What is spirituality?

The word spirituality has a Christian history, even though its contemporary use now extends far beyond Christianity. The English word belongs to a family of terms derived from Latin spiritus, meaning breath, spirit, wind or animating life, and from spiritualis, meaning pertaining to spirit. In Christian usage, spiritus became the usual Latin equivalent for Greek pneuma, itself linked to breath, spirit and the divine Spirit.

In early Christian usage, especially in Pauline language, spiritual did not mean psychological, private, non-religious or opposed to institution in the modern sense. The spiritual person - pneumatikos anthropos - referred to a person whose life was shaped by the Holy Spirit.

By the high and later Middle Ages, spiritual life increasingly referred to interior religion and devotional or ascetical practices: prayer, meditation, contemplation, spiritual exercises, moral discipline and the pursuit of Christian perfection. But it still did not mean spirituality as distinct from religion. It meant the interior, affective, ascetical or grace-oriented dimension of Christian religious life.

The contemporary meaning of spirituality is different. In modern and late-modern Western societies, spirituality often names a search for meaning, values, connection, self-realisation, healing, authenticity, inner growth or transformation. It may remain religious, but it is no longer confined to institutional religion, doctrine, clergy, formal worship or inherited tradition.

This shift helps explain the emergence of categories such as spiritual but not religious, non-religious spirituality, secular spirituality and post-religious spirituality. In this context, spirituality is often associated with subjective experience, personal authority, inner life, embodied practice, ecological concern, art, therapy, meditation, yoga, creativity, community, grief work and other practices of transformation.

Spirituality and religion are related, but they are not identical. Religion usually refers to organised traditions of belief, ritual, community, authority and practice. It is often structured around sacred texts, doctrines, institutions, clergy, moral obligations and shared forms of worship.

Spirituality is broader. It refers to experiences, practices and orientations through which people seek meaning, connection, transformation, self-transcendence or relationship with what they consider sacred or ultimate. It may exist inside religion, but it may also be cultivated outside institutional religion.

The most important distinction is authority. Religion often locates authority in a shared tradition: scripture, doctrine, clergy, liturgy, institution, moral law or divine command. Contemporary spirituality, especially in its non-religious forms, more often locates authority in lived experience: inner truth, authenticity, bodily awareness, affective transformation, direct encounter or felt connection.

This does not mean that religion is merely external, or that spirituality is merely private. Religious life can be deeply experiential, embodied and transformative. Non-religious spirituality can also become disciplined, communal and ethically demanding. The difference is therefore not absolute. It is better understood as a shift in emphasis: from inherited authority to experiential authority, from institutional belonging to personal meaning-making, from doctrine alone to lived transformation.

Religion is one historical container for spirituality, but spirituality is the wider category: a movement of meaning, connection, self-transcendence and transformation that may also arise outside institutional religion.

The subjective turn describes a major shift in modern Western culture: a movement away from lives organised primarily around external roles, duties, institutions and inherited authority, and toward lives organised around subjective experience, authenticity, personal growth and inner meaning.

Heelas and Woodhead’s distinction is useful here. They contrast life-as religion with subjective-life spirituality. In life-as religion, truth and goodness are usually located outside the individual: in God, scripture, doctrine, church, duty, moral law or a transcendent common good. Subjective experience may matter, but it is not normally treated as the final authority in its own right.

In subjective-life spirituality, authority shifts towards the person’s own experience: the body, emotions, intuition, healing, personal truth, transformation and the felt quality of living. The sacred is encountered less as an external command and more as something discovered, cultivated or expressed through the depths of life itself.

This does not make subjective experience automatically spiritual. An experience becomes spiritually significant when it is interpreted, cultivated or integrated as pointing beyond the ordinary ego-bound self and when it changes meaning, identity, conduct or worldview.

The relocation of spiritual authority from institution to experience should not be understood only as a religious phenomenon. Religion is one site where the shift becomes visible, but the deeper movement is a wider late-modern or postmodern reorganisation of authority across Western society.

This shift affects politics, education, medicine, information, media, science, family, gender roles, expertise, therapy and culture. The question is no longer only “Which church has authority?” It is: who has the authority to tell me what is true, how to live, what counts as health, how to educate, how to interpret the body, what counts as knowledge, how to make meaning, and what deserves trust?

For this reason, SBNR spirituality should not be reduced to a caricature of consumerism, self-centred individualism or people shopping for meaning. Those features may describe part of the contemporary spiritual marketplace, but they do not explain the whole phenomenon.

