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You typed it into a search bar, or you came close to it. Spiritual but not religious. Four words that almost describe where you already stand, and you wanted to check whether they were a real thing — or whether you had just invented them to end a conversation you did not want to have.
They are a real thing. Search tools estimate the exact phrase gets looked up somewhere around 1,600 times a month in the United States alone, and that is only one phrasing of the question. People also search “what is it called when you believe in a higher power but not religion,” and “what is it called when you don’t have a religion.” Those are all the same person, standing in the same place, looking for a word.
So here is the word, where it came from, how many people use it — and the part that almost nobody mentions, which is the most interesting part of all.
What “Spiritual But Not Religious” Actually Means
It means roughly this: you sense there is something more than what you can touch, and you do not locate that something inside an organised religion.
That is it. It is not a doctrine. There is no book, no founder, no membership. It is a description of a position, not a belief system — which is exactly why it is so hard to pin down, and why so many people reach for it. It is less a flag than a shrug in the right direction.
Two things it does not mean, despite being used that way:
- It does not mean you have no beliefs. We will come back to this, because the numbers here are startling.
- It does not mean you are against anybody’s religion. Plenty of people who use the phrase were raised inside one, still love parts of it, and simply would not describe themselves by it today.
How Many People Are Spiritual But Not Religious?
The best count comes from the Pew Research Center, which surveyed US adults in 2023 and published the results.
Their findings, for the United States:
- 22% of adults land in the spiritual-but-not-religious group.
- 70% consider themselves spiritual in some way.
Read those two lines together and something comes loose. Most people in the country describe themselves as spiritual. Roughly one in five describe themselves as spiritual and not religious. Whatever you are, it is not rare and it is not a gap in the data. It is one of the largest groups there is.
One honest limit on all of this: that is a survey of the United States. The phrase travels much further than the survey does, and nobody has counted it everywhere. If you are reading this from Nairobi or Manila or Lahore, the number where you live is simply unknown — which is not the same as zero.
The Part Nobody Mentions: No One Can Define It
Here is where it gets genuinely strange, and it is the thing worth knowing before you decide whether the label fits you.
The researchers who count this group cannot agree on what they are counting.
Pew said so themselves, in their own report. They wrote that their results “illustrate the difficulty of separating ‘spirituality’ from ‘religion'” and that “there is no clear dividing line” between them. So rather than tell people what spiritual meant, they made a deliberate choice: they let each person define it for themselves.
Sit with that for a second. The most careful measurement we have of this group was taken by people who openly admitted they could not draw the boundary — so they handed the pen to the respondent.
And it shows. Look at what happens across surveys:
- In 2017, Pew asked two plain yes-or-no questions — are you a religious person, are you a spiritual person — combined the answers, and got 27%.
- In 2023, using a wider definition, they got 22%.
A lot of coverage reports this group as growing. Based on those two numbers, that is not something anyone can currently say — and Pew is clearer about it than the coverage is. They note that many of these questions were asked for the first time in 2023, that earlier surveys are not directly comparable because of differences in wording and method, and that they therefore “do not know whether they are more – or less – common today.”
So the honest answer to “is this a growing movement?” is: nobody knows. The measurement moves when the question moves. That is not a failure of the research — it is the research being straight with you about a thing that genuinely does not hold still.
Which means something useful for you personally. If the experts cannot draw the line, you are not failing a test by being unsure which side of it you are on. There is no line to be on the wrong side of.
What This Group Actually Believes
This is the number that reframes everything, and it is the one most often left out.
Ask spiritual-but-not-religious people what they believe, and in Pew’s 2023 survey:
- 73% said they believe in “some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe.”
- 20% said they believe in God as described in the Bible.
Add those together and you get the overwhelming majority of the group believing in something beyond the physical world. The label does not mark out the people who stopped believing. It marks out the people who kept believing and stopped belonging.
Those are very different things, and lumping them together is the mistake almost every article on this topic makes — in both directions. One kind of article treats you as a lapsed member who needs retrieving. Another treats you as someone who has bravely escaped and needs congratulating. Neither is talking to a person who believes in something real and simply has no word for it.
That experience — a pull toward something you cannot name — turns out to be old and well documented. Other languages built whole words for it. German has Sehnsucht, a longing you cannot quite name or satisfy, which several writers have described as the most important feeling of their lives precisely because nothing available ever answered it. You are not describing a new condition. You are describing a very old one in the only vocabulary currently on offer.
The Oldest Version of This Story
Which brings up something easy to miss, and it is not the thing you would expect.
In the oldest written accounts of Jesus’s life, the people singled out for the highest praise are, again and again, people with no religious standing whatsoever.
