What They Did
The researchers collected 138,000 Twitter posts containing
the words “religion” or “spirituality” between March and April of 2021. They used
language analysis software to generate seven clusters of words associated with
“religion” or “spirituality,” label each post as positive or negative in
sentiment, and generate a concept map of 200 words frequently appearing in the
data. Three of the authors (an anthropologist, a church historian, and a
theologian) separately examined the clusters and suggested names to capture the
overall theme of each cluster. The final cluster names were theistic/Western,
mystical/subjective/practices, Islam, Christian/Evangelical, politics, conduct
of life, and Indian.
The mystical/subjective/practices cluster and the conduct of
life cluster were associated with positive sentiment, and the Islam cluster
also had a slight positive association. The other clusters were associated with
negative sentiment. The theistic/Western cluster and the Indian cluster were
associated with “spirituality” and “religion” at near equal strengths. The
Christian/Evangelical cluster and the conduct of life cluster were also
associated with both terms but had a stronger association with “spirituality.”
The mystical/subjective/practices cluster and the Islam cluster were only
associated with “spirituality,” and the politics cluster was only associated
with “religion.”
The researchers conclude that their data is consistent with
a linguistic differentiation between religion as negative, morally
prescriptive, and public versus spirituality as positive, life-enhancing, and
private. They note, however, that the methodology used only provides a
broad-stroke picture of the data and that more granular examination of the Twitter
posts reveals varied and sometimes contradictory usage of both terms.
Further Exploration
The concept map generated for this paper was made from the
most frequent 200 words in the data set, excluding English “stop words.” That
was a new term for me, and it refers to words that appear frequently but don’t
carry very much meaning (see https://smltar.com/stopwords.)
Obviously, leaving those out allows for generation of a much more interesting
concept map!
On the concept map itself, I noticed that the words closest
to “spirituality” were “healing,” “connection,” and “soul,” while the words
closest to “religion” were “freedom,” “politics,” and “race.” This seems consistent
with the sense of “spirituality” as more private and “religion” as more public.
At the same time, “freedom of religion” is a common phrase describing the U.S.
first-amendment right, and “politics and religion” is a common phrase grouping
both topics as inappropriate for general conversation, so I wonder if that
could’ve skewed the results.
As far as I gathered from the paper, the Twitter posts specifically
used the words “spirituality” or “religion,” not any related words like “spiritual”
or “religious.” That means the phrase “spiritual but not religious” wouldn’t
show up. It also seems that the words aren’t exactly grammatically equivalent. I
might refer to “a religion” but not usually to “a spirituality” in casual
conversation. Instead, I would refer to a spiritual “path,” “practice,” or “tradition.”
I could also refer to a religious path, practice, or tradition. That makes me
wonder if using the adjective forms would give different results, but that’s a
rabbit hole for another day!
Image credit: Nancystodd
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Icon-religion.svg
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