Are The Nones Replacing Religion With Spirituality?

One of the things that we often hear when we tell folks that we are working on a project that is studying the growing number of nones in the United States is something along the lines of, “Oh, I’m not that religious, but I consider myself highly spiritual.” It’s a concept that we talk about a lot in social science. So much so that we have a term for it: SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious). It’s been written about for decades by scholars of American religion and it’s become part of the lexicon among religious leaders throughout the United States.

In fact, when we created our four category typology of the nones, one of the groups that we identified in the data were exactly these people — they scored relatively high on measures of spiritual importance but very low on traditional religious questions like church attendance. So, we do agree that there is a subset of the nones who do seem to have a deep well of spirituality. But there’s a blanket statement we see bandied about a lot that we want to challenge in this post. It’s, “Oh, the decline of religion is probably not a problem because all kinds of nones are just replacing church with yoga, meditation, crystals, etc.” But the data tells a different story: the nones just aren’t that spiritual, either.

Let me start by just showing you a simple question that we asked to all respondents, “How important is spirituality to you?” The response options ranged from “not at all important” to “very important.”

It’s pretty hard to look at this graph and come to any other conclusion than: religious people are significantly more spiritual than non-religious people. In our survey, 62% of religious respondents (coming from any faith tradition like Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, etc.) said that spirituality was very important to them. Among atheists, agnostics, and nothing in particular folks it was only 24%.

Just reflect on that for a minute because it flies in the face of how lots of people think about these two concepts. The viewpoint often described is: spirituality replaces religion. The assumption there is that non-religious people have a void and spirituality rushes in to fill that. But that’s not what we see here — spirituality does not supplant religion. Those two concepts are actually highly correlated with each other.

In our sample, just 11% of religious people said that spirituality was “not at all” or “not too” important to them. For the nones, it was 48%. There’s just no other conclusion that we can come to based on this data. The heatmap below drives that home even more.

If the theory that lots of non-religious people are highly spiritual but not at all religious, their top left square would contain a significant number of the nones. It does not. Just 8% of the non-religious sample says that spirituality is very important to them and religion is not at all important. Even if you add in spirituality being somewhat important, that still only describes 20% of the nones.

The square that fills up the most among the non-religious? It’s people who said, “not at all” on both dimensions. That’s more than a quarter of the nones. If you add the four bottom left squares together (which are people who score low on both dimensions), that’s basically half of the non-religious sample. This a portrait of the nones that we don’t see described much in the popular discourse.

What about religious people? Well, about three quarters of them are in the top right of the heatmap. That means that they think both religion and spirituality are important to them. As religiosity increases so does spirituality. They have a multiplicative effect, they aren’t crowding each other out.

But what about individual spiritual practices? We gave folks a list of eight possible activities that touch on some of the most popular types of alternative spirituality. Things like meditation, yoga, crystals and astrology were on the list. They were asked to indicate which ones that they engaged in over the prior thirty days and they could check as many boxes as they wanted.

What we found was that most of these spiritual practices were rare in our sample. The one that was clearly the most popular was meditation. Among religious folks, 40% of them said that they had meditated in the prior 30 days compared to 27% of the non-religious sample. About one-in-five religious people in the survey said that they had done yoga in the prior month, which was just slightly higher than the non-religious. And astrology was just about as popular with both groups (right around 15%).

But here’s the really big upshot from this graph: you cannot find a single instance where non-religious people were noticeably more likely to engage in spiritual activity compared to a religious person. As previously mentioned, religious people were 13 points more likely to meditate, but that was easily the biggest gap. In many cases, the percentages were not substantively different.

Again, there’s no empirical support to be found in this data that non-religious people are trading in regular church going for regular yoga sessions. Or that they eschew a small group Bible study to spend an hour in meditation. Non-religious people are also, by and large, non-spiritual too.

In the previous question battery we also allowed respondents to check a box saying that they had participated in zero spiritual acts over the prior 30 days. This is the share who did nothing spiritual in the prior month.

Given what we know about the Dones, it should come as little surprise that three-quarters of them had done nothing spiritual. But when I threw all four types of nones together into a single category, 55% of them said that they were in the “none of the above” camp. Said another way, a majority of the nones have no discernible spiritual practice.

I also threw in the Protestants and Catholics into this analysis, too, so we could get a sense of the overall spirituality of traditionally religious people. About 51% of Protestants said that they had engaged in zero spiritual practices - that was four points lower than all the nones in the sample. Catholics were even lower than that, with just 44% saying that they had not done yoga, meditation, etc.

It was pretty clear to us that three spiritual practices were easily the most popular: meditation, yoga, and astrology/horoscopes. Here’s how often folks engage in each of those practices over the prior month.

It’s interesting that the Nones in Name Only and Catholics are just as likely to say that they have meditated over the prior 30 days (42%). The group that was the next most likely to meditate were Protestants. Among all the non-religious in the sample, only a quarter had a regular practice of meditation. Even the most popular spiritual practice among the nones is still pretty rare.

On the question of yoga, it’s pretty amazing how little variation there is between all these groups. Catholics are no more (or less) likely to practice yoga than Protestants. But among all the non-religious, just 15% have a regular yoga habit. That’s actually slightly lower than the Christians in the sample.

And, no matter how often we see discussion in the discourse about how lots of people are embracing astrology, that’s not the conclusion that emerges when looking at our survey. Just 14% of all nones say that they regularly read their horoscope. That’s no different than the Catholics in the sample and five points higher than Protestants.

Alternative spiritual practices are just not that widespread, folks. And there’s just not any compelling evidence to be had that the nones are engaging in these New Age activities at a rate that replaces traditional religious practices.

We have come to believe that lots of people are engaging in what we would describe as “aspirational spirituality.” Put simply, folks want to be perceived as having a deep well of spirituality inside them. They do not want to be perceived as vapid and superficial. So they will say that they are deeply spiritual, but then do nothing to express that feeling. In our minds, it’s a similar phenomenon to the significant number of people who say that they are evangelical but don’t go to church.

We can test that. I calculated the share of people who engaged in zero spiritual activities based on how they answered the question about spiritual importance. One would assume that people who say that they are highly spiritual are doing yoga or meditation or astrology, right?

What we found was that a significant share of non-religious people who say that spirituality is important to them don’t actually engage in spiritual practices. Among all nones, 46% of those who say that spirituality is somewhat important to them don’t express that in tangible spiritual acts. That was also true of 28% of the non-religious who said that spirituality was very important to them.

Among religious folks in our sample, the percentages don’t deviate that much when compared to the nones. The biggest difference is among religious people who say that spirituality is very important to them – 38% of this subgroup said that they engage in zero spiritual acts. However, this does kind of make sense. A lot of Christians have an aversion to activities like yoga, mediation, crystals, etc. Instead they are engaging in a lot of traditional religious activities like regular church attendance and prayer.

This analysis shatters one of the most pervasive myths about how the faith of the average American has changed as secularism has continued to rise in the United States. Any idea that the last few decades has only remixed American religion instead of just reducing it is demonstrably false. Non-religious people are, by and large, non-spiritual people as well.

Is this problematic for the future of the United States? It’s hard to know for certain. But what we can say with some surety is that the last few decades of our history have not only seen a decline in traditional religion, they have also been a spiritual desert as well.

To read more, visit The Nones Project.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.