It has become commonplace for people to refer to themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Among those who have deconstructed their faith (or are in the process thereof), it is a kind of mantra, a new postmodern identity.
The growth of this identity parallels a wider decline. As Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge have recorded in “The Great Dechurching,” over 40 million people have stopped regularly attending services in a mainline house of worship since the 1990s, with many seeking alternative spiritualities or none at all. This is the greatest demographic shift in religious affiliation in American history. Pew Research Center has noted that 28% of American adults are now religiously unaffiliated, a rise of about 12% over the last 15 years, with about half of those respondents (49%) still claiming to be “spiritual” or that spirituality is still important to them, however it is defined.
According to scholars such as Linda Mercadante, several factors characterize the “spiritual but not religious” demographic, including a continued search for transcendence, a quest for an authentic or true self, general open-mindedness (even to theism), and communion with nature. Given these factors, Mercadante writes, “identifying as SBNR allows one to reject being confined within an orthodoxy that may impede these goals—and yet the individual can still claim they are not simply secular.”
But if they’re not strictly secular, then what are they? How should the church speak to those who may have traded their faith for this new identity? Part of the answer lies in understanding the SBNR affiliation not merely as an identity, but as a creed with its own components.
The church offers a better story to those who have embraced this identity, a story that affirms the essential biblical truth underlying human spirituality, exposes the lie that blinds them to their invisible forms of worship, and helps them see that only the gospel narrative can adequately satisfy the search for truth.
Assessing “Spiritual”
As many scholars note, without a set text or received tradition, SBNR adherents often struggle to articulate exactly what it means to be “spiritual,” instead using it as a catch-all term that invokes elements of mysticism, relativism, and syncretism. “The mundane notion of ‘spiritual’ is merely a broad designator that does not do much critical work,” Aaron Simmons argues.
Often the claim includes a generic universalism, the belief that all human beings are traveling up “the same mountain” of ultimate reality, and individual religions or traditions of faith are simply different routes of ascent, whatever that journey may yield: enlightenment, nirvana, or some other higher state. SBNR is intentionally ambiguous, lacking a systematic structure and a vision of a promised future.
The attraction of SBNR is in part its contrast with modern materialism: the notion that all life is simply an accident of chemical chance, that consciousness is merely a property of the brain, and that all intangible aspects of our makeup (including the soul) will eventually be reducible to physical compounds and laws. Science may play a central role in the SBNR worldview, but in general its adherents commit scientism less often than more extreme secularists—even if the concept of spirituality remains vague.
But the most loaded portion of the SBNR creed is its second part, the adherent’s rejection of religiosity, usually formal or organized tradition. Theologian David Dark notes that many SBNRs use the term “religious” broadly, with little definition: “To claim to be ‘anti-religious,’ without getting into the specifics of any tradition, is to shake a fist at an impossibly large target,” he argues. “Religion, in this sense, is a concept too general to be meaningfully for and too abstract to be coherently against. … There is no religion in general.”
It is important to remember that for those who were raised in a faith, this portion of the creed often signals the point of their departure, whether they departed casually through spiritual drift, or as a casualty from relational or doctrinal pain. In such circumstances, we must be careful not to repeat the mistakes of churches past. But the point retains its edge: all humans are religious in some way, ordering their lives around their perceived needs and commitments, and undertaking specific, regular actions in order to fill them. Though they don’t realize it, many adherents implicitly acknowledge that God “has put eternity into man’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
The novelist David Foster Wallace observed this in his famous Kenyon College address, where he argued that “in the day to day trenches of adult life … There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Traditional faith icons are one object, but other worldly attractions seek our worship as well—such as beauty, money, fame, and influence, all of which, as Tim Keller argued in “Counterfeit Gods,” deceive us as to the power they hold over our lives.
To reject external religion is to keep hidden the secret devotions within, lest the truth of their rootedness in our hearts come out. The issue with this portion of the SBNR claim, then, is that it is based on self-deception.
The Church Responds
In responding to the components of this creed, two approaches can help engender an open conversation. The first is to affirm the core claim of what it means to be spiritual: that human beings are indeed more than mere collections of atoms, the accidental results of cosmic chance. To claim spirituality without an account of where that nature came from is a deficiency of the SBNR creed, and yet this creed bears within it the seed of biblical truth: from its opening pages, Scripture attests that human makeup is a unique combination of matter and spirit, as in the moment of humanity’s creation, in which we are given the imago Dei, the very likeness of God (Genesis 2:7).
Without question, we are spiritual – which includes being rational, moral, creative, and truth-seeking – but we are more than just spiritual; we are fully embodied in a way that points both to our origins as created beings and our destiny in glory. Such a complex portrait of our personhood is not a bug in the system. It is a feature designed from the beginning to reveal the handiwork of its Designer and point his creations back to him. The beliefs of SBNR open the door to talk about the meaning of human spirituality while also showing how much more they stand to gain through biblical truth.
Our second approach is to share the critique of false religiosity, a form of posturing or status-seeking that found its condemnation nowhere more than in Jesus’s battles with Pharisaic legalism (see Matthew 23). When SBNR adherents depart from orthodox religion, the retreat is as often from hollowness and hypocrisy as it is from an unloving community or difficult doctrine. Often, Satan focuses their sights on the shortcomings of the visible church while blinding them to its King and Head.
The church’s role is to help these followers “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). All humans worship, and false worship is self-destructive. By helping them see the shifting sand beneath their beliefs, the church can invite them into a story in which their loves are rightly ordered and planted on solid ground.
Religious Because We Are Spiritual
For Nones in general and SBNRs in particular, traditional apologetic approaches may not always bear fruit. Listening will show the avenue to address their false beliefs: how did they come to define their terms? What tradition did they depart from, and why? And where do they believe they are going—what forms of salvation, growth, or destination does their creed hold?
New identities often mask old longings. Apologists must search for the person under the position, the individual for whom Christ gave up his life, and share with them the beauty of joining the gospel story. By speaking the truth in love, we reveal that we are seeking to win the individual, not just the argument. Ultimately, this better story is the one in which the SBNR creed is not denied but reversed. Believers are “religious because we are spiritual.”
Benjamin Morris is an M.Div. student at Reformed Theological Seminary and contributing writer for byFaith.