How Many Americans Are Actually Spiritual But Not Religious?
(ANALYSIS) It may be one of the most frequently used phrases in my neck of the woods — “spiritual but not religious.”
The phrase is one that is really hard to trace back to its origins, but Wade Clark Roof’s 1993 book “A Generation of Seekers” definitely talked about this general idea.
However, I think that Robert Fuller’s “Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America” is probably the one single piece of scholarship that pushed the phrase into the mainstream.
It’s used so much among folks who study the decline of religion that it has an acronym, SBNR. It’s certainly an idea that we almost accept as being true without really testing the underlying assumptions behind it.
While there are a dozen working definitions of the SBNR concept, I think it’s probably most clearly articulated as an individual who says that they are spiritual but reject all the trappings of organized religion.
This could be someone who doesn't ever go to church, but they read their horoscope on a daily basis and believe that tarot cards can help them understand the future. It could also be someone who doesn’t identify with a particular religious faith but perhaps believes in the afterlife or a higher power.
Certainly the discourse around this type of person is that they are becoming a larger share of the population. But I wanted to test that really basic claim with data from the General Social Survey.
In 1998, for the first time the GSS asked, “To what extent do you consider yourself a spiritual person?” the ARDA provides a handy little tool to just check the frequencies of those responses without having to download the data. What’s interesting is that the team at GSS didn’t ask that same question again until 2006 but has asked it in every wave of the survey since that point.
The most common response over the time series has been “moderately spiritual,” with 40% of respondents selecting this option in 1998. But things have dropped from there. In 2022, just 32% of folks said that they were moderately spiritual.
Meanwhile, the percentage of those identifying as “very spiritual” has increased, rising from 22% in 1998 to 26% in 2022. However, the trend line for “very spiritual” seems to be pointing downward in the last couple of surveys. I just can’t see how one could draw the conclusion that highly spiritual people are a growing part of the adult population.
The biggest shifts have occurred among those who consider themselves “slightly spiritual” and “not at all spiritual.” The percentage identifying as “slightly spiritual” started at 26% in 1998, dipped slightly in the early 2000s, but has since rebounded to the same level in 2022.
Meanwhile, the “not at all spiritual” group, which started at 12%, has seen a gradual rise, reaching 15% by 2022. So, the ‘very spiritual’ percentage has increased by 4 points since 1998, but the share who are “not at all” spiritual has also risen 3 points.
Again, if there’s a rise in spirituality in the United States, that claim cannot emanate from this GSS data.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s post, visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.