Frequently Asked Questions

A critical component of any adaptive response to our changing cultural evolutionary situation is holding together mind and heart, knowledge and wisdom. JHA’s research suggests that what’s adaptive in our time is expansive spirituality – a vastly inclusive and benevolent perspective that engages life at the deepest level while drawing meaning, ethical guidance, and inner motivation to act from a common commitment to the good of the whole.

Expansive spirituality is accountable, contemplative, empathetic, empowering, generous, grounded, humble, inclusive, transformative, and visionary. It is both a consequence of and a contributor to the shift away from divisive dogma-driven belief systems toward a more unified and unifying cultural ethos that’s large enough to fully embrace the greater good.

Expansive spirituality is an adaptive response to the challenges of our time, and it needs to be recognized as such. Cultivating life meaning through expansive spirituality is a vital human activity, far older than religion and destined to survive, even if the decline of traditional religions continues.

Expansive spirituality is not the posession of any particular religious tradition. It naturally resonates with all forms of appreciation for the depth dimension of human life, across cultures, including both religious and nonreligious ways of life.

Expansive spirituality is not affiliated with any particular religious tradition. It naturally resonates with all forms of appreciation for the depth dimension of human life, across cultures, including both religious and nonreligious ways of life.

It doesn’t seek to regulate the beliefs and practices of adherents the way some religions do. Consequently, advocates of expansive forms of spirituality can be seen as a threat to more fundamentalist doctrinal religions. Backlash against people willing to lead humanity’s evolution toward expansive forms of spirituality has been tragically common; consequences have included banishment, imprisonment, torture, and execution. Ironically, it is secular humanistic cultures that have created safer spaces for expansive spirituality, making it difficult for control-oriented religious traditions to do more than speak against it and/or shun those who dare explore it. Notably, some religious traditions are learning to embrace expansive spirituality wholeheartedly, building on the ways their more mystical and prosocial elements have supported expansive spirituality all along. In another ironic twist, religious institutions with the strongest commitment to expansive spirituality tend to be most vulnerable to contraction and collapse within secular cultural settings.

As we humbly attempt to describe essentially ineffable experiences, spirituality can be defined as “engagement with the depth dimension of reality.” Many people experience it through art or nature, poetry or music, both relationally and in solitude. Others cultivate spirituality through contemplative practices such as meditation, mindful journaling, or walking a labyrinth. It is a source of meaning, guidance, and motivation that can direct the focus of a person’s ultimate concerns and generate the power that drives some of humanity’s most profound values and commitments.

In the context of human history, spirituality is far older than religion, rooted in the human brain and body, interwoven in our social networks and cultures, arising from the mists of evolutionary change long before people tried to organize themselves in huge collectives and make use of religion as a form of social glue to support large-scale cooperation. Religion stems from attempts to regulate and focus human engagement with the depth dimension of reality. The world’s major religions therefore efficiently catalyze trust and cooperation between people who share a commitment to the same religious worldview.

If cultural circumstances make previously held religious worldviews implausible – as often happens in secularizing social contexts – then religious institutions become non-viable. But the depth dimension of human life continues to survive and thrive, and spirituality thrives right along with it. The spiritual roots of religion significantly predate and will long outlive institutional religion in a global emergence of more flexible, expansive, benevolent forms of spirituality.

JHA’s scientific research has uncovered many dimensions of spirituality, measured in the Dimensions of Spirituality Inventory (DSI). The way these dimensions cluster defines distinctive cultural packages of spirituality. Observe the following research tools called “word clouds” expressing four such cultural packages prevalent at the current time (the words are the dimensions of spirituality and their sizes reflects their relative importance). Notice how you may feel drawn to one more than the others.

Top left is the word cloud for Transformational Theistic Spirituality. This is type of spirituality common in people with personal religious commitments to supernatural beings. Top right is Axiological Extra-Theistic Spirituality, which is focused on values and meaning rather than on relationships with supernatural beings. Bottom left is Ritualistic Theistic Spirituality, which is another type of spirituality common in religious people, but focused more on ritual and tradition. Bottom right is Supernaturalistic Extra-Theistic Spirituality, which is essentially the New Age cultural package for spirituality.

