these people need to be encouraged to keep seeking; to keep thinking. There is real, objective truth; there are real answers to questions like, “Is God real?”, and “What’s the point of human existence?”. There is a right way to live and a wrong way to live, and they both have eternal consequences.