Who Is Spiritual Outside Religion Today?
This section does not attempt to catalogue all religious, mystical or esoteric movements. Instead, it focuses on the growing field of people who do not identify primarily through institutional religion, but who nevertheless use spiritual language, seek meaningful experience, cultivate practices, or orient their lives around connection, transformation and values.
In my framework, affiliation and identity are treated as one dimension of spirituality, not as the whole of spirituality. This matters because religious belonging, spiritual self-description, belief, practice, experience and ethical conduct no longer always align neatly. A person may be religious and spiritual; religious but not especially spiritual; spiritual but not religious; neither religious nor spiritual; culturally religious but non-practising; atheist or agnostic but still open to awe, meaning, connection and transformative experience.
This is why I distinguish identity from belief, practice and experience. Saying "I am spiritual" tells us something important about how a person positions themselves, but it does not yet tell us what they believe, what they practise, what they have experienced, or how they live. Conversely, a person may reject the label "spiritual" while still having experiences of awe, self-transcendence, moral seriousness, ecological connection or existential depth.
The contemporary landscape is therefore best understood as a field of overlapping identities rather than a simple opposition between religion and secularism. The key question is not only whether someone belongs to a religion, but how they make meaning, what forms of authority they trust, what experiences they consider significant, and whether they interpret any of these as pointing beyond the ordinary ego-bound self.
The basic identity matrix
| Religious | Not religious | |
|---|---|---|
| Spiritual | Religious and spiritual Example: a believer whose spirituality is grounded in prayer, worship, scripture, ritual, community or relationship with God. | Spiritual but not religious Example: someone who rejects institutional religion but seeks meaning, connection, transformation, inner life, nature, meditation, art or the sacred. |
| Not spiritual | Religious but not spiritual Example: someone whose religion is mainly cultural, communal, familial, ethical, ethnic or institutional rather than experiential or inwardly transformative. | Neither religious nor spiritual Example: someone who does not use religious or spiritual language, although they may still value ethics, meaning, beauty, care or existential reflection. |
Affiliation / identity categories
Introduction
| Category | Working meaning | Why it matters in the framework |
|---|---|---|
| Religious | Identifies with, belongs to, or is shaped by a recognised religious tradition, institution, community or inherited faith. | Shows that spirituality may remain embedded in religion, doctrine, ritual, scripture, worship and community. |
| Spiritual | Uses spiritual language or values to describe meaning, connection, inner life, transformation, experience, the sacred or a reality beyond the ego-bound self. | Must be distinguished from religious identity, belief, practice and experience; it is an identity claim, not a complete account. |
| Both / Neither | Some people identify as both religious and spiritual; others identify as neither. These are not residual categories but meaningful positions. | Prevents the framework from assuming that religion and spirituality are either identical or opposed. |
| SBNR | Spiritual but not religious: a person who identifies with spirituality while rejecting, avoiding or not prioritising institutional religion. | Important for secular and post-religious spirituality, but not identical with all non-religious spirituality. |
| Nones / Unaffiliated | Survey category for people who report no religious affiliation, often including atheists, agnostics and those who say nothing in particular. | Shows that lack of religious affiliation does not automatically mean lack of meaning, belief, practice or spiritual experience. |
| Atheist / Agnostic | Atheism usually rejects belief in God or gods; agnosticism suspends judgement or treats ultimate metaphysical claims as unknown or unknowable. | These are belief or knowledge positions, not complete identities. They can overlap with secular forms of awe, ethics, meaning or spirituality. |
| Seeker | Someone actively exploring meaning, practices, experiences, traditions or worldviews without fixed institutional belonging. | Captures movement, experimentation and the process of spiritual identity formation. |
| Culturally religious | Identifies with a religious tradition through family, ethnicity, memory, ritual, aesthetics, holidays or culture, without necessarily holding strong doctrinal belief or regular practice. | Important because affiliation may be cultural, communal and symbolic rather than primarily theological or experiential. |
Key distinctions for the reader
Affiliation is not the same as belief. Someone may belong to a religion without strong belief, or believe in God, spirits, consciousness, energy or the sacred without belonging to a religion.
Identity is not the same as practice. Someone may identify as spiritual but have few regular practices; another person may meditate, pray, create art, spend time in nature or practice care without using spiritual language.
Experience is not the same as interpretation. A person may have an intense, beautiful, anomalous or transformative experience and only later interpret it through religious, secular, psychological, spiritual or metaphysical language.
Non-religious does not mean non-spiritual. The unaffiliated include atheists, agnostics and people with nothing in particular; some are secular or indifferent, while others hold spiritual beliefs or report spiritual experiences.
Spirituality outside religion is not one movement. It is a loose field of identities, practices, experiences and worldviews, shaped by personal authority, meaning-making and the decline of inherited religious belonging.
Why this matters for secular spirituality
This section prepares the reader to understand secular spirituality without confusing it with either organised religion or simple unbelief. It shows that contemporary identity is often hybrid: people may move between inherited religion, personal spirituality, secular ethics, therapeutic practice, aesthetic experience, ecological concern and existential questioning.
For this project, the most important point is that spirituality should not be measured by affiliation alone. Affiliation tells us how people name themselves. The wider framework asks what they believe, what they practise, what they experience, how they interpret those experiences, and whether any of this changes their conduct, values or relationship to the world.
This is why Affiliation / Identity is only the first dimension of the five-dimensional framework. It opens the question of spirituality, but it does not settle it.