What Does It Mean to Be ‘Spiritual but Not Religious’?
I saw a Substack post from Brian Zahnd last week in which he wrote:
The tired cliché, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” should be put out to pasture. It’s an increasingly banal quip. More and more people are realizing that vague spirituality as an accessory to default consumerism is a cheap knock-off for the richness and rigor of healthy religion, substantive theology, and deep faith.
It’s perhaps naïve to interrogate such a short post too deeply, but it made me think further about my response to that fairly common statement. Like many such short, pithy catchphrases, it can mean different things to different people. Clearly, Brian is thinking of it in a very particular way, one that is not especially flattering to those who use it to describe themselves: a “vague spirituality as an accessory to default consumerism.”
I’m not sure it’s fair to characterise a whole group of people simply on the grounds of the statement being a cliché (still less a ‘tired’ one). As the saying goes, if you meet one person who says, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” you’ve met one person who says, “I’m spiritual but not religious”!
I suspect that if Brian and I sat down to chat about it in more depth, I’d get where he’s coming from in this instance. But if someone were to use that phrase in conversation with me, my first response would be “Tell me why you say that. What do you have in mind by those words, ‘spiritual’ and ‘religious’?”
What I think many people mean is something like this: they once had a faith (often via church) but had a bad experience, ending up somewhere between traumatised and disillusioned. By ‘spiritual’ they mean something like “I still believe in God,” and by “not religious” they mean “but I’ve had it with institutional Christianity.” I suspect many readers will be able to put flesh on the bones of the kinds of bad experiences that have caused people to become “dechurched” without me needing to spell it out.
I find it hard to see how those of us who have had similar experiences—or who have listened to many such stories—can do anything other than empathise, especially when the experience was truly horrendous (as, sadly, many have been).
Let’s look, then, at Brian’s alternative proposal: “the richness and rigor of healthy religion, substantive theology, and deep faith.” We would need to start by attempting to define “healthy religion,” because it doesn’t take much familiarity with the Christian scene in the Western world (at least) to recognise there is a great deal about it that is very unhealthy. Every week, news organisations covering the Christian scene report yet another moral scandal involving one or more of that triumvirate of sex, money, and power, and the abuses and harms that too often come with them. We tire of institutional leaders playing these down as “one-offs” that are statistically insignificant, and/or framing them as the devil’s attacks.
For every headline-worthy story we hear about, there’s a thousand more that we never hear about—hurt and damaged people who have suffered from unhealthy religion, shallow theology, and trite faith. I cannot honestly say that these poor souls are wilfully choosing “a cheap knock-off,” though I fully accept that this is what has been delivered to them by some churches and leaders.
Of course, other circumstances might lead someone to describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” For example, they may sense something transcendent beyond this material existence, and they are attracted to encountering it, whatever that might be. We could call that a kind of “God consciousness” or “God seeking” (but probably with a lowercase ‘g’).
That interest might, of course, function more as an “accessory” (Brian’s word)—something added to life that keeps us in the driving seat and costs little—rather than something on which a person centres their life (which would surely reflect the religion of Jesus). The phrase “not religious” might be a euphemism for “unwilling to commit.” But there’s no reason to immediately assume that, especially for those who are exploring.
I’ve said many times that one of the positive features of postmodernity is an interest in spiritual matters, unencumbered by early memories of “dead religion”; if there is an underlying feature that the so-called “Quiet Revival” was reflecting (even if the data that supposedly affirmed it was fatally flawed), then it was this interest.
If I were to have further conversation with someone in this category, I would try to explore their sense of spirituality. Questions such as: do they believe in a “spiritual realm” (or “supernatural” realm) of some kind? If so, do they believe there is some level of engagement between that realm and the material realm—that those realms interface in some sense, either all the time or at least from time to time? Do they conceive the spiritual realm as being an impersonal force (like, say, gravity) or in some way personified, in a being or beings? If so, do these beings have a goal in relation to the material realm, and especially concerning people? Can they be “known” in some sense?
Our answers to these kinds of questions frame where we are starting from in what “spiritual” means.
In a Christian context, it shapes what someone believes God to be like, how Jesus fits into that, whether there is such a thing as “spiritual warfare,” what answered prayer means, the extent of the intervention of spiritual forces (good or bad) into the material realm, and so on.
We know that different religions propose different answers to these questions. Christians are saying, in effect, that the Christian answers, broadly speaking, make the most sense to us, even if (a) Christians disagree on some of the detail, and (b) we will undoubtedly find, one day, that we have more of the detail wrong than we would like. Both are somewhat inevitable given human frailties, but we can only work with what we’ve got. That’s one good reason for Christians to focus on the “main and the plain” of their faith and be humble and non-dogmatic concerning secondary and tertiary matters.
Brian is undoubtedly right that our “spirituality” (our sense of a parallel spiritual realm existing alongside our own) cannot be left as a vague spirituality. If we sense that there is such a thing as a spiritual realm, we surely can’t just stop there; we should want to try to figure out what it might mean for us.
If that is the case, then “spiritual but not religious” may be less a fixed personal characteristic than the start of an important journey of exploration.
The existence of such a realm would not be a recent development; it would almost certainly precede the material realm; indeed, it may directly correspond to the origins of the material realm.
To close, a brief word on the role of sacred texts in informing “spirituality.”
For Christians, this means Scripture, and it reflects a revelation of God primarily by way of narrative (stories) within a big story of God and people. The divinely inspired goal for this Scripture is that we should understand God and know God. The zenith of the story is God entering into the world (into our human story) in the person of Jesus, beginning a transformation of us and our world that has begun but is yet to be completed (which the New Testament speaks of as a “Kingdom” of God, that many characterise as “already” but also “not yet”).
The challenge is, of course, how to understand the nature of Scripture (what “inspired” looks like in practice), what it’s for, what we are to learn from it, and how we are to apply it.
Why is the notion of Scripture so important? Because otherwise all we have to go on is what science can tell us (which at this point in the human journey is not much) and personal experience (which is patently unreliable).
This is where there is so much need for what Brian labels substantive theology, though of course, it needs to be good theology as well—a major challenge in itself! And yes, it does depend on what we mean by “good.”
For Christians, I suggest the three most important foundational theological questions are (1) what is God like (as a person, in his nature and character), leading to (2) what does he desire both for us and from us (his plans and purposes), and (3) what is the nature of Scripture and its divinely designed role in answering those questions?