ABSTRACT

In his book Spiritual, But Not Religious, Robert C. Fuller outlines three categories of the “unchurched” that include his definition of the Spiritual but Not Religious (SBNR). The subjects of this chapter, self-identified Baptist-Buddhist Janice Dean Willis and activist-artist James Baldwin, grew up in traditional Christian church communities. Later, however, each would reject these communities as their primary spiritual homes. While aspects of Baldwin and Willis’s narratives might be aligned with one or more of Fuller’s categories of “the unchurched,” Baldwin and Willis do not neatly fit into Fuller’s description of the SNBR demographic. Baldwin and Willis’s spiritual journeys are rooted in a search for complex subjectivity that is a core concept of African American religiosity. In this quest for complex subjectivity, their religious quests take on layered, nomadic qualities that are evident in both Baldwin’s and Willis’s journeys. As a result of their religious quests, Baldwin and Wills engage and construct flexible and hybrid spaces that can serve as containers for complex identities. An examination of Willis’s and Baldwin’s spiritual quests might help us to think more about how race, gender, and sexuality might influence a spiritual seeker’s quest in ways that expand our views of SBNR populations.