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54 CONVERSATION

much as it revealed. I could almost repeat by heart the formula he used, for I was familiar with it from the religious environment of my childhood.'

There have been many times and places where the stories people tell about their spiritual experience are pretty formulaic. This is particularly likely to be the case where a religious institution is socially dominant. In traditionally devout communities, people are taught what is supposed to happen as they advance in the spiritual life, sometimes in considerable detail. Theologians have laid out the pattern for them, possibly hundreds of years previously, giving it immense authority as timeless truth. The old ordo salutis of the Lutheran Church had ten stages that believers were expected to go through. First they were elected, then successively called, illumined, converted, regenerated, justified, United mystically with Christ, renovated, preserved to the end, and finally glorified with the Son; a complex, not to say wearisome seąuence.² Within the Roman Catholic tradition, textbooks on prayer are still available containing very detailed, step-by-step accounts of how to progress in prayer. 5 Adolphe Tanquerey’s The Spiritual Life, published in 1930 and at one j time to be found in seminaries and convents throughout the Western world, is a classic example of the genre.³ It advances sequentially through the spiritual life and reads almost like a technical manuał, i subdivided into morę than 1,500 numbered sections.⁴

TALKING TO ORDINARY PEOPLE

lt is highly unlikely that such standardisation would be found in the -l modern West, except amongst the membership of a few relatively | isolated religious communities. In that case, what about the situation J of people who never go to church and don’t necessarily^subscribe to J any standard religious formula? If the biological thesis is right, they certainly ought to have a spiritual life. My colleague Kate Hunt and I decided to try to find out. As the number of regular churchgoers in the UK is now very smali, we didn’t anticipate any difficulty in identifying people who fitted the bill. In consultation with Gordon Heald, we wrote a questionnaire on areas like religious identity, church attendance, belief in God, self-identity (as either religious, spiritual, agnostic, atheist etc.), spiritual experiences, and attitudes towards the meaning of life. A pollster employed by ORB stopped people randomly in a Nottingham shopping centre and asked if they

would responcl to the ąuestionnaire. If they answered a question about churchgoing by saying they never went to church, they were candidates for selection for interview.

To be on the safe side, we felt it necessary to add the reąuirement that they labelled themselves ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’. This was poten-tially a serious error because it could mean that the people chosen were a smali subset of the non-churchgoing population who happened to take an interest in ‘that sort of thing’. Fortunately we were saved to some degree from our folly by the statistics from our national survey (see Chapter 1) which told us that three out of every four of the people who passed our pollster in the shopping centre would probably claim to have a spiritual dimension to their experi-ence. Nevertheless the resulting limitation to the data needs to be remembered. We invited a sample of those who fitted our criteria to attend one of four focus groups held a few days after the initial interview.

Although we discussed a large number of possible ways of making up the focus groups, we decided to concentrate on differences in age and gender (see table in notes).⁵ The first group consisted of men and women within the age rangę of 20 to 39, whilst the second group was ałso mixed gender, within the age rangę of 40 and upwards. These two groups were set up on the intuition that the decade of the 1960s was a pivotal period of cultural change.⁶ People born before then are morę likely to have had some sort of formal contact with the church than those born afterwards. The third focus group was madę up of women and the finał group was all małe. We divided these latter groups along gender lines to test the assumption that women are morę concerned about spiritual issues than men. At the con-clusion of the focus groups, we asked each of the participants if they would be willing to be interviewed on their own by one of the researchers. Only one person declined to continue.⁷

In generał we found that to varying degrees people were defensive at the beginning of the conversations. They gradually relaxed as they : realised that we did not have a hidden agenda either to criticise or to convert them, and that we were genuinely interested in their own views. Although we were researchers we were perfectly well aware that we were not totally detached outsiders, but fellow human beings with our own life stories and spirituality. These would inevitably affect the mood of the conversation and the best we could do was to