Spiritual but Not Religious: A Field Guide for People Who Hate Both Words

At a friend's wedding, somewhere between the toasts and the dancing, a man at my table asked what I do. I said my work leans spiritual. He narrowed it down the way people do when they want the short answer: "So, religion? That kind of thing?" I told him I was spiritual but not religious. It wasn't exactly true. But it was the shortest version of the truth I had on me, and that's the label's whole job: telling a stranger what you're not, so the evening can keep moving.

The Label I Reach For Reluctantly

What the man couldn't see was the half-second before I answered. Inside it sat seven years in a community I'd now call a cult, twenty more years of meditation in a second tradition, a long inventory of disappointments and recoveries, and one governing thought: this is a wedding, not a seminar.

So I handed him the prefabricated answer.

If you came here wanting to know what spiritual but not religious actually means, the honest answer comes in two sizes. The dictionary size: it describes people who keep some form of inner practice, meditation, prayer, a sense of something beyond the material, without belonging to a religious institution; about 22% of American adults fit it. The wedding size: I have an inner life I take seriously, I don't belong, and neither of us wants the long version right now.

The thought I had while saying it is the same one I've had for years: if this phrase is the only thing the man remembers about me, he'll understand almost nothing. And for the moment, that's enough. Everyone owns a trade like this. The accountant says "I work with numbers." The mother on leave says "I'm taking a break." A compressed truth, good enough for the table.

The compression has been around longer than the hashtag. In Habits of the Heart (1985), the sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues reported an interview with a young nurse they called Sheila Larson, who described her faith this way: "I believe in God. I'm not a religious fanatic. I can't remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It's Sheilaism. Just my own little voice."¹ She had already turned her own first name into a one-member faith; Bellah and his colleagues just promoted it to a category. Even the name was a pseudonym, so the founder of the category doesn't quite exist. The label I used at the wedding is Sheilaism, forty years on.

What "Religious" Actually Carries (And Why I Opt Out)

When the man said "religion, that kind of thing," he wasn't asking about God so much as about a package: membership, doctrine, ritual, a building, a hierarchy with somebody at the top, and a list of things I presumably believed he was doing wrong. The word "religious" carries the whole bundle whether you mean it to or not. When people decline the word, what they're declining is usually the institutional load it drags behind it.

The part of the package I actually declined took me years to locate, and I finally found it at a party.

After the seven years, I joined a second tradition. Same practice, eyes open this time. The early years were full: seminars, retreats, long flights to ashrams, a local group large enough that we kept needing bigger rooms. It felt like the early chapters of something important. Then people started skipping meetings, having children, renovating kitchens. Within a year, the old guard was down to half.

One New Year's Eve, the remaining few of us sat around a table doing the thing shrinking groups do, trading stories about how it used to be. Somewhere between two of those stories I noticed, without planning to, that I no longer believed the doctrine underneath them. That we were special. That ours was the best meditation available. That the masters sat just below God on the organizational chart. The belief had expired quietly, and I'd found out only by reaching for it. I said nothing that night. I wasn't ready to. I remembered what saying such things out loud had looked like at the end of the seven years, and I had no appetite for becoming a dissident twice.

That night is what refusing "religious" actually looks like from the inside. Nobody slammed a door or wrote a resignation letter. A man at a table with people he loves, discovering that the claim of being chosen no longer holds his weight. The rest of what I'd believed in those rooms turned out to be no sturdier: beliefs I had never tested, installed before it occurred to me to check the source.

Honesty requires the other side of the ledger. What I left was the institution, not its machinery: cadence, accountability, company. Those were real losses. When our group thinned out, nobody called to ask where my practice had gone; to be fair, I had never announced it was leaving. I noticed the cost of "not religious" only after the room had emptied.

What "Spiritual" Actually Carries (And Why I Still Use It)

The other half of the label has the opposite problem: where "religious" drags a whole institution behind it, "spiritual" shows up carrying almost nothing at all. It may be the most emptied word in the language; it can mean a twenty-year meditation practice or a candle bought at an airport. The market did much of the emptying. Spirituality sells better unbundled, by the retreat, by the app subscription, by the deck of affirmation cards. I've paid for my share of it.

Taken literally, "spiritual but not religious" promises only that I'm one adjective instead of another; nothing in the phrase describes a single thing I'll actually do tomorrow.

Still, I keep the word, and not out of laziness. Underneath the merchandise there's a gesture I haven't found a better name for: turning attention, a few minutes a day, toward something other than my own scorekeeping. Pew Research found that 22% of American adults now describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, and 70% call themselves spiritual in some way.² I'd guess most of them are pointing at some version of that gesture, and discovering, as I keep discovering, that the available vocabulary comes in two flavors: institutional or for sale.

What the gesture looks like in my case is smaller than the word suggests. Morning meditation, shorter than it used to be, more consistent than it's ever been, twenty years of meditation past the point of expecting fireworks from it. A journal I write in when something signals, not on a schedule, thirty years and counting. A standing rule about never missing anything two days in a row. If the inventory sounds underwhelming, it should. A spiritual practice small enough to keep through a normal week is worth more than an impressive one that only works under ideal conditions.

The Two Things the Label Hides

The label works at weddings precisely because of what it leaves out. After thirty years of using it, I can name the two omissions that matter.

What survives an ordinary Tuesday

The label sorts you by what you've rejected, and rejection is the least informative fact about a person. Years ago I spent three weeks at a mountain retreat and became someone I didn't recognize. I've been a back-row man my whole life, last seat in the classroom, quietest voice in the meeting. At the retreat I sat in the front row, raised my hand first, spoke when the room went silent. Then I flew home, and within a week the old configuration was back, as comfortable as ever. Change of scenery isn't change of character. But it shows you what's possible, if you're willing to stay uncomfortable longer than three weeks.

