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.
A great note. We did a follow-up survey of 850 non-religious respondents and included an expanded battery of possible spiritual practices. One new option was:
Spent time in nature for the purpose of enlightenment
In this sample, it was selected by 13% of respondents.
Engaging in regular spiritual practice takes discipline and commitment. Heck, I struggle with that a lot of times! I wonder if “choice paralysis” plays a role in self-directed spirituality? There are so many ways to go that I wonder if some of the Nones wind up not choosing any.
For those interested the Dutch Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau, a government agency here, did an extensive study into spiritual practices among Dutch who are not in organized religion.
The study was from 2022. Currently we have >55% not in (organized) religion. In 2022 it was only slightly lower.
The study can be found below. It's in Dutch but has an extensive English summary which also talks about the previous 2 reports as the study was part 3 in a series of 3.
I understand the need for observable, quantifiable, measures. I generally use the definition of spirituality offered by Zinnbauer and Pargament (2005)("Spirituality has come to represent individual's efforts at reaching a variety of sacred or existential goals in life, such as finding meaning, wholeness, inner potential, and interconnections with others"). Such activity is hard to quantify. However, I wonder how much time both religious and nonreligious people spend trying to unravel these mysteries in their lives without considering it a spiritual activity. Using that definition, I think that more of us are spiritual than we realize. Appreciate and follow your work.
Meditation doesn't have to have any spiritual component, and mind-altering drugs doubly so. Personally I find all spiritual practices to be unprovable woo and nonsense, but meditation is self-reflection and drugs are just straight fun.
And no meditation, yoga (hindu), "prayer of Jabez" prayer labyrinths or "contemplative prayer" needed. Most people have become indoctrinated into believing eastern mysticism practices = Christianity. They don't.
Any given practice (well, assuming it is not inherently wicked as, say, worshiping a idol would be) can be Christianized. Consider: the ancients burned incense before the altars of their gods. Christians also adopted incense in their practices, even though Protestants (much) later dropped its use.
I am puzzled about your reference to contemplative prayer. That is a deeply ancient Christian practice and I don;t think any ancient Pagan cult, at least not in Europe or the Middle East, used such a practice.
Sorry. Everything you just wrote is wrong. Catholics use incense. I won’t discuss catholicism and the false religion it is. Contemplative prayer is not a ‘deeply ancient Christian practice.” If so, please provide the reference for that. A very helpful website to show the truth against what you wrote is:
There are also drugs people do for a spiritual experience with intention. Ayuascha, MDMA, psilocybin, etc. Although you could say it's just for psychological benefit. No woo required.
The claim is that 'Non-religious people are, by and large, non-spiritual people as well.'
But the graphs do not bear this out. Instead they show a solid half (52%) of non-religious people saying spirituality is somewhat or very important to them. Am I missing something or is this wilful misinterpretation?
And then if you add together the percentages of non-religious people engaging in the (limited) spiritual practices listed, you also end up with a significant proportion, even if you allow for some overlap.
(And I say 'limited' because I suspect that if you'd included swimming in the ocean or walking in nature in the list, you'd find an even larger proportion would identify these as activities as having a spiritual component.)
Yoga can have a spiritual component, and the same is true of traditional martial arts, but most people are just doing it as physical exercise, I think. Similarly, some people take astrology seriously as a belief system, but lots just regard it as a bit of fun.
Responding to your larger point, I've seen studies from the UK suggesting that, as a self-description, SBNR is typically just a way-station on the path from "religious" to "secular"
“One would assume that people who say that they are highly spiritual are doing yoga or meditation or astrology, right?”
I think this is a problematic assumption. Spirituality is a concept that encompasses far more than traditional New Age practices. It’s about the pursuit of transcendent meaning, and that pursuit varies depending on context.
Consider a None who is a huge Ray Kurzweil fan. He believes the Singularity is right around the corner. He spends a long time talking to ChatGPT about the future, and he looks forward to the day he can use cybernetic enhancements.
