Religion vs. Spirituality

Defining the terms

Religion and spirituality are two of the most overused and under-defined words in the English language. In the usage that has stabilised over the last thirty years, religionrefers to organised, institutional, communal traditions with doctrines, clergy, scriptures, and rituals — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism in its traditional forms. Spiritualityrefers to the personal, experiential side of those traditions, often detached from institutional setting — meditation, prayer, a sense of meaning, a felt connection to something larger than oneself.

In the vernacular, the pair is often used as a contrast. To call yourself “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) is to claim the interior without the institution — access to meaning, awe, and contemplative practice while declining membership in any specific tradition. In US polling the SBNR category has grown from roughly 19% of adults in 2012 to around 27% in 2023, and the share that calls itself neither spiritual nor religious has grown along with it.

At a glance

Why “spiritual but not religious” is growing

The SBNR category sits at the intersection of several long trends. Institutional trust has collapsed across Western societies since the 1970s, and religious institutions are no exception. The sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, the alignment of American evangelicalism with a polarising political coalition, and the visible alliance between some religious authorities and illiberal politics have all pushed people out of the pews without necessarily pushing them into pure unbelief.

At the same time, the therapeutic idiom has moved into the space religion used to occupy. People who once would have joined a church for community, moral guidance, and a sense of transcendence now assemble those goods piecemeal — a meditation app, a yoga studio, a 12-step group, a therapist, a podcast. The result is an explicitly spiritual life without any institution owning it. The rise of the religious nones has mostly been a rise in SBNRs, not a rise in confident atheists.

Sam Harris and the case for secular spirituality

Sam Harris’s Waking Up(2014) is the most influential recent argument that serious spiritual practice does not require serious religious belief. Harris defines spirituality narrowly — as the first-person investigation of consciousness and the recognition that the felt sense of a separate self can be dismantled by training. On this view, meditation is neither supernatural nor merely relaxation; it is an empirical procedure that yields specific, reproducible effects.

Harris is an atheist. He is also blunt that the traditional contemplative traditions — especially in Buddhism and in Advaita Vedanta — have been mapping the territory of first-person experience for centuries, and that atheists who dismiss all of this as priestcraft are missing something. His position is one of the clearest answers available to the question of whether an atheist can be spiritual without dishonesty: yes, provided the word is used carefully.

The case that the distinction is hollow

Not everyone is convinced. Critics of the SBNR framing argue that “spirituality” as deployed in Western culture has become a consumer category rather than a serious commitment. You can buy a crystal, light a candle, follow an astrologer on Instagram, and call it spirituality; none of that involves the discipline, sacrifice, or moral accountability that traditional religious practice demanded. The word ends up doing almost no work, describing anything from regular meditation to a vague preference for non-doctrinal woo.

A second objection, from within religion, is that spirituality without a tradition is structurally impoverished. The traditions have centuries of error-correction, accountability to a community, tested liturgies, and moral teeth. An individual assembling a personal practice from YouTube and a couple of retreats is unlikely to match that depth, and is far more likely to drift into self-congratulatory practice that confirms rather than challenges the ego.

Does it drain the concept of meaning?

A third objection comes from atheists and agnostics. If everything that any human has ever done — awe at the ocean, grief at a funeral, joy at a concert — counts as spirituality, then the word is no longer doing meaningful work. The risk of over-extending the term is that it re-enchants experiences that are already richly explainable in natural terms, and quietly smuggles in metaphysical commitments under cover of a vague vocabulary.

One reply, available to Harris and to secular contemplatives generally, is that there is a specific and identifiable set of experiences — the dissolution of the felt sense of self, deep mental stillness, non-dual awareness — that the word spirituality picks out precisely and nothing else does. On that narrower usage the term earns its keep. On the broader cultural usage it probably does not.

What it means in practice

For someone leaving institutional religion, the distinction matters. Dropping the creeds, the Sunday obligations, and the moral micromanagement is one thing; losing contemplation, awe, and community is another. The SBNR category names the space between — a way to walk out of the tradition without walking out of the interior life it was built to cultivate. Whether that space is stable across a lifetime, or whether it collapses either into atheism or back into some recognisable tradition, is an open question. The growth of the nones is still young, and the cohort data will tell us something the cross-sections cannot.

For secular humanists, religion and spirituality are both optional. Meaning, community, moral seriousness, even contemplative depth can all be cultivated on a wholly naturalistic footing. The person of faith and the self-declared spiritual seeker are both asking the right questions; the claim of secular humanism is just that the usual answers are not the best ones on offer.