The retreat ran on a schedule that held me in place. At home nothing held me, which meant I had to become the schedule. So the place to check any practice is an ordinary Tuesday, when nothing holds you and nobody is watching.

Mine, on most Tuesdays, is barely visible. For more than twenty years I've had a habit of pausing before any piece of work that matters. Not to plan or brainstorm. I let the task sit there while I look slightly past it, out the window or at my hands, thirty seconds, sometimes a few minutes. No decision yet, just attention. Then I begin. I've called it a micro-dose of meditation for lack of anything better, and I'm certain I didn't invent it. The work that follows is more lucid than work that starts cold; solutions show up that I'm convinced wouldn't have appeared if I'd lunged at the task the moment it landed.

I filed this for years under superstition with a good track record. Then I went looking, and the closest thing I found in psychology is incubation: in Sio and Ormerod's meta-analysis, people who set a problem aside after working on it came back to modestly better solutions, especially when the pause held something light rather than another demanding task.³ My version runs the pause up front, before the first attempt, so I can't claim the studies as proof, only as company: the mind seems to do useful work when you stop demanding it. Either way, a practice this small is testable against my own results, which is more than the label can say for itself.

Who does your checking

This is the omission with teeth. You can leave religion and keep the habit religion gets blamed for: handing your judgment to somebody else. I did it for seven years inside an organization, and I've since watched people do it with podcast hosts, biohacking protocols, and men who sell certainty by the retreat. The habit is sticky because deference feels like relief; doing your own checking is the expensive option.

The teachers who helped me most were the ones most honest about what they couldn't give me. The rest were selling the thing the label can't detect: a reason to stop checking. The only question that catches it is one you have to keep asking yourself, regularly, like flossing: when something true-sounding arrives, does it get processed through your own reference point, or swallowed whole?

The two omissions share one mechanism: the label is a noun, and everything it hides is something you do. No short answer was going to carry that much weight.

What I Actually Mean by "Spiritual but Not Religious"

So, the longer version, the one the man at the wedding didn't get.

When I say I'm spiritual but not religious, I mean I keep a small set of practices I've tested against my own life for thirty years, meditation and journaling mostly, held with a consistency I'd call religious if the word weren't taken. I don't belong to an institution anymore, and I've stopped pretending that costs nothing; I miss the cadence and the company that institutions are good at. And I've made myself the final checkpoint for what I believe, because I already ran the experiment of outsourcing that job, and the results took seven years to come back.

After leaving the community, I needed something to call myself, and this label was the closest fit on the rack. It still is. I've stopped expecting it to fit better. A phrase that short was never going to hold a thirty-year practice, any more than "I work with numbers" holds an accountant's actual Tuesday.

I've stopped expecting the phrase to resolve, and stopped trying to force it into precision.

If you use the label too, I won't tell you to keep it or drop it. The words were never the practice. The question I'd hand you is the one I keep using on myself: is there something you do regularly, with nobody watching, that's building the longer version of you, and would you notice if it stopped?

The Longer Version

For one week, add one verb to the label. Every time it comes up, out loud or in your own head, note what you actually did that day: "I sat for ten minutes this morning," or, on honest days, "I read an article about people who sit." The label won't come up much, so use the backstop: once a day, label or no label, write the verb anyway. A note on your phone is enough. At the end of the week, read the list back and sort it into two piles, practice and costume. The list will tell you more than the label does, and it will come out messier. That's the point.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "spiritual but not religious" actually mean?

It describes people who keep some form of inner or contemplative life, such as meditation, prayer, or a felt sense of something beyond the material, while declining membership in organized religion. Pew Research puts the group at 22% of US adults. In conversation it mostly signals what someone is not. What the person actually practices, if anything, varies from rigorous daily discipline to nothing at all.

Is spiritual but not religious the same as atheist?

No. Atheism answers the God question. SBNR answers an institution question, and the two combine more freely than either tribe likes to admit. Many SBNR people believe in God or something adjacent to God: Pew found that 70% of US adults consider themselves spiritual in some way, and large majorities report believing in a soul or in something beyond the natural world. Plenty of SBNR people are believers; some atheists keep a meditation habit.

Can you be spiritual without believing in God?

Yes. A practice doesn't need a theology to function. I've meditated for more than twenty years, and the practice has worked through several different explanations of why it works, including periods when I had no explanation at all. What practice requires is consistency and honesty about results. Beliefs change shape over time; for many long-term practitioners the sitting stays constant while the story around it rotates.

What practices do spiritual but not religious people follow?

Surveys and the wellness market between them list meditation, time in nature, prayer, yoga, journaling, and breathwork as the most common. The range is wide because the label imposes nothing. In my experience the useful question isn't which practice but which size: whether the practice is small enough to survive an ordinary week without a retreat schedule holding it up.

How is spiritual but not religious different from agnostic?

Agnosticism answers a knowledge question: can we know whether God exists? Spiritual but not religious answers a membership question, and often an image question: whether you practice inside an institution, and whether you want to be associated with one. The two sit on different axes and combine freely. An agnostic can keep a strict daily contemplative practice, and a firm believer can refuse every institution on offer. Knowing someone is SBNR tells you about their relationship to organizations, not about what they believe.

Three pieces that go further:

• I Am the Foundation — what processing everything through your own experience involves in practice, and what it costs
• Twenty Years of Meditation — the long version of what consistent practice does and doesn't deliver
• How I Left a Spiritual Community Without Becoming Bitter — the exit that made a new label necessary in the first place

Notes & References

1. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1985) — Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. University of California Press. ↩
2. Pew Research Center (2023, December 7) — "Spirituality Among Americans." Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. ↩
3. Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009) — "Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review." Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94–120. ↩