Inductivist

There is a certain type of person who doesn't like to describe himself as "religious" but is fine with "spiritual." (For that matter, there are self-described religious people who don't consider themselves to be particularly spiritual.) You might get the impression that the two are alternatives, but the MIDUS study shows considerable overlap. The correlation between the variables of how religious you are and how spiritual you are is .54 for 988 respondents -- a strong relationship. I also looked to see if perhaps the correlation was lower for young people. For those ages 18-39, the correlation is .51, not much different.

MIDUS respondents were asked a number of questions about their spirituality. I calculated the means for blacks and whites:















With all questions, black-white differences are statistically significant. The Cohen d's reveal a gap of moderate size. All the answers are highly intercorrelated which indicates that they are measuring an underlying trait--something that might be termed spirituality. "Mindfulness" is a Buddhist term that refers to the accepting awareness of one's internal experiences.

MIDUS Study respondents were asked the following question: "On a daily basis, how often do you experience the following: A feeling of being deeply moved by the beauty of life." Here are the percentages who answered "often" by race/ethnicity:

Percent

Blacks 49.0
Hispanics 43.2
Polish 42.3
Amerindian 40.0
Scottish 37.1
English 38.4
Irish 35.3*
Norwegian 33.8
German 33.0*
Jewish 30.2*
Italian 29.9*
French 26.7*

* significantly lower than blacks at the 95% confidence level

Blacks are significantly more likely than several European groups to have this type of experience often. I'm reminded of Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" (although he didn't write the song). This is consistent with the higher level of religiosity reported by blacks.  

Spirituality is unrelated to education: I assumed that intelligence would be positively correlated with "feeling connected with all life." While unintelligent people have strong feelings for specific friends, relatives, or enemies, I imagined that only smart people would feel a bond with an abstraction. I was wrong: according to the General Social Survey, the correlation between years of education and feeling connected is a whopping .02.

Do men and women differ in spirituality? Just a few posts below, I looked at how spiritual various ethnic groups are. Let's compare men and women now.


Men

Mexicans 3.12
Blacks 3.11
American Indians 3.05
Scots 3.00
Irish 2.98

USA 2.80

English/Welsh 2.67
Germans 2.66
Italians 2.52


Women

Scots 3.63
Blacks 3.33
English/Welsh 3.17
American Indians 3.16
Germans 3.15

USA 3.11

Italians 3.07
Mexicans 2.68
Irish 2.83

First, we can see that women are more spiritual than men, but the differences appear to be smaller than with church attendance (earlier post). Comparing ethnic groups, Mexican men are comparatively spiritual, but Mexican women are not. The pattern is similar but less striking for Irish Americans. The pattern is reversed for Germans and English/Welsh. But we can't make to much of small differences since sample sizes are small.

More on spirituality: I just posted on the topic of ethnicity and feeling connection to all life, and it made me wonder how much of an overlap there is between spirituality and church attendance. According to GSS data on 1,271 people, the correlation between the two is .27. Note that, as a rule, correlations based on survey data are disappointingly low, so relatively speaking, this ain't too shabby. Here is the list of mean church attendance by ethnic group (3=several times per year, 4=once a month):


Mean church attendance score

Blacks 4.44
Mexicans 4.22
Irish 3.97

USA 3.93

Germans 3.92
English/Welsh 3.87
Scandanavians 3.86
Scots 3.77
Italians 3.71
American Indians 3.70
East Asians 3.58

Across the 10 groups, the rank correlation (Spearman's rho) for spirituality and church attendance is .32. Certain groups lower the correlation: the Irish are church-goers but are not spiritual, and Scots and American Indians are spiritual but don't go to church much.

Update: On a related topic, what is the distribution of church membership among American Indians? Three-quarters are Protestant, 9 percent are Catholic, 11 percent have no religion, and only .6 percent report a Native American faith.

Which American ethnic group is the most spiritual? GSS respondents were asked how often do they experience a connection to all life. Answers range from never (=6) to many times a day (=1) (many times a day?!) I calculated mean scores for ethnic groups with at least 30 cases and subtracted this number from 6 so that higher numbers indicate greater spirituality:


Mean spirituality score (sample size in parentheses):

Scots 3.29 (42)
Blacks 3.26 (82)
American Indians 3.12 (58)

USA 3.04 (1,000)

English/Welsh 2.95 (137)
Mexicans 2.91 (61)
Germans 2.90 (151)
Irish 2.90 (138)
Italians 2.80 (54)
Scandanavians (Danes, Norwegians, Swedes) 2.78 (36)
East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos) 1.92 (26)

I was under the impression that Scandanavians and East Asians were sober people, so I combined national groups so samples were larger. I was right, espeically with Asians: they fall to the bottom of the list. Blacks in second place seems right: they are not a sober people. The Scots in first place does seem odd, however.