I would hesitate to say this individual is without spirituality. His futurism is his spirituality. He may not believe in magic, but he believes in technology that is about as good as magic. He lives in an enchanted world, no less than a religious person or a New Age practitioner. And I don’t know if he would appear as spiritual on this survey.
You could chalk it up to the limitations of self-reported data: People don’t know themselves as well as they think. These individuals *believe* they aren’t spiritual, but a closer look at their lives might yield practices that reveal a spirituality.
You gesture toward such limitations when you talk about how people want to be perceived as not merely vapid, so they say they are spiritual. The opposite could be true, too. It may be that people don’t want to be seen as irrational, so they say they don’t care about spirituality.
In fact, a strategy of saying “I don’t care about spirituality” while caring deeply about spirituality fits the pattern Jason Ananda Josephson Storm described in The Myth of Disenchantment.
The West has a long history of portraying itself as epistemically virtuous because we don’t believe in silly superstitions. This creates a position from which anthropologists could comment on the cultures of the “savages,” glorying in how much more advanced the West is than the “primitives.” But of course, the same period that saw the birth of anthropology was the heyday of seances and tarot cards.
It would not be surprising in the least if this discourse has evolved to disguise new spiritualities.
So those are some potential ways to square the data.
Researcher: "Okay, but I'm going to ask you a bunch of other questions and depending on how you answer them, I am going to classify you as spiritual even though you don't say that you are."
Here’s a parallel scenario where I think asking a bunch of other questions isn’t problematic:
Imagine going to a small community to investigate how antisemitic it is.
You get there and ask your respondent, “On a scale of ‘0 Not at all’ to ‘5 Very,’ how antisemitic do you consider yourself?”
Most people will say 0, and they’ll probably believe it.
But let’s say you then ask some other questions. You discover that 80% of the community thinks the Rothschilds family is the head of a global attempt destroy local community, you find that public sentiment toward the Nazis is unusually high, your transcripts contain numerous references to “blood and soil.”
Would you think that information calls the self-report data into question? Isn’t it worth having?
I certainly don’t think the label “spiritual” is socially stigmatic to the same degree racism is. But that isn’t the same thing as it being totally non-stigmatic.
Go back to our futurist friend—call him Peter. His community looks down upon the term “spirituality” because it seems so unscientific. Peter has a social reason to interpret his pursuit of meaning as something other than spirituality, even though they are structurally the same. He wants to avoid the stigma of being labeled “spiritual.”
But even if Peter’s friends don’t stigmatize spirituality, maybe Peter sees it as inconsistent with his identity. Maybe he thinks there is some deep conflict between technological progress and spirituality. Therefore, he doesn’t think of himself as spiritual.
The point here is that it is tough to measure whether people are really spiritual without knowing what spirituality is. The term’s semantic range is wide enough that people can easily start talking about different things with the same word—threatening the validity of the measurement.
I still think this study is extremely helpful. At the very least, it helps us see what spirituality doesn’t look like among the Nones. But I don’t think that is enough to conclude that it largely isn’t there.
In the kind of demographic survey work you are doing, sure. But that is a sign that we need more qualitative work to advance our understanding of these constructs.
It may be fruitful to do a bunch of in-depth interviews with some of these respondents. You might discover that they do have a sort of spirituality, but it’s more novel than what everyone thinks. I don’t see anything problematic with that.
I think this post shows the limitations of quantitative research and why it sometimes needs to be paired with qualitative research. It would be useful to talk to folks who say they are spiritual but not religious to get a better sense of how that manifests itself. I once had a Catholic girl friend who believed they she could sometimes but not always sense the future (not exactly see it). Its what some traditions might call the 3rd eye though she did not use such language. She often thought of it as a curse that she could be aware of things that others around her were blind to.
I can't think of very many people I personally know who can clearly differentiate between the terms "spiritual" and "religious", especially if describing their own selves.
I'm not sure if it matters what the person thinks the definition is; someone claiming spirituality is making a measure of "belonging" but the actions that Ryan outlined (yoga, meditation) are the measures of "behavior." It's harder to get the belief measurement for spirituality but I'm sure that kind of analysis is coming in a future Saturday post.
