Spiritual but Not Religious

Ask Americans about their religion and a growing share answer with a hyphenated refusal: they’re spiritual, but not religious. The phrase names the single largest and fastest-growing way people describe their relationship to the transcendent in the United States today. It isn’t a church, a doctrine, or a lineage in the usual sense. It’s an identity, a way of locating yourself relative to organized religion by stepping partway out of it while keeping the inner life that religion used to house.

A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that roughly 22 percent of U.S. adults call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” and that the share has climbed steadily across recent surveys. Many millions more would recognize the description even if they’ve never used the label. For most readers who arrive here drawn to tarot, astrology, breathwork, or energy healing, this is the box they already stand in, whether or not they know its name.

What the identity is

“Spiritual but not religious,” commonly shortened to SBNR, marks a split between two things that traditional religion bundled together. Religion, in this usage, means the institutional package: a named tradition, a congregation, a clergy, a creed, a calendar of obligations, an authority that defines orthodoxy. Spirituality means the experiential and personal dimension: a sense of connection to something larger, an inner life of meaning, practices a person chooses and tends on their own terms.

The SBNR person keeps the second and declines the first. They may meditate daily, read tarot, feel awe under the stars, sense that the dead are near, or believe the universe is conscious and responsive, all without belonging to a religious body or accepting that any institution gets to certify those experiences. The defining move is the refusal of external religious authority over an internal spiritual life. As we use the term here, SBNR is less a belief system than a posture toward belief: sovereign, eclectic, and experiential.

SBNR is easily confused with two neighbors, and it’s neither. It isn’t atheism; most SBNR people hold strong supernatural or transcendent beliefs. And it isn’t simple non-attendance, the “lapsed” Catholic who still considers himself Catholic and would return for a funeral. The SBNR person has, in some real sense, relocated rather than lapsed.

Origin and historical development

The split SBNR names is old, but the label and the population it describes are recent. The sociologist Robert C. Fuller traced the lineage in Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (2001), locating its American roots in nineteenth-century currents — Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, and New Thought — that already prized personal religious experience over institutional membership. These were the tributaries that taught Americans to treat the inner life as the real seat of the sacred.

The phrase itself hardened into a recognizable identity in the late twentieth century, as the broader detachment from organized religion accelerated. Sociologists Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, studying a single English town in The Spiritual Revolution (2005), described what they called the subjective turn: a cultural shift in which authority migrates from external sources (scripture, institution, tradition) to the individual’s own felt experience. Religion that tells you what to believe loses ground; spirituality that helps you attend to your own inner life gains it. SBNR is the personal-identity expression of that turn.

By the 2010s the demographic data made the formation impossible to miss. The rise of the religiously unaffiliated, the “nones,” and within them a large bloc who were unaffiliated but far from secular, gave the identity its numbers. The 2023 Pew study and the news coverage that followed, including NPR’s reporting that December, established SBNR as a fixed feature of the American religious scene rather than a passing fashion.

Who holds it and what they actually believe

The label is broad enough to hide real internal variety, and the more interesting picture is in the specifics. Pew’s data show that SBNR Americans are, on most measures, more conventionally religious in belief than they are in behavior. Substantial majorities believe in a soul, in something spiritual beyond the natural world, and in a God or higher power. They simply decline the membership and the building.

Their practices skew toward the personal and the unscheduled. Spending time in nature, meditation, and quiet reflection rank high; congregational worship ranks low by definition. Belief in spiritual forces in physical objects, in energy, and in the significance of dreams and intuition is more common among SBNR people than in the general population. This is the demographic that sustains much of the contemporary spiritual marketplace and that has made digital spirituality, from astrology apps to WitchTok to online courses, a mass phenomenon rather than a niche one.

A second pattern, one practitioners feel directly: SBNR identity correlates with unbundling. Where a churchgoer received community, ritual, moral teaching, an afterlife account, and a calendar as a single package, the SBNR person assembles those goods separately: a yoga studio for embodiment, a therapist or wellness practice for self-work, an oracle deck for guidance, an online community for belonging. The freedom is real, and so is the labor. Nobody hands you the package anymore.

What this lineage transmits

SBNR isn’t a teacher passing down a fixed body of doctrine. What it transmits is a stance and a permission: the assumption, now so widespread it’s nearly invisible, that an individual may build a spiritual life from whatever sources speak to them, answerable to their own experience rather than to any institution.

That permission is what makes the contemporary field possible at all. The eclecticism that lets a single practitioner combine chakras from yogic tradition, tarot from Renaissance Europe, manifestation from American New Thought, and ancestor work from sources they never inherited, all without contradiction, rests on the SBNR settlement. It’s the operating system of modern spirituality: the field’s default user is precisely this self-authorizing, tradition-shopping, experience-trusting individual.

Reception and legacy

The identity has drawn steady criticism from two directions. From inside organized religion, clergy and theologians have argued that SBNR spirituality is shallow, consumerist, and conflict-averse: a “religion of the self” that takes the comforts of the sacred while dodging its demands, its community, and its accountability. The most-quoted version of this charge holds that spirituality without religion is a buffet, all dessert and no discipline, with no one to answer to when the practice gets hard.

From the secular and academic side, critics have argued the opposite: that SBNR is religion in denial, importing supernatural belief under a more fashionable name, and that “spiritual but not religious” functions partly as a status claim, distancing the speaker from the perceived rigidity or politics of institutional faith.

Practitioners, for their part, often experience the label as freedom rather than as either evasion or pretense, the permission to take their inner lives seriously without signing a doctrinal contract. The encyclopedia describes all three readings without ruling on whether the SBNR life is thinner or richer than the religious one it stepped out of; that judgment depends on the practitioner and the practice, not on the label. What’s documented and not contested is the scale: a fifth of American adults now place themselves here, and the number is still rising.

Related Articles

Sources

• Pew Research Center, Spirituality Among Americans and “Who Are ‘Spiritual but Not Religious’ Americans?” (December 2023) — the demographic and behavioral spine: prevalence, beliefs, and practices of the SBNR population.
• NPR, coverage of the Pew spirituality study (December 2023) — accessible summary of the survey’s findings and the identity’s growth.
• Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (Oxford University Press, 2001) — the standard history of the identity’s American roots in Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, and New Thought.
• Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Blackwell, 2005) — the “subjective turn” framing that explains the cultural shift the identity expresses.