Spiritual but not religious

The fastest-growing religious category in the Western world is not atheism — and the phrase describing it means at least four different things.

What it is

A self-description: someone who reports a spiritual dimension to their life while rejecting religious institutions, doctrines or membership.

It is the label attached to a large and growing demographic. In the United States, the religiously unaffiliated — the "nones" — grew from around 16 per cent in 2007 to roughly 28–30 per cent by the mid-2020s, and only a minority of them are atheists or agnostics. In Australia, "no religion" went from 22 per cent in the 2011 census to 39 per cent in 2021, overtaking every individual denomination. The pattern repeats across Western Europe, Canada and New Zealand.

Disaffiliation is not disbelief. Large proportions of the unaffiliated continue to report belief in God or a higher power, in an afterlife, in spiritual energy, and continue to pray.

Where it came from

The phrase entered common use in the 1990s, though the underlying distinction is older — William James was already separating personal religious experience from "the smooth and lifeless" inherited institution in 1902.

The drivers, as best the sociology can identify them:

Institutional collapse of trust, of which the clergy sexual abuse scandals across multiple denominations are the single largest cause in most Western countries
The shift toward individual authority in the postwar West generally, of which this is the religious instance
The New Age and human potential movements, which normalised eclectic personal practice
Politicisation — in the US especially, the identification of organised religion with a political programme drove out people who did not share it
Simple generational replacement, which accounts for most of the numeric change

How it is used

As a description, usually offered when someone is asked their religion and does not want either "Catholic" or "nothing".

What we can and cannot say

We can say it describes at least four different people, and treating them as one group is the commonest analytical error here:

Those with an active personal practice — meditation, prayer, ritual — outside any institution
Those with residual belief and no practice at all, for whom the label marks a leftover rather than a commitment
Those in the process of leaving a tradition, sometimes painfully, for whom it is a transitional position
Those using it to signal openness and decency, with very little content behind it

Survey instruments generally cannot distinguish these, which is why the research is weaker than the numbers suggest.

We can say the critique from the religious side has a real point. The standard objection — made sharply by Lillian Daniel, and from the Catholic and Orthodox sides at length — is that unstructured personal spirituality lacks the things institutions actually provide: obligation to people you did not choose, accountability, a tradition that can tell you that you are wrong, continuity across generations, and practical infrastructure for birth, marriage, illness and death. A practice assembled entirely to suit oneself cannot easily challenge oneself, and the challenge is often the point.

The evidence on community supports the strongest version of this. Much of the measured association between religion and wellbeing tracks attendance and social connection rather than belief — which means the person who keeps the belief and drops the congregation may have kept the part that does least.

We can say the critique from the other side is also fair. People did not leave institutions for no reason. Abuse, exclusion of women and of gay people, doctrinal demands they could not honestly make, and the loss of trust that followed the scandals are sufficient explanations, and telling someone they should return for the community's sake ignores what happened to them there.

We can say the outcomes are mixed rather than clear. Studies of wellbeing among the unaffiliated generally find the securely non-religious and the securely religious both doing better than the uncertain and searching — the difficulty appears to attach to unresolved status rather than to belief or unbelief as such.

And we can say the category is unstable. Some of the "nones" are moving toward atheism, some toward reconstructed practice, and some toward the newer forms described under wellness culture and spirituality online, which supply community of a kind and demand of a kind, on different terms. Whether those forms provide what congregations provided is the open question of this whole section.

We cannot say what this category will be in twenty years. What we can say is that it is now the largest religious grouping in several Western countries, that it is not secularisation in the sense predicted for most of the twentieth century, and that it is a rearrangement rather than a disappearance.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is used

What we can and cannot say

Further reading