Fascinating, this not what I expected the data to show at all. As you said not a lot of social scientists are looking at this population, so there is a lot of superficial takes based on surface level engagement with the data. Looking forward to future posts as you continue your work.
I think one of the most interesting parts of these columns is seeing my life from another perspective.
As a None by all measures, the assumption that those without religion are replacing it with a belief in crystals or spiritual energy sounds comical to me! I don't believe in any of that, either! It's like going up to a vegetarian and saying "I see you've given up burgers, but surely you're eating bacon instead, right?" I mean...no. I don't do that either, and I'm not sure you understand what the word means. I would never have imagined that religious people assume that my lack of church attendance implied any of this.
First, I think it's a good idea to break the "Nones" into groups as you have done, because, speaking as one myself, I have been aware for a very long time that some of the individuals with whom I have the least in common metaphysically are those among other types of the "Nones".
I know you have often said that the Unitarian Universalists are a group hard for you to analyze because they are too small in numbers to show up in the published data you rely on. I was a UU for a time, and I think most UUs will readily admit that you find all four kinds of "Nones" in UU congregations! (ex-Nones? Nones-in-spirit?) Where I live, in the Twin Cities, there are several UU congregations, each with its own separate "flavor", and it's kind of an open secret that the two largest, both in Minneapolis proper, are the one in which you will find the largest concentration of atheists and agnostics, and the one in which you will find the fewest.
I do have a question. This may be colored by my being older than you (I'm 69), so I'll preface the question with some background. I was raised super-Catholic. I was an altar boy. I was doing the readings at Sunday Mass while still in high school. I was a "Lay Minister of the Eucharist" in college. In '75, at age 20, I found myself just not believing in the stuff one was supposed to believe. I went into what would probably be called Spiritual Direction today, meeting with a wonderful Jesuit priest at the parish just off campus. We met one-on-one, one night each week, in what I later came to understand was a Socratic Discussion. He was really good at it. Father Jake literally helped me talk myself out of the Catholic Church and into atheism. In retrospect, I imagine he likely was heartbroken, but he never let on. We parted as friends. I wavered between atheist and agnostic for 25 years, but then had what I regard as a life-changing spiritual experience late in '99, and from 2000 forward, have been on a spiritual journey that has taken me to UU, to Zen Buddhism, and, more briefly, to a few other 'places'. All that time, when affiliated with some group, and when not, I have considered myself SBNR. I have never entertained the question "Does spirituality replace religion for the SBNR?" Like you, I have noticed that a lot of people seem to think that, today. My question, rather, has been, and is "When did people start to think that?"
In 1975, my personal sense is that people did NOT think that. If in '75 I were to draw a Venn diagram for "spiritual" and "religious", the two circles would highly overlap, but there would be a significant space inside the "religious" circle that was NOT also in the "spiritual" circle, and only the slightest sliver of the "spiritual" circle that was not also "religious". My late Dad, a fully-practicing lifelong Catholic, was "religious but not spiritual". A lot of people I knew growing up seemed to be. In'75, I knew no one personally - not even on a large state university campus - who today I would call SBNR. SBNR was not what I "turned into" when I came out of Catholicism. In '75, in my world, it did not seem an option that existed.
When I "emerged" out of atheism/agnosticism 25 years later, SBNR was something that not only existed, but was "a big thing". But even as recently as then, 2000, "SBNR" was a phrase that implied that "if one was not religious, it was then noteworthy that one was spiritual". Not the default. NOTEWORTHY, because OUT of the ordinary. So I think what you have "discovered" here is what we SBNR's all intuitive felt back circa 2000 - it's why we USED the phrase. But I think you are correct that this is no longer the sense that the general public shares.
It's almost like I "missed" 25 years - Rip Van Winkel-style. When I left Catholicism, there was almost no concept of being SBNR. Then, for 25 years as an atheist/agnostic, I had no personal need for the concept. Then, in 2000, when I newly DID have a need for the concept, it was already there, fully formed, and ready for me to adopt/adapt!