The DSI and other tools developed by Just Horizons Alliance researchers offer significant information that helps us better understand how spirituality impacts various groups. By better understanding spiritual differences as well as shared common ground, we’re better able to resolve conflict and work together for the greater good.

At JHA, we see science and spirituality as perfectly compatible. Indeed, expansive spirituality is more at odds with traditional religion than it is with science.

When science represents an honest attempt to understand reality, it is a deeply spiritual activity – in the expansive, non-sectarian sense of the word. Interviews with famous scientists, including Albert Einstein, disclose the deep meaning and powerful inner motivations associated with scientific inquiry. Many scientists privately use the word “spiritual” to describe the deep potency of their scientific work, but they may hesitate to do so publicly because they don’t want to be misunderstood as aligning themselves with doctrinal religion.

There’s another way science and spirituality connect: we can use science to study just about anything, including spirituality – both expansive spirituality and other kinds of spirituality. At JHA, we’ve been doing that for decades.

Ask a good scientist. Seriously. First make sure they understand that you have an expansive, non-sectarian understanding of spirituality, so they feel comfortable to speak freely. And then find out why they do what they do. Researchers have done this in several research projects – including one called Science and the Spiritual Quest – and the beauty and wonder of scientific research comes through clearly. For many scientists, their work is an expression of their ultimate concern, and a way to engage the wondrous depths of reality. It is a clear instance of what we mean by expansive, non-sectarian spirituality. Applying science to improve life for other people is an additional level of meaning and motivation for some scientists.

Secularization decimates organized religions peacefully, without specifically targeting religion. It’s simply a byproduct of modernity. In secularizing settings, individuals abandon private religious practices, dial down their public religious participation, and eventually disaffiliate altogether. JHA’s research confirms that most of this change occurs between generations, as parents willingly or unwillingly fail to transmit their religious commitment to their children, and it takes a couple of centuries to unfold.

The deeper reasons for the decline of large religions are fascinating. JHA’s research has built computational simulations of religious change, synthesizing the best theories to interpret what’s going on. These computational models and the associated data identify four key factors in religious decline:

High existential security, so people are not constantly worrying about their survival or the wellbeing of their loved ones.

High education, so that people have alternative explanations for the world as they experience it other than those supplied by religious teachings.

High pluralism, in the sense of a welcoming attitude to religious and cultural diversity, which decreases confidence in exclusivist religious claims and increases interest in alternative worldviews and lifeways.

High freedom, which allows people to decrease religious commitment and eventually disaffiliate without having to pay an intolerable social or economic price.

Modernity reliably produces these four conditions, and not just in western societies. JHA’s research has detected signs of secularization in India, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa – wherever these four conditions are becoming stronger.

It is possible to revert to more religious societies by weakening one or more of these four conditions. But most people prefer lifestyles with high existential security, education, pluralism, and freedom. Thus, the only effective way to stop secularization is truly terrible: through extreme disruptions, either deliberately engineered (as some religious extremists dream of doing, using weapons of mass destruction if possible) or as an unplanned side effect of massively disruptive events such as climate disasters or global war.

Organized religions with hierarchical authorities and bodies of doctrine are likely to decline wherever and whenever existential security, education, pluralism, and freedom remain strong. But these four drivers of decline in organized religion have very little impact on unaffiliated expansive forms of spirituality. The depth dimension of reality remains present, inviting engagement, not unlike its presence fifty thousand years ago, long before organized religions arrived on the scene. People will engage that depth dimension, one way or another, as they seek meaningful lives.

Secular humanist societies afford frameworks for exploring the depths of the human spirit through the arts, experiences in nature, physical activities, and even complex forms of inquiry such as science, medicine, and the humanities. But secular societies make no effort to regulate or guide exploration of the depths of the human spirit, so long as it remains within legal and civil bounds. The result is creatively chaotic – the spiritual equivalent of the wild west.

