The Spiritual-But-Not-Religious — A Portrait of America's Fastest-Growing Spiritual Identity
1. The Sentence Everyone Recognizes
There may be no self-description in American life that arrives more easily, or more politely, than this one: "I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious."
It is a sentence people offer at dinner tables and in hospital corridors, on awkward first dates and in eulogies for a faith they left without bitterness. It answers a question nobody asked and settles one everybody is quietly asking: where do you stand? For decades it was treated — by churches, by columnists, by anyone with a stake in the answer — as a mood, a phase, a way station on the road back to a pew or on to unbelief.
Then the numbers arrived. In December 2023, Pew Research Center published the first national study devoted entirely to spirituality in America, and a phrase that had lived in anecdotes for a generation turned out to describe a stable, measurable, and very large slice of the country: 22% of U.S. adults — more than one in five — are what researchers now call "spiritual but not religious," or SBNR [1]. In a land that has been arguing about religion since before it had a flag, here was a group large enough to be a constituency, distinct enough to have a portrait, and slippery enough that almost every assumption about it turned out to need a second look.
This is that portrait. Not a verdict on whether anyone's spirituality is true — no survey can deliver that — but a careful account of who these Americans are, what they say they believe and do, what they think of the religious institutions they left behind, and why the most interesting question of all, whether the group is growing, is also the hardest one to answer honestly.
2. How a Self-Description Becomes a Statistic
Start with the machinery, because everything that follows depends on it.
Pew's 2023 study asked Americans four simple questions: Do you think of yourself as spiritual? Do you think of yourself as religious? How important is spirituality in your life? How important is religion in your life? From the answers, four groups emerge. Forty-eight percent of U.S. adults are both religious and spiritual. Twenty-two percent are spiritual but not religious — people who describe themselves as spiritual, or say spirituality is very important to them, but who do not describe themselves as religious and do not say religion is very important. Ten percent are religious but not spiritual, and 21% are neither [1].
The survey drew 11,201 responses from Pew's American Trends Panel, with a margin of error of roughly 1.4 percentage points — an unusually solid foundation for a subject this soft [1]. And by the same questions, roughly seven in ten American adults count as spiritual in some way. Whatever else is happening in American religious life, the word "spiritual" belongs to the majority of the country.
There is a second measurement worth setting beside it. In February 2025, Pew released its Religious Landscape Study — a far larger instrument, with more than 36,000 respondents — and the four categories came out as 53% both religious and spiritual, 21% spiritual but not religious, 5% religious but not spiritual, and 21% neither [3]. In that same study, 74% of Americans described themselves as at least somewhat spiritual, while 58% said the same about being religious. "Spiritual" now outranks "religious" as