So... my question basically comes down to the need for a historical analysis. For starters, it would be interesting to know in what year SBNR was coined and/or what year it gained currency. And then, what happened 1975-2000 to make SBNR "a thing", and what has happened since (or perhaps both during that period AND since) to cause so many in the general public now to erroneously think that "spirituality" REPLACES "religion" for many Nones? I agree with the conclusion of your analysis - That's NOT the way it works!
I think the ambiguity of the word "meditation" skews the data. Every other area where the practices of the religious and non-religious track closely with each other (astrology, yoga, crystals, etc.) are pretty well-understood.
But to a non-religious person, meditation probably connotes something like "emptying your mind of thoughts and emotions in order to achieve a state of calm, focus, and awareness through breathing and chanting techniques." Whereas to a Christian, "meditation" carries the meaning of "study and think deeply". (e.g. Psalm 119:15, "I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your way").
So it's not surprising that a large number of Christians would indicate they "meditate", far in excess of the number of non-religious people who engage in their kind of "meditation". If the two concepts were separated out into different terms, I'll bet the gap between the two groups for "meditation" would be quite a lot smaller.
One of the biggest activities or behaviors of SBNR people is engaging with nature. Not an option in this questionnaire.
Another might be reading/studying philosophy or even science (awe of the unknown).
Gardening (though a subset of nature engagement) is more akin to meditation, but a distinct behavioral approach.
I could come up with others that should be ahead of tarot cards and psychic experience.
A great note. We did a follow-up survey of 850 non-religious respondents and included an expanded battery of possible spiritual practices. One new option was:
Spent time in nature for the purpose of enlightenment
In this sample, it was selected by 13% of respondents.
Mediation was 17%
None of the above was 33%.
Interesting. Thanks for the follow up. I really thought it would be higher.
I like how ending a sentence in "..., folks." is Ryan's way of using an exclamation point.
Prayer is a spiritual activity, and should have been included in the choices listed.
Engaging in regular spiritual practice takes discipline and commitment. Heck, I struggle with that a lot of times! I wonder if “choice paralysis” plays a role in self-directed spirituality? There are so many ways to go that I wonder if some of the Nones wind up not choosing any.
For those interested the Dutch Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau, a government agency here, did an extensive study into spiritual practices among Dutch who are not in organized religion.
The study was from 2022. Currently we have >55% not in (organized) religion. In 2022 it was only slightly lower.
The study can be found below. It's in Dutch but has an extensive English summary which also talks about the previous 2 reports as the study was part 3 in a series of 3.
https://www.scp.nl/publicaties/publicaties/2022/03/24/buiten-kerk-en-moskee
I understand the need for observable, quantifiable, measures. I generally use the definition of spirituality offered by Zinnbauer and Pargament (2005)("Spirituality has come to represent individual's efforts at reaching a variety of sacred or existential goals in life, such as finding meaning, wholeness, inner potential, and interconnections with others"). Such activity is hard to quantify. However, I wonder how much time both religious and nonreligious people spend trying to unravel these mysteries in their lives without considering it a spiritual activity. Using that definition, I think that more of us are spiritual than we realize. Appreciate and follow your work.
Meditation doesn't have to have any spiritual component, and mind-altering drugs doubly so. Personally I find all spiritual practices to be unprovable woo and nonsense, but meditation is self-reflection and drugs are just straight fun.
As someone said above, prayer is a spiritual practice.
And no meditation, yoga (hindu), "prayer of Jabez" prayer labyrinths or "contemplative prayer" needed. Most people have become indoctrinated into believing eastern mysticism practices = Christianity. They don't.
Any given practice (well, assuming it is not inherently wicked as, say, worshiping a idol would be) can be Christianized. Consider: the ancients burned incense before the altars of their gods. Christians also adopted incense in their practices, even though Protestants (much) later dropped its use.
I am puzzled about your reference to contemplative prayer. That is a deeply ancient Christian practice and I don;t think any ancient Pagan cult, at least not in Europe or the Middle East, used such a practice.
