Are you religious or spiritual?

And why the answer is becoming increasingly significant

Today people involved in a search for deep meaning in their lives are increasingly calling themselves spiritual rather than religious. A Pew Research Center survey published in 2017 concluded that 27% of Americans described themselves as spiritual but not religious, up 8% on a survey five years before. Overall, “only 54% of U.S. adults think of themselves as religious — down 11 points since 2012 — while far more (75%) say they are spiritual.” More recent surveys identify this as an ongoing trend.

What’s the difference between being religious and being spiritual? Being religious involves having faith in God (however named and defined) and signing up to a basic set of beliefs — technically a credo — that define what a worshipper needs to accept to become a member of that religious community. In contrast, being spiritual is experientially focused, with seekers and worshippers preferring to ground their spiritual outlook in personal experience, and to express using a range of sacred world texts, rather than by referring to a credo drawn from a single holy scripture.

Of course, being religious or spiritual isn’t as straightforward as this implies. Religions differ in the credos they profess, and use diverse terms to name and describe God. Furthermore, many sects within each religion advocate key variations in core credo — which may be expressed so vehemently they lead to bloodshed.

The result is that if, for example, a person says they are a Christian, that isn’t sufficient to learn what they actually believe. More information is required, whether they are Catholic, Protestant, Quaker, Episcopalian, Baptist, Trinitarian, Unitarian, Christian Scientist, evangelical. Moreover, there are conservatives, progressives, Old Testament moralists, those who see Jesus as a man rather than God … you get the point.

The nature of spirituality

But religion isn’t unique in this diversity. Spirituality is equally difficult to pin down, given people have different aims and accordingly embrace diverse forms of spiritual practice, including psychospiritual self-transformative processes, meditation, yoga, fasting, praying, going on retreats, out-of-body experiences, and so on.

Furthermore, the spiritual don’t have an exclusive lock on these approaches: many who identify as religious use similar practices in order to have their own deep encounters. Being religious and being spiritual are certainly not mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, as the Pew survey concluded, a drift away from religious scripture-based credos and into personal spiritual encounters is under way.

An American meditator and scholar, Robert K.C. Forman, surveyed North Americans’ spiritual practices and beliefs at the turn of the century. He published his results in a book, Grassroots Spirituality (2004). In it he shows that the trend the Pew survey identified was already well under way.

Key factors behind grassroots spirituality

Those who self-identified as spiritual viewed religion as being predominantly rational, dogmatic and closed to changes in the external world. Conversely, they saw spirituality as involving inner transformation, meditation, quietness, and being open and alive to what is happening in the wider world. This last category is significant, with most considering that spirituality involved having powerful and supportive relationships with others, and for those relationships to be intuitive and fluid, i.e. non-judgmental and open rather than closed.

The definition of spirituality that Forman arrived at, drawn from those he questioned, was that spirituality

involves a vaguely panentheistic ultimate that is indwelling, sometimes as the deepest self and accessed through not-strictly rational means of self transformation and group process that becomes the holistic organisation for all life.

Panentheism is the idea that everything exists within Ultimacy (however you wish to name and define It), yet Ultimacy is not limited to everything. Ultimacy is present within all that exists, but simultaneously exists beyond everything.

The term panentheism was invented in the eighteen century when the personal theistic God of Christianity began to lose intellectual traction. At that time the main alternatives to theism were atheism and pantheism — the latter identifies God with the entirety of the natural world. With personal theism no longer viewed as adequate to describe God/Ultimacy, atheism was rejected because it didn’t allow for God, while pantheism was seen as inadequate because it seemed to limit God to the natural world. Panentheism enabled post-Enlightenment thinkers to conceive of God as being present in the world, but as simultaneously existing beyond it. Presence and transcendence — these were viewed as the core characteristics of Ultimacy.

While panentheism is a term invented three hundred years ago, the notion of simultaneous presence and transcendence is at the heart of the world’s mystical texts: the Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Plotinus’s Enneads, many Psalms, Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, and so on. Mysticism, in technical terms, offers a metaphysical view of reality that situates human existence in relation to Ultimacy, along with a set of practices, using which we may transcend our limited human viewpoint and directly experience aspects of that Ultimacy for ourselves.

