More than one in five adults now describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, and the phrase has quietly become one of the most common ways people answer the oldest question of all: what do I actually believe? It sounds almost like a lifestyle preference, yet it carries real psychological weight. To say you are spiritual but not religious is to claim a relationship with meaning while declining the institution that has traditionally managed it. In this article I want to look honestly at what that choice means, what neuroscience reveals about it, and what it can quietly cost us. The answer is far more interesting than a hashtag.
What “Spiritual but Not Religious” Actually Means
For most of human history the two words sat together so naturally that nobody thought to separate them. To be spiritual was to be religious. That old marriage has quietly ended. When someone today says they are spiritual but not religious, they are drawing a line between two things that once seemed inseparable. Religion here refers to the organised system: the doctrine, the building, the clergy, the rituals, the community that holds you accountable. Spirituality refers to the inner experience, the felt sense of connection to something larger than the self, whether you name that God, consciousness, nature or simply mystery. To be spiritual but not religious is to keep the second and gently decline the first.
The numbers confirm this is no fringe position. A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that roughly seven in ten American adults describe themselves as spiritual in some way, and 22 per cent identify specifically as spiritual but not religious, with an earlier Pew estimate placing the figure as high as 27 per cent. Most have not abandoned belief at all. The same research found that 88 per cent think there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, and 89 per cent believe human beings possess a soul. They have not stopped believing. They have stopped belonging in the old way.
I think of a client, a senior executive raised in a devout household. She still prayed every morning, she told me, but had not entered a temple in fifteen years. “I did not lose God,” she said. “I lost the building.” That single sentence captures the spiritual but not religious experience more honestly than any survey could.
A Quiet Exodus, Told in Numbers
This shift is global rather than merely Western. The religiously unaffiliated, often called the “nones”, are now the third-largest religious category in the world, numbering well over a billion people. Across most countries studied by Pew, younger adults are markedly less affiliated than their parents were, and those who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious tend to be younger and better educated than the general public.
Yet here is the detail that complicates the easy story of decline. Roughly 45 per cent of people who are spiritual but not religious still claim some religious affiliation. They have not slammed the door. They are standing in the hallway, one foot in and one foot out, unsure whether the house was ever really theirs.
What the Brain Does When We Reach for the Sacred
When I sit with the science of this, I find it genuinely humbling. The neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, who pioneered the field he calls neurotheology, has spent decades scanning the brains of meditating monks and praying nuns using SPECT imaging, a technique that measures blood flow to show which regions are active. During deep spiritual practice, activity falls in the parietal lobe, the part of the brain that maps where your body ends and the world begins. When that region quietens, the rigid boundary between self and everything else softens, which is why people so often describe a feeling of oneness or of dissolving into something vast.
The lesson is important and quietly democratic. There is no single God spot in the brain. Spiritual experience is a whole-brain event, woven from emotion, attention and the senses working together. The experience that a person who is spiritual but not religious finds on a yoga mat or a mountain path is, neurologically speaking, entirely real. The brain does not check your denomination at the door.
Why We Are Leaving the Pew but Keeping the Prayer
So why are so many walking away from organised religion while holding firmly on to the prayer? The Pew data offers one blunt clue: 42 per cent of those who are spiritual but not religious say that religion causes division and intolerance. We live in an age that distrusts institutions of every kind, and religion has not been spared that scrutiny. Add the internet, which places every tradition on earth a single search away, and you have a generation raised on spiritual choice rather than spiritual inheritance.
The result is what sociologists call bricolage, the assembling of a personal belief system from many sources. We curate our spirituality rather as we curate a playlist, a little mindfulness here, some breathwork there, a half-remembered verse from childhood. There is real freedom in this, and also a fair question hiding inside it. Is a faith you have designed entirely for yourself a liberation, or simply a mirror? Tellingly, nature has become the new cathedral. Around 59 per cent of spiritual but not religious people say that feeling connected to nature is essential to their spirituality.
The Shadow Side, When Spirituality Becomes an Escape
Here I want to be honest, because compassion without honesty helps nobody. A spirituality with no structure carries a particular risk, one the psychologist John Welwood named in the 1980s as spiritual bypassing. He defined it as the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep unresolved emotional wounds and unfinished psychological work. It is the phrase “everything happens for a reason” offered to someone in raw grief. It is using meditation to numb anger rather than to understand it.
Organised religion, for all its real failures, traditionally offered something the solitary seeker lacks: a community that witnesses you, a discipline you did not invent, and people who will gently tell you when you are deceiving yourself. When you are spiritual but not religious, you become both the seeker and the only authority on the path. That is a great deal of power to hand a single nervous system. It can also be quietly lonely, because belonging, ritual and shared grief are how human beings have always metabolised pain.
So, Is Being Spiritual but Not Religious Enough?
I do not think that is quite the right question, and I say so as someone who holds his own beliefs lightly. The honest question is not religious versus spiritual. It is whether your inner life has roots, rhythm, relationship and truthfulness. Roots, meaning you have examined what you believe rather than absorbed it from an algorithm. Rhythm, meaning a regular practice, because the brain changes through repetition far more than through intention. Relationship, meaning one or two people who can challenge your blind spots. And truthfulness, meaning a spirituality that includes your anger and grief rather than floating serenely above them.
If being spiritual but not religious means you have thought deeply, practised consistently and stayed in honest contact with both other people and your own shadow, then it is a mature and quietly beautiful path. If it simply means you have swapped a demanding tradition for a comfortable one that never disturbs you, then it is worth asking what you are truly seeking. Meaning is not found lying around. It is built, slowly, with attention. Whatever label you choose, that work belongs to you.
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