Sorry. Everything you just wrote is wrong. Catholics use incense. I won’t discuss catholicism and the false religion it is. Contemplative prayer is not a ‘deeply ancient Christian practice.” If so, please provide the reference for that. A very helpful website to show the truth against what you wrote is:
https://www.christiananswersnewage.com/
There are also drugs people do for a spiritual experience with intention. Ayuascha, MDMA, psilocybin, etc. Although you could say it's just for psychological benefit. No woo required.
The claim is that 'Non-religious people are, by and large, non-spiritual people as well.'
But the graphs do not bear this out. Instead they show a solid half (52%) of non-religious people saying spirituality is somewhat or very important to them. Am I missing something or is this wilful misinterpretation?
And then if you add together the percentages of non-religious people engaging in the (limited) spiritual practices listed, you also end up with a significant proportion, even if you allow for some overlap.
(And I say 'limited' because I suspect that if you'd included swimming in the ocean or walking in nature in the list, you'd find an even larger proportion would identify these as activities as having a spiritual component.)
Yoga can have a spiritual component, and the same is true of traditional martial arts, but most people are just doing it as physical exercise, I think. Similarly, some people take astrology seriously as a belief system, but lots just regard it as a bit of fun.
Responding to your larger point, I've seen studies from the UK suggesting that, as a self-description, SBNR is typically just a way-station on the path from "religious" to "secular"
The way-station argument is correct in my case. Some pause at the way-station longer than others, of course.
“One would assume that people who say that they are highly spiritual are doing yoga or meditation or astrology, right?”
I think this is a problematic assumption. Spirituality is a concept that encompasses far more than traditional New Age practices. It’s about the pursuit of transcendent meaning, and that pursuit varies depending on context.
Consider a None who is a huge Ray Kurzweil fan. He believes the Singularity is right around the corner. He spends a long time talking to ChatGPT about the future, and he looks forward to the day he can use cybernetic enhancements.
I would hesitate to say this individual is without spirituality. His futurism is his spirituality. He may not believe in magic, but he believes in technology that is about as good as magic. He lives in an enchanted world, no less than a religious person or a New Age practitioner. And I don’t know if he would appear as spiritual on this survey.
But when we ask people, "how important is spirituality to you?"
Non-religious: 27% not at all
Religious: 4% not at all
How do you square that?
I just don't buy the assumption here that if we would have included 100 different possible items, that the results would be fundamentally different.
There are a few ways to square that data.
You could chalk it up to the limitations of self-reported data: People don’t know themselves as well as they think. These individuals *believe* they aren’t spiritual, but a closer look at their lives might yield practices that reveal a spirituality.
You gesture toward such limitations when you talk about how people want to be perceived as not merely vapid, so they say they are spiritual. The opposite could be true, too. It may be that people don’t want to be seen as irrational, so they say they don’t care about spirituality.
In fact, a strategy of saying “I don’t care about spirituality” while caring deeply about spirituality fits the pattern Jason Ananda Josephson Storm described in The Myth of Disenchantment.
The West has a long history of portraying itself as epistemically virtuous because we don’t believe in silly superstitions. This creates a position from which anthropologists could comment on the cultures of the “savages,” glorying in how much more advanced the West is than the “primitives.” But of course, the same period that saw the birth of anthropology was the heyday of seances and tarot cards.
It would not be surprising in the least if this discourse has evolved to disguise new spiritualities.
So those are some potential ways to square the data.
Imagine this scenario.
Researcher: "How spiritual are you?"
Respondent: "Not that much really"
Researcher: "Okay, but I'm going to ask you a bunch of other questions and depending on how you answer them, I am going to classify you as spiritual even though you don't say that you are."
Doesn't that seem a bit...problematic?
Here’s a parallel scenario where I think asking a bunch of other questions isn’t problematic:
Imagine going to a small community to investigate how antisemitic it is.
You get there and ask your respondent, “On a scale of ‘0 Not at all’ to ‘5 Very,’ how antisemitic do you consider yourself?”
Most people will say 0, and they’ll probably believe it.
But let’s say you then ask some other questions. You discover that 80% of the community thinks the Rothschilds family is the head of a global attempt destroy local community, you find that public sentiment toward the Nazis is unusually high, your transcripts contain numerous references to “blood and soil.”