Mystical experience

In my own research, I have concluded that a key difference between spirituality and religion today is that while a quest for personal mystical experience beats at the heart of people’s spiritual search, many religious authorities wholeheartedly consider such a search invalid.

The Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church whose Sunday School I attended as a child, and most modern evangelical churches, despite their many differences, find the authority for their credos in the words of the Bible. Many theologians also turn their backs on mysticism. Lloyd Geering, an innovative New Zealand theologian — who has the distinction of being one of the few people prosecuted for blasphemy in modern times (he was found not guilty) — has no place for mystical practice in his religious outlook. The direct personal experience of the divine, as articulated in the writings of mystics like Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, St John of the Cross, and St Teresa of Avila, has very much fallen out of sight. (In part, this is undoubtedly due to bias, given that the medieval Christian mystics are all Catholic, and most modern sects derive from the Reformation, which involves a rejection of all things Catholic.)

I find this widespreead rejection of mystical spirituality disappointing — especially given that all the world’s religions came into existence after their founders had undergone transcendent spiritual experiences. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Zoroaster, the prophets of Judaism, the founders of Indian Advaita Vedanta, each had profound mystical encounters. Today’s religious credos derive from their personal encounters with a present-transcendent Ultimacy. To put this in the simplest terms: without mystical experiences we wouldn’t have the world’s dominant religions.

I am not discounting that many religious believers are also spiritual seekers. For them, their religion provides a platform to leap into the spiritual realm and have a personal encounter with the divine. In Christianity the inner light sects, founded in the seventeenth century, of which the Quakers remain the most prominent today, have always given inner experience a key place in their religious practice. Interestingly, Quaker Richard Foster initiated something of a revival of Christian mystical practice with his book, Celebration of Discipline, published in 1978.

Tensions regarding modern mystical spirituality

Foster introduced the practice of inner prayer to inquisitive believers and also drew attention to the writings of Medieval Christian mystics .

However, for others Christianity’s creeds are a barrier to deeper spiritual encounters. The Episcopalian minister John Shelby Spong felt that in order to know God more deeply he had to leave the credo of his religion behind. He has has extensively critiqued the founding beliefs of Christianity, and has gone so far as to formulate a potential new credo — for which he has been criticised, and even, like Geering, called a heretic.

The narrowness of many people’s views, and their need to defend their religion from all comers, is present in a critique of Richard Foster’s work I recently came across. I’m going to quote from it because it goes to the heart of what I’m discussing here. It is from a post written by Gary Cilley and published on the Evangelical Times website:

“It is disturbing that Foster’s magnum opus stems from such a dubious ‘Divine encounter’. His system for spiritual growth is not drawn from Scripture but from subjective experiences involving unbiblical methodologies … This should give pause to any seeker of truth. We must not automatically assume, as many seem to do, that Foster has rediscovered the missing jewels of spirituality.”

Spiritual, or religious?

Such religious apologists are marking a line in the road, claiming those who want a deeper experience of the divine must adhere to “house rules” and never cross that line in thought, word or deed. Conversely, Robert Forman discovered that contemporary spiritual seekers are not just stepping over the line, they are walking away from traditional churches, whose credos they find too restrictive.

Grassroots forms of spirituality are increasingly becoming the norm for many, with seekers joining small neighbourhood groups to practise meditation, prayer, yoga, debate metaphysical notions, and to explore their inner lives together. Foreman’s research found that in the USA there are literally thousands of such groups in every city and town. The same applies in New Zealand, where I live.

Hidden away from the mainstream, ignoring creaking religious institutions and their narrow credos, spiritual seekers are doing their own thing, enriching their lives in the ways that are personally significant to them. Becoming spiritual, or being religious, or engaging in both — what is the most meaningful to you?

A discussion of historical precedents that contributed to this shift can be found in my two previously published essays:

Keith Hill is the author of The God Revolution, which examines this shift in greater detail, and The New Mysticism, which examines contemporary trends in mystical encounters.