Thursday Thoughts: Spiritual, but not religious?

“I’m spiritual but not religious.” I’ve heard this phrase often. Anecdotally, I usually hear this from religiously unaffiliated people (atheists, agnostics, etc.). In some ways, this makes me sad, as I believe religion and religious activities are necessary for one’s spirituality.

But, as a pastor, I’m more concerned about my fellow Christians living out this phrase.

A Pew Research Center article shows that from 2012 to 2017, people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” has increased from 19% to 27% of the U.S. population. This didn’t surprise me. Of those people, 37% describe themselves as religious unaffiliated. This was the largest group of “spiritual but not religious” people. This also didn’t surprise me.

The second largest group did surprise me. 35% of these people describe themselves as Protestants.

Maybe this shouldn’t surprise me. I fell into the same trap in my early years of faith. It’s easy in our context that praises individualism to believe that being a Christian is just about an individual relationship between the person and God. I believe that my personal relationship with God is important, crucial even, to my faith. But I also believe that it is not the only important, crucial part of my faith. There has to be community.

We have to be, collectively, with the imperfect people around us in the church, the body of Christ. In order to love God and love our neighbor, we have to know our neighbors.

In a Protestant context, I believe that this hyper-individualistic emphasis on faith is at least partly to blame for a Christian “spiritual but not religious” attitude in that “spiritual” is perceived as individualistic and “religious” is perceived as communal.

Let’s embrace community. Let’s be hospitable. Let’s love our neighbors. Let’s serve one another and the stranger. To me, an imperfect person who, like all humans, has selfish tendencies, I need my religious community to do these things. I need to see examples of hospitality and love and service, I need to experience that hospitality and love and service from others to know how to be hospitable and how to love and how to serve. I need my religious community in order to be spiritual.

An article about this topic, which explains many perspectives of the reasoning behind “spiritual but not religious,” closes with a lament of one such person. “’I don’t tend to like uniformity of practice and belief because that gets a bit culty to me,’ said Ribar. ‘It often means people stop asking questions — that’s why I’m shy of organized spiritual community. But I do sometimes long for more people to share things with.'”

That last sentence stands out. This person misses community. Perhaps we can be a community that helps a person like this to see the spiritual necessity of worship, even those practices that seem “culty.” Perhaps we can be a community that reminds each of us, when we feel the pull to be “spiritual but not religious,” of the ways that worship instills in us a sense of God’s love and a call to love and serve.