There Is No Such Thing as Spiritual but Not Religious
A psychology of religion argument for the sacred core and why religion and spirituality were never two different things
A classroom argument over the “spiritual but not religious” turned into a deeper question: are religion and spirituality two things, or one search wearing different clothes?
It started, as the best class discussions often do, with a disagreement. This healthy disagreement, I must say, has been ongoing throughout the semester. This time, we were working through the standard definitions in my psychology of religion course, the ones every textbook offers: religion as the institutional and doctrinal thing, and spirituality as the personal-transcendental inner thing. One student described herself as spiritual but not religious. Another pushed back. By the end of the three-hour class we were no longer talking about definitions. We were talking about whether the distinction itself was telling us something true about human beings, or something true about us, the people who drew the line.
That question has stayed with me, and I have had reason to keep wrestling with it. I am writing a textbook on religion and psychology for Routledge’s Engaging with Religion series, where the problem of definition is unavoidable. And it surfaced again recently at the Religion, Spirituality and Mental Health Global Summit (APA Division 36 mid-year conference) at Harvard Medical School. During Tyler VanderWeele’s presentation on his meta-analysis of how religious resources help reduce the risk of substance abuse, a practitioner-scholar interrupted to press the distinction between religion and spirituality. I could not help pointing out that we gain little by treating the two as a binary. My argument is simple to state and harder to sit with: religion and spirituality are not two constructs but one. Both are expressions of a single human orientation toward the sacred. And the sharp wall we have built between them says less about the universal structure of religious life than about a particular, mostly Western, way of imagining the self.
One Search, Many Forms
If we accept Kenneth Pargament’s widely used definition of religion (p.32) as a search for significance in ways related to the sacred, then the partition between religion and spirituality starts to come apart in our hands. What unites the two is more elemental than what separates them. Both orient the person toward the sacred. The institutional and the experiential are not rival categories. They are two ways the same search takes shape.
I have come to call this shared ground the sacred core: the human capacity and inclination to perceive, pursue, and relate to whatever is held as ultimate, holy, or set apart. A Buddhist seeking awakening, a Muslim in the discipline of daily prayer, a Christian receiving communion, and an Indigenous practitioner honoring ancestral land are all engaged in the same fundamental orientation, even as the symbols and theologies differ profoundly. The psychological substrate beneath them is shared across these traditions and include but not limited to things like meaning-making, self-transcendence, attachment to a perceived ultimate, the regulation of what matters most.
Naming a sacred core does not flatten genuine difference between traditions. It identifies the shared psychological territory that makes comparing them possible in the first place. You cannot study variation without a common axis along which to measure it.
Where the Wall Came From
Here is the part my students found most unsettling, and the part I think matters most. The modern religion-spirituality split did not arrive through neutral observation of how people actually live. It carries an intellectual lineage. The clean separation of private spiritual experience from organized religious practice reflects a Western, post-Enlightenment inheritance that treats the autonomous self as the true seat of authentic meaning.
In that framework, a person’s inner experience is primary and trustworthy, while collective, institutional, and embodied forms of religious life are eyed with suspicion, as outside pressures laid upon the self. The “spiritual but not religious” or “religious nones” identity is the cultural offspring of this assumption. It prizes transcendence with the obligations, the community, and the tradition removed.
What the Western lens isolates is the self-transcendence part of religious life, then detaches it from the organized and material forms that, in most of the world, are inseparable from it.
Spirituality, in this rendering, becomes transcendence without belonging. The awe, the sense of connection, the brush with the numinous, all of it cut loose from the community of practice and the body that elsewhere hold it in place. The analogy I offered my class was a deliberately pointed one: It is like a Christian who wants to follow and love Jesus while declining any formal identification with the body of Christ, the local church. The longing toward the sacred is real. But it has been individualized in a way the tradition itself would not recognize as whole. The transcendent is pursued in the abstract while its concrete, incarnate, corporate dimensions are set down.
Why This Matters Beyond the West
The cost of this bias becomes clearest when we look outside the contexts that produced it. In much of the world the sacred is not first met in the private interior of the autonomous individual. It is met in and through community, land, ancestors, and the shared everyday experiences of collective life. The very premise that one could extract a purely personal spirituality from religious practice in the context of community would be hard to make sense of in such settings, where the self is understood relationally rather than as a bounded self-authoring agent.
To impose the religion-spirituality split on these populations is to smuggle a culturally specific picture of the human person into categories we present as universal. For a science that aims to study people across cultures, that is not a small problem. It could potentially be a threat to the validity of the whole enterprise.
The sacred core is the foundational construct: the orientation of the person toward what is held as ultimate. Everything else is a variation in form.
The forms of expression — institutional, social, experiential, individual — differ in kind of expression, not in the kind of thing being sought. Which points to a better question: Not “is this person religious or spiritual?” but “how, through what means, and within what relational matrix do they pursue the sacred?”
A Way Through the Impasse
Recovering the idea of a sacred core offers a path out of the definitional muddle that has dogged the field for decades. It keeps the real phenomenological gains of the spirituality literature, the seriousness about subjective experience, transcendence, and personal meaning, while refusing to sever them from the religious whole to which they belong in most human lives.
For the psychology of religion, this means treating the search for the sacred as the foundational construct and treating its different expressions (e.g., institutional, communal, experiential, and individual) as variations in form rather than differences in kind. It keeps the discipline honest about its own assumptions. And it leaves us better equipped to study human beings as they actually are: meaning-seeking creatures oriented toward what they hold to be ultimate, in all the varied ways that orientation takes shape.
My student who began the discussion was not wrong to feel that something in her experience exceeded the institution she had left. That intuition is worth taking seriously. What I wanted her to consider was whether the language she had been given to name it, the language of spirituality set against religion, was a faithful framing of her experience or a Western inheritance she had received without examining. The conversation did not resolve the religion-spirituality split. It was not supposed to anyway. But we left with a better question than the one we walked in with, and in this field that is most of the work.
Republished at vcounted.com.