Would you think that information calls the self-report data into question? Isn’t it worth having?
But isn't there a pretty difference in:
"Are you anti-semitic?"
vs
"Are you spiritual?"
One is rife with social desirability and one isn't.
I totally get why you can't ask people "Are you racist?" or "Do you hate women?"
But I just don't see a lot of people hesitating to say that they are (or are not) spiritual.
I certainly don’t think the label “spiritual” is socially stigmatic to the same degree racism is. But that isn’t the same thing as it being totally non-stigmatic.
Go back to our futurist friend—call him Peter. His community looks down upon the term “spirituality” because it seems so unscientific. Peter has a social reason to interpret his pursuit of meaning as something other than spirituality, even though they are structurally the same. He wants to avoid the stigma of being labeled “spiritual.”
But even if Peter’s friends don’t stigmatize spirituality, maybe Peter sees it as inconsistent with his identity. Maybe he thinks there is some deep conflict between technological progress and spirituality. Therefore, he doesn’t think of himself as spiritual.
The point here is that it is tough to measure whether people are really spiritual without knowing what spirituality is. The term’s semantic range is wide enough that people can easily start talking about different things with the same word—threatening the validity of the measurement.
I still think this study is extremely helpful. At the very least, it helps us see what spirituality doesn’t look like among the Nones. But I don’t think that is enough to conclude that it largely isn’t there.
In the kind of demographic survey work you are doing, sure. But that is a sign that we need more qualitative work to advance our understanding of these constructs.
It may be fruitful to do a bunch of in-depth interviews with some of these respondents. You might discover that they do have a sort of spirituality, but it’s more novel than what everyone thinks. I don’t see anything problematic with that.
I think this post shows the limitations of quantitative research and why it sometimes needs to be paired with qualitative research. It would be useful to talk to folks who say they are spiritual but not religious to get a better sense of how that manifests itself. I once had a Catholic girl friend who believed they she could sometimes but not always sense the future (not exactly see it). Its what some traditions might call the 3rd eye though she did not use such language. She often thought of it as a curse that she could be aware of things that others around her were blind to.
I can't think of very many people I personally know who can clearly differentiate between the terms "spiritual" and "religious", especially if describing their own selves.
I'm not sure if it matters what the person thinks the definition is; someone claiming spirituality is making a measure of "belonging" but the actions that Ryan outlined (yoga, meditation) are the measures of "behavior." It's harder to get the belief measurement for spirituality but I'm sure that kind of analysis is coming in a future Saturday post.
My foundational assumption in doing survey research is this: it's a mistake to try and define terms.
1. For most terms: there is not a definition that will satisfy a majority of respondents.
2. If you try to define things, the question will become so long and cumbersome that the quality of answers will fall to an unacceptable level.
Instead I take this approach: When people tell you what they are -- believe them.
If I ask, "Are you spiritual?" And you say, "no" - that's good enough for me.
Yep, but in fairness I don't think there are clear, agreed upon definitions even among people that think about this stuff a lot.
Fascinating, this not what I expected the data to show at all. As you said not a lot of social scientists are looking at this population, so there is a lot of superficial takes based on surface level engagement with the data. Looking forward to future posts as you continue your work.
I think one of the most interesting parts of these columns is seeing my life from another perspective.
As a None by all measures, the assumption that those without religion are replacing it with a belief in crystals or spiritual energy sounds comical to me! I don't believe in any of that, either! It's like going up to a vegetarian and saying "I see you've given up burgers, but surely you're eating bacon instead, right?" I mean...no. I don't do that either, and I'm not sure you understand what the word means. I would never have imagined that religious people assume that my lack of church attendance implied any of this.
First, I think it's a good idea to break the "Nones" into groups as you have done, because, speaking as one myself, I have been aware for a very long time that some of the individuals with whom I have the least in common metaphysically are those among other types of the "Nones".
