What is meant by being spiritual not religious?

Question 60113.

Spiritual not religious has become the standard British answer to a question about faith, and you will hear it at work, at the school gate and at funerals. It signals openness to something beyond the material world combined with a firm distaste for institutions, doctrines and anyone telling you what to believe.

I do not think it should be met with a sneer. There is something real underneath it and something confused, and being able to tell the two apart is the difference between a conversation and an argument.

What the Phrase Usually Means

When someone says they are spiritual not religious, they generally mean several things at once. They believe there is more to reality than matter. They value experience, intuition and a sense of transcendence. They want to construct their own beliefs rather than receive them. And they associate organised religion with hypocrisy, control and, in this country, a certain damp beige boredom.

The content varies enormously. It can include mindfulness, yoga, crystals, astrology, an interest in the afterlife, a general benevolent force, or simply a feeling on a hillside in the Lake District that there is something going on. What unites these is the absence of any authority outside the self.

That is the defining feature. Spiritual not religious is, above all, a claim about who decides. The individual curates their own beliefs and adjusts them as they go, and nothing external has the standing to correct them.

What Spiritual Not Religious Gets Right

Let me start where I agree, because I usually do agree with part of it. The instinct that reality exceeds the material is correct, and it is a rebuke to the flat secularism that dominated public conversation for a while. People who say they are spiritual not religious are refusing a reductionism that Christians also refuse.

The criticism of institutional religion frequently lands too. Churches have been hypocritical, cold, controlling and abusive, and pretending otherwise persuades nobody. Jesus reserved His harshest words for religious professionals who kept the externals and lost the substance, and a good deal of what the spiritual not religious crowd objects to is what He objected to.

The hunger for real experience is also right. A faith that is all propositions and no encounter is not the Christianity of the New Testament, where people met a person and were changed. If our churches offered nothing but correct information, we would deserve the reputation.

Where It Falls Apart

The difficulty is that spiritual not religious is a position with no way of being wrong. If I assemble my own beliefs from what resonates, then my spirituality can never challenge me, because I built it out of things I already liked.

That is the fatal flaw. A faith that only ever confirms you cannot transform you. Every serious spiritual tradition in human history has insisted that the self is the problem to be addressed rather than the authority to be consulted, and a spirituality curated by the self quietly makes the patient the physician. Jeremiah 17:9 is blunter about the heart than most of us would choose to be.

There is also the question of truth. Beliefs about God are either accurate or inaccurate, in the same way that beliefs about anything else are. Choosing what resonates is a perfectly good way to select a jumper and a very poor way to determine whether the universe has a maker. See answering the claim that truth is relative.

The Missing Category

There is a further problem, and it is the one I would raise gently in conversation. Spiritual not religious has almost no way of dealing with guilt.

Mindfulness can calm you. Astrology can interest you. A sense of transcendence on a hillside can lift you. None of them can forgive you, because forgiveness requires a person who has been wronged and who is able to release you, and an impersonal force cannot forgive anything.

That is not an abstract point. Most people carry things they cannot undo, and a spirituality that offers peace but not pardon leaves the actual problem untouched. Christianity begins exactly there, with a God who is personal, whom we have offended, and who has dealt with it at His own cost.

Jesus Was Not Religious in Their Sense

Here is where the conversation often turns, and it is worth knowing. The person who says they are spiritual not religious is usually surprised to discover how much of their case Jesus would have supported.

He was executed by the religious establishment of His day. He accused them of straining out gnats and swallowing camels, of cleaning the outside of the cup, of loading burdens on people they would not lift a finger to move. He touched lepers, ate with the disreputable and broke the Sabbath conventions with what looks like deliberate regularity.

So the objection to organised religion is not an objection to Jesus. If anything it is an objection He raised first. The question is what He offered instead, and the answer is not a private spirituality but Himself, and then a community. See Matthew 23:23-26.

Why Christianity Insists on the Community

This is where I would not give ground, because the New Testament does not. There is no such thing in Scripture as a solitary Christian. The word church means a gathered assembly, and every letter in the New Testament is written to one.

The reasons are practical as much as theological. You cannot practise forgiveness alone, or patience, or bearing with one another, or the dozens of one another commands scattered through the letters. Character is formed by friction, and a spirituality with no other people in it has removed the sandpaper.

There is also the matter of correction. A believer inside a congregation can be told, by people who love them, that they have got something wrong. Spiritual not religious removes that possibility by design, which is precisely why it is comfortable. See can unity exist apart from doctrinal agreement.

How to Talk About It

Practically, I would do three things. Agree where you can agree, and mean it: yes, the material world is not all there is, and yes, the church has often been a poor advertisement. Starting with agreement is not a tactic; it is honesty.

Then ask questions rather than making assertions. What do you think is out there? Has it ever asked anything of you? What do you do with the things you regret? Those questions do more than any argument I could construct, because they surface the gaps without my having to name them.

And then talk about Jesus rather than about Christianity. Spiritual not religious people have usually rejected a caricature of the institution and have rarely looked closely at the man. Suggest reading Mark’s Gospel; it takes an hour and a half, and it is a great deal stranger and more compelling than they expect.

Where the Phrase Came From

This is a recent development, and knowing that helps. For most of human history the idea of a private spirituality with no community, no tradition and no authority would have been unintelligible. Religion was something a people did together.

The modern version has several roots: the Romantic elevation of personal experience, the nineteenth century Theosophical movement, the collapse of deference to institutions after two world wars, and the consumer assumption that everything including belief is a matter of personal selection. Add the internet, which lets anyone assemble a worldview from fragments, and you have spiritual not religious as we now meet it.

None of that makes it wrong by itself, and I am not arguing from origins. It is worth knowing, though, that this is a very unusual position historically, held by a small slice of humanity in a particular time and place, and that its plausibility owes a good deal to our circumstances.

What Jesus Offered Instead

If the objection is to religion as performance and control, what did Jesus put in its place? Not a technique and not a private path, but Himself, and then a table.

Come to me, He said, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. That is an invitation to a person, and it is the opposite of a system. He then formed a community of extremely unpromising people and told them that others would know they were His by how they loved one another.

So the Christian answer to spiritual not religious is not to defend religion. It is to point past it. The question is not whether institutions are disappointing, because they are. The question is whether the man at the centre is who He said He was. See Matthew 11:28-30.

So, now what?

If the phrase describes you, I would ask one question and leave it with you. Is your spirituality able to tell you something you do not want to hear? If not, it may be a mirror rather than a window, and mirrors are pleasant company but poor guides.

And if you are a Christian who keeps meeting this, take the criticism seriously before you answer it. The reason spiritual not religious sounds so plausible in Britain is partly that a lot of religion here has been exactly what they think it is. What would somebody find if they came to your church next Sunday looking for the real thing?

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.

Matthew 23:25 (ESV)