God in the Particular: How Franciscan Concreteness and Anglican Liturgical Rootedness Challenge the Rise of Formless American Spirituality
There is a phrase that has become something of a cultural watermark in contemporary American life: spiritual but not religious. Polling data from Pew Research consistently shows that the proportion of Americans who identify with this formulation has grown substantially over the past two decades, now representing a significant and self-conscious segment of the population. They are not, by and large, indifferent to transcendence. They seek meaning, practice gratitude, and speak of the sacred with evident sincerity. What they resist is the particular—the specific creed, the named community, the inherited rite, the inconvenient history.
Both the Franciscan and Anglican traditions, for all their considerable differences in temperament and structure, stand in quiet but firm opposition to this tendency. They do so not by issuing polemics against therapeutic spirituality, but by the far more persuasive method of simply being what they are: traditions that insist, at every turn, on the theological significance of the specific.
Francis and the Stubborn Fact of the Particular
When Francis of Assisi heard what he believed to be a divine call at the chapel of San Damiano, the instruction was not a general summons toward spiritual improvement. It was, by every account in the Franciscan sources, scandalously concrete: Go, Francis, and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin. Francis took this literally before he understood it figuratively. He gathered stones. He rebuilt a specific, deteriorating, architecturally unremarkable church on the outskirts of a specific Italian hill town in the thirteenth century.
This is not incidental to Franciscan spirituality. It is its very grammar. The tradition that flows from Francis is one that perpetually refuses the elevation of principle over person, of idea over encounter. Francis did not love poverty as an abstraction; he embraced lepers by name and touched their wounds with his hands. He did not preach a generalized theology of creation; he addressed the sun, the moon, the wolf of Gubbio, and the birds near Bevagna as though they were particular members of a household he actually inhabited.
For a culture that has learned to curate its spiritual life from an ever-expanding marketplace of practices—mindfulness apps, wellness retreats, eclectic personal altars assembled from multiple traditions without commitment to any—the Franciscan insistence on the concrete presents an uncomfortable challenge. Transformation, in the Franciscan account, does not occur in the realm of generalized intention. It occurs when a specific person, in a specific place, encounters a specific other and is changed.
Anglican Liturgy and the Scandal of Historical Embodiment
Anglicanism arrives at a similar conviction by a different route. The tradition's liturgical inheritance, shaped decisively by Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and refined through centuries of Anglican practice, is not merely an aesthetic preference for beautiful language. It is a theological commitment to the idea that God's people are formed by particular words, spoken in particular sequences, in particular gathered communities, across particular spans of historical time.
The American Episcopal Church's own liturgical tradition—rooted in the Book of Common Prayer and its successive revisions—embodies this principle in practice. When Episcopalians pray the Daily Office, they are not engaging in a private spiritual exercise that could be performed equally well with any words or no words at all. They are joining a conversation that began with Cranmer in sixteenth-century England, was carried across the Atlantic by colonial settlers, survived the disruptions of revolution, and has been handed on, with modifications, to the present generation. The prayer is embedded in history because, Anglican theology insists, God acts in history.
This stands in direct tension with the therapeutic spirituality market's central promise, which is essentially the promise of transformation without inheritance. The bestselling spiritual memoirs of recent decades share a common structure: the protagonist leaves behind the religion of their childhood (too specific, too demanding, too historically compromised), wanders through a sequence of practices drawn from various traditions, and arrives at a personalized synthesis that bears the stamp of no community's authority. It is a compelling narrative. It is also, from an Anglican theological perspective, a narrative built on a category error—the assumption that the particular is a liability rather than the very medium through which the universal becomes accessible.
Where the Two Traditions Converge
It would be a mistake to suggest that Franciscan and Anglican spirituality are identical in their approach to particularity. They are not. The Franciscan tradition tends toward the affective and the immediate—the direct encounter, the embrace of the stranger, the prayer spoken to the creature at hand. The Anglican tradition tends toward the ordered and the communal—the shaped liturgy, the gathered body, the long inheritance of a praying people. One tradition's genius is evangelical spontaneity; the other's is liturgical continuity.
And yet they converge, with remarkable consistency, on a single theological conviction: that God is known here, not in the abstract elsewhere of generic spirituality. The Franciscan mystic and the Anglican liturgist would both recognize, in the contemporary appetite for decontextualized spiritual experience, a flight from the very conditions under which divine encounter becomes possible.
This convergence has practical implications for American Christians who find themselves navigating a culture increasingly hostile to inherited religious identity. The temptation, even within established traditions, is to soften the particular edges—to present Christianity as a set of universal values that any reasonable person might endorse, to emphasize spiritual practices that can be extracted from their theological context and marketed to the unchurched. Both Franciscan and Anglican traditions resist this accommodation, not from institutional defensiveness, but from a deep theological conviction that the accommodation itself constitutes a theological error.
The Bracing Alternative
What does it look like, in practice, to recover the theology of the particular? It looks like a parish that takes its neighborhood seriously as a theological category—not merely as a demographic to be served, but as a specific place with a specific history that makes specific demands on the community of faith located within it. It looks like a Franciscan friar who learns the names of the people he serves and refuses to relate to them as representatives of a social problem. It looks like an Anglican congregation that prays the Daily Office not because it is convenient, but because the practice binds them to a particular community of prayer that extends across time.
It looks, in short, like the opposite of the spiritual buffet. It looks like commitment—to a place, to a people, to a set of practices that have been handed on and must be handed on again, with all the friction and difficulty that inheritance entails.
The American spiritual marketplace will continue to offer its wares. The promise of transformation without tradition, of transcendence without community, of the sacred without the scandal of the specific, is genuinely appealing—and, in the short term, genuinely lucrative. But the Franciscan and Anglican traditions, each in its own idiom, offer a counter-testimony: that the God who became flesh in a particular place, among a particular people, at a particular moment in history, is not best encountered by abstracting away from the particular. He is encountered precisely there—in the stone chapel falling into ruin, in the words of a prayer spoken by ten thousand generations, in the face of the person in front of you whose name you have not yet learned but must.
