ABSTRACT

“Spiritual but Not Religious” (SBNR) as a self-description encompasses many different intersections and engagements with religion. While survey research asks far less frequently what people mean by the term spiritual than whether they endorse it as a self-description, what seems to link these varied “spiritualities” together is a focus on individual choice and fulfillment, with sincerity as the measure of ethical engagement. Because this focus on individual intent and this distancing from institutional claims create space for certain queer lives and subjectivities, identifying as SBNR appears to be far more common in queer communities than in heterosexual and cisgender ones. At the same time, it is critically important to attend to the complicities that this linkage creates between certain forms of homonormativity and neoliberal economic and political commitments. This chapter, utilizing ethnographic research, explores the phenomenon of SBNR in queer communities as it is linked to homonormativity and homonationalism, examining the exclusions this position consequently enacts and linking it to broader neoliberal patterns of consumption that make religious resources, like natural and other cultural resources, ethically available to anyone with the social and economic capital to access them. It investigates the SBNR’s neoliberal complicities in an effort to disentangle why certain neoliberal subjects adopt this identity while others do not and to elucidate the political consequences of making personal fulfillment and sincerity the measures of benefit or harm.