I know you have often said that the Unitarian Universalists are a group hard for you to analyze because they are too small in numbers to show up in the published data you rely on. I was a UU for a time, and I think most UUs will readily admit that you find all four kinds of "Nones" in UU congregations! (ex-Nones? Nones-in-spirit?) Where I live, in the Twin Cities, there are several UU congregations, each with its own separate "flavor", and it's kind of an open secret that the two largest, both in Minneapolis proper, are the one in which you will find the largest concentration of atheists and agnostics, and the one in which you will find the fewest.
I do have a question. This may be colored by my being older than you (I'm 69), so I'll preface the question with some background. I was raised super-Catholic. I was an altar boy. I was doing the readings at Sunday Mass while still in high school. I was a "Lay Minister of the Eucharist" in college. In '75, at age 20, I found myself just not believing in the stuff one was supposed to believe. I went into what would probably be called Spiritual Direction today, meeting with a wonderful Jesuit priest at the parish just off campus. We met one-on-one, one night each week, in what I later came to understand was a Socratic Discussion. He was really good at it. Father Jake literally helped me talk myself out of the Catholic Church and into atheism. In retrospect, I imagine he likely was heartbroken, but he never let on. We parted as friends. I wavered between atheist and agnostic for 25 years, but then had what I regard as a life-changing spiritual experience late in '99, and from 2000 forward, have been on a spiritual journey that has taken me to UU, to Zen Buddhism, and, more briefly, to a few other 'places'. All that time, when affiliated with some group, and when not, I have considered myself SBNR. I have never entertained the question "Does spirituality replace religion for the SBNR?" Like you, I have noticed that a lot of people seem to think that, today. My question, rather, has been, and is "When did people start to think that?"
In 1975, my personal sense is that people did NOT think that. If in '75 I were to draw a Venn diagram for "spiritual" and "religious", the two circles would highly overlap, but there would be a significant space inside the "religious" circle that was NOT also in the "spiritual" circle, and only the slightest sliver of the "spiritual" circle that was not also "religious". My late Dad, a fully-practicing lifelong Catholic, was "religious but not spiritual". A lot of people I knew growing up seemed to be. In'75, I knew no one personally - not even on a large state university campus - who today I would call SBNR. SBNR was not what I "turned into" when I came out of Catholicism. In '75, in my world, it did not seem an option that existed.
When I "emerged" out of atheism/agnosticism 25 years later, SBNR was something that not only existed, but was "a big thing". But even as recently as then, 2000, "SBNR" was a phrase that implied that "if one was not religious, it was then noteworthy that one was spiritual". Not the default. NOTEWORTHY, because OUT of the ordinary. So I think what you have "discovered" here is what we SBNR's all intuitive felt back circa 2000 - it's why we USED the phrase. But I think you are correct that this is no longer the sense that the general public shares.
It's almost like I "missed" 25 years - Rip Van Winkel-style. When I left Catholicism, there was almost no concept of being SBNR. Then, for 25 years as an atheist/agnostic, I had no personal need for the concept. Then, in 2000, when I newly DID have a need for the concept, it was already there, fully formed, and ready for me to adopt/adapt!
So... my question basically comes down to the need for a historical analysis. For starters, it would be interesting to know in what year SBNR was coined and/or what year it gained currency. And then, what happened 1975-2000 to make SBNR "a thing", and what has happened since (or perhaps both during that period AND since) to cause so many in the general public now to erroneously think that "spirituality" REPLACES "religion" for many Nones? I agree with the conclusion of your analysis - That's NOT the way it works!
I think the ambiguity of the word "meditation" skews the data. Every other area where the practices of the religious and non-religious track closely with each other (astrology, yoga, crystals, etc.) are pretty well-understood.
But to a non-religious person, meditation probably connotes something like "emptying your mind of thoughts and emotions in order to achieve a state of calm, focus, and awareness through breathing and chanting techniques." Whereas to a Christian, "meditation" carries the meaning of "study and think deeply". (e.g. Psalm 119:15, "I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your way").
So it's not surprising that a large number of Christians would indicate they "meditate", far in excess of the number of non-religious people who engage in their kind of "meditation". If the two concepts were separated out into different terms, I'll bet the gap between the two groups for "meditation" would be quite a lot smaller.