A more rigorous view is that SBNR is the spiritual expression of a wider post-institutional condition. People may no longer automatically trust inherited institutions, yet they still need meaning, healing, connection, ethical orientation, transformative experience and a language for the sacred.

Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel’s value-change framework helps place this shift in a wider social context. The point is not that all societies become SBNR as they modernise, but that secular-rational and self-expression values help explain why spiritual authority can migrate from institution to experience in many Western contexts.

Core thesis

SBNR is not simply a bottom-up collection of private preferences. It can also be read top-down as the spiritual expression of a wider cultural shift in which institutional authority is no longer automatically trusted.

The sacred is what is set apart from ordinary use and experienced as carrying ultimate, irreducible or inviolable significance. It is not simply a synonym for religion, nor is it only a supernatural category. It names a different order of value: what cannot be handled casually, reduced to utility, consumed without consequence, or treated as merely ordinary.

In Durkheim’s sociological account, the sacred is first defined by its separation from the profane. Sacred things are “set apart and forbidden”: protected by rules, approached through rites, surrounded by prohibitions and distinguished from everyday use. This makes sacredness socially observable. We can see it in thresholds, taboos, rituals, protected objects, consecrated spaces, silence, special forms of handling and the behavioural difference between what may be used casually and what must be approached with reverence.

But the sacred is not only a social classification. It also has a particular affective and psychological force. Rudolf Otto described the sacred as the numinous: a mystery that is both overwhelming and fascinating. It produces awe, trembling, attraction, humility and reverence. Jung later understood the numinous as a psychic force that exceeds the ordinary ego and can seize or transform consciousness. The feeling of the sacred is therefore not a simple primary emotion such as fear or pleasure. It is a complex affective constellation: awe, wonder, dread, fascination, reverence, humility, beauty, moral seriousness and the sense of standing before something more-than-ordinary.

Short formula

The sacred is what is set apart, affectively sensed and experienced as carrying irreducible value.

The sacred outside religion

In secular life, the sacred does not disappear simply because religious belief declines. It may relocate into other objects, spaces, values and practices: nature, the body, love, grief, justice, memory, creativity, ecological concern, art and collective experience. The sacred outside religion is not necessarily supernatural, but it still marks what people experience as inviolable, transformative or ultimately meaningful.

Nature, art, the body and love are among the recurring places where the sacred may appear outside formal religion. They may be experienced as carrying a value that exceeds ordinary use: as alive, inviolable, beautiful, vulnerable, transformative or worthy of reverence. These same domains return in the section on Pathways to Spirituality, where they are treated not as objects of sacred valuation but as contexts and practices through which spiritual experience may be cultivated or unexpectedly encountered.

Beauty is crucial to this question. In much contemporary art discourse, beauty is often treated with suspicion, as if it were merely decorative, sentimental or intellectually weak. But in religious, mystical and philosophical traditions, beauty has often been understood as a portal to truth, goodness and the divine. Pieter de Villiers argues that aesthetics should not be reduced to subjective taste or ornament, but recognised as a participatory form of knowledge: one that involves feeling, embodiment, imagination, discernment and transformation. In this sense, beauty is not simply what pleases the eye. It can disclose depth, presence, order, fragility, radiance, love, suffering or mystery. McGilchrist distinguishes beauty from the sacred, but places beauty, goodness and truth among the values through which the sacred may become perceptible. Beauty, then, is one of the ways value becomes visible, sensible and affectively real.

This is where art becomes central. Following Kuspit’s reading of Kandinsky and the spiritual impulse in modern art, museums and galleries can be understood as secular sacred sites when they remove objects from ordinary circulation and place them within spaces of heightened attention. They create thresholds, regulate behaviour, invite silence, protect objects and ask viewers to look differently. Artworks may become sacred, or begin to function sacredly, when they are encountered not merely as objects, commodities or representations, but as sites of presence, symbolic intensity and transformation.

The sublime and the numinous are two routes through which this may happen. The sublime overwhelms us through scale, power, vastness or the limits of comprehension. The numinous draws us into awe before mystery. Art can hold both. It can make beauty, terror, silence, grief, truth, goodness and transcendence experientially present rather than merely conceptually stated. In this sense, the sacred is inseparable from the spiritual: it names the irreducible value around which spiritual experience, practice and transformation often gather.