A foreign army officer — an occupier, with no claim on the religion at all — asks for help. The accounts say Jesus marvelled, and then said of him: “I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.” The compliment is not that the man had the correct affiliation. It is that he did not have it, and it did not matter.
A woman at a well raises exactly the question this whole article is circling: which mountain is the right place to worship, ours or yours? She is asking him to settle the institutional question. He declines. He tells her instead that “the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father,” and that “the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” The location was never the point. He takes the building off the table.
And a condemned man, dying beside him, with no ritual available to him, no community, no record of attendance, nothing to offer at all, is simply told: “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.”
None of those three had the credential. All three got the yes. Whatever else that pattern is, it is not an institution checking membership cards at the door.
Where That Leaves You
You came looking for a name. “Spiritual but not religious” is a usable one, as long as you hold it loosely — it describes where you are standing, not who you are, and it was never meant to be a final answer about you.
And standing there is not a waiting room. It is not a half-finished version of something else. By the only count we have, it is where roughly one in five adults are, almost all of them believing in something they cannot fully explain, most of them assuming they are unusual for it.
If you want to do something small with that instead of just filing it away, two things on this site are built for exactly this spot and cost nothing. One is a short, unpushy How Close Am I to God? assessment that just reflects back where you actually are, no sermon attached. The other is for the practical question underneath all of this — whether anyone is listening before you have sorted out what you believe, which has a surprisingly specific answer involving another Roman soldier.
A good place to start: The Beginner’s Guide to Feeling God’s Presence Every Day. It is a short guide to noticing something real in ordinary moments — a commute, a kitchen, a bad night — without joining anything or agreeing to anything first. Get the free guide. Free.
Nothing here needs resolving today. You went looking for a word and found out the word is bigger and stranger and more crowded than you thought — and that the oldest story in the neighbourhood keeps handing its best lines to the people standing right where you are.
A Question Worth Sitting With
Here is the one we would genuinely like to hear your answer to: do you think “spiritual but not religious” is a useful description, or has it become so broad that it no longer tells anyone anything? Both answers are defensible, and people are firmly on both sides. Tell us which way you lean in the comments — and if you would word the label differently, we want that version too.
Worth Passing On
- “Turns out ‘spiritual but not religious’ isn’t a cop-out answer — it’s about 1 in 5 US adults, and 73% of them believe in a higher power. They didn’t stop believing. They stopped belonging. Those are not the same thing.” bgodinspired.com
- “Best detail I read today: the researchers who measure ‘spiritual but not religious’ admitted they can’t define the boundary, so they let people define it themselves. Everyone arguing about this label is arguing about a word nobody agreed on.” bgodinspired.com
- “Everyone says the ‘spiritual but not religious’ crowd is growing. Pew’s own answer is that they genuinely don’t know — the 2017 survey said 27%, the 2023 one said 22%, and the questions weren’t the same. Good piece on what the label actually means.” bgodinspired.com
Questions People Ask About Being Spiritual But Not Religious
What does “spiritual but not religious” mean?
“Spiritual but not religious” describes someone who senses there is something beyond the physical world, but does not locate that sense inside an organised religion. It is a description of a position rather than a belief system — there is no founder, text, doctrine or membership attached to it. Most people who use the phrase are not describing an absence of belief, but an absence of institutional belonging.
How many people are spiritual but not religious?
In the Pew Research Center’s 2023 survey of US adults, 22% fell into the spiritual-but-not-religious group, while 70% of US adults considered themselves spiritual in some way. Those figures cover the United States only; no comparable global count exists. Pew’s 2017 survey produced a higher figure of 27%, but Pew states that the questions were worded differently and are not directly comparable, so the trend over time is genuinely unresolved.
Do spiritual but not religious people believe in God?
Most believe in something. In Pew’s 2023 survey, 73% of spiritual-but-not-religious US adults said they believe in “some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe,” and 20% said they believe in God as described in the Bible. Taken together, the large majority of the group holds some belief in a reality beyond the physical world. The label marks a distance from organised religion, not from belief itself.
What is it called when you believe in God but not religion?
The most widely used term is “spiritual but not religious,” sometimes shortened to SBNR. Related but narrower terms include “deist,” for someone who believes a creator exists but does not intervene, and “unaffiliated” or “nothing in particular,” which are the categories surveys use for people who claim no religious tradition. None of these capture everyone, which is why many people end up using a phrase rather than a single word.
Is “spiritual but not religious” a real category or just a vague label?
It is a real and widely measured category, but it has no agreed definition — including among researchers. In its 2023 report, the Pew Research Center wrote that its findings “illustrate the difficulty of separating ‘spirituality’ from ‘religion'” and that “there is no clear dividing line” between the two, and chose to let respondents define spirituality for themselves rather than imposing a definition. The category is therefore useful for describing a position but unreliable for drawing precise conclusions about what any individual believes.