Small-scale religious traditions that were suppressed by the large religions spring back to life and prove their value to a new generation of adherents.

Eclectic mergers of appropriated spiritual practices arise within the supernatural worldview of New Age spirituality.

Spiritual people who have no interest in supernatural worldviews create lifeways that are often highly idiosyncratic and individualistic.

Worryingly, people can fill their longing for meaning with engagements unworthy of their ultimate concern, such as extremist nationalist sentiments or escapist behavior. The result can be profound loneliness and isolation from others, and populist destabilization of political orders. The problem of creating human togetherness for the emerging era of expansive spirituality has not been solved, and it is high on JHA’s research priorities.

Some FAQs have leading questions. This is one of those leading questions – one we really want you to ask because we really want to answer it. The answer is a bit mind-bending but, if you’re interested in cultural evolution, dig in and see what you think.

Ever since the neolithic agricultural revolution, when people left hunting and gathering lifestyles behind and learned to live in large farming townships with domesticated plants and animals, religion has offered social glue to bind people in common purpose, supported by beliefs in supernatural beings that watch over people, to monitor and judge, help and hinder. Religious worldviews and lifeways were adaptive strategies in that cultural evolutionary niche, helping groups compete, survive, and thrive.

The juggernaut religions born a few centuries either side of 500 BCE launched the so-called Axial Age, where religious priests and scholars could vie for power with formerly unchecked rulers, challenging corruption and rationalizing whatever socioeconomic system prevailed in a given time and place. Here again the supernatural religious worldviews and lifeways of the Axial religions were an adaptive strategy in the prevailing evolutionary niche, catalyzing unprecedented levels of cooperation, creativity, and competition. Cultures equipped with Axial worldviews and lifeways out-competed small-scale cultures, subsuming one after another in their rapacious maws, eliminating languages, intricate cultures, and stunningly beautiful and useful bodies of accrued wisdom. Colonial conquest is the natural expression of gigantic Axial-Age cultures, and it occurred with convenient and (at the time) compelling religious rationalizations.

The Axial Age gave birth to science and medicine in modernity and, ironically, also accidentally created the conditions for its own undoing. We are living through the end of the Axial Age, which is unfolding a few centuries either side of 2000 CE. With the giant religions shrunk to the size of pastimes, and their social and political influence correspondingly reduced, the conditions for adaptive spirituality and religion are shifting once more. In this newly emerging cultural evolutionary niche, adaptive spirituality is expansive and non-sectarian, in precisely the sense we study at JHA. We use this body of research knowledge to support thought leaders and influencers through offering reliable information and opportunities for discussion.

To learn more about this cascade of transformations in what counts as adaptive in a cultural evolutionary framework, see Wesley J. Wildman and F. LeRon Shults, Modeling Religion: Simulating the Transformation of Worldviews, Lifeways, and Civilizations (Bloomsbury, 2024).

The honest answer is that we don’t know yet. So far at least, expansive, non-sectarian spirituality hasn’t generated the potent kind of long-term social glue that religions once produced. Of course, this is why religions were born out of spirituality in the first place: large civilizations needed the social glue that shared imaginative engagement with supernatural religious beings could provide. In the newly emerging cultural evolutionary niche, many humans are trying to do the large-scale civilization thing without religious glue, using secular life patterns to hold us together.

Spirituality in the expansive, non-sectarian sense of engaging the depth dimension of reality is alive and well, and remains critical for motivating prosocial behavior and inspiring great works of creativity and courage, but it doesn’t hold people together the way organized religion does. People do want spiritual companions to accompany them on their life journeys, to be there for them in good times and bad, and to create meaning-giving spiritual community. Thus, the longing for spiritual support and companionship certainly exists, but the methods for forging long-term spiritual communities are not yet fully developed. This is a point of focused research within JHA (for example, through the Ritual for the Non-Religious project). We’re engaging thought leaders and change agents on this issue to learn what’s being tried on the ground and to figure out what is likely to work in the future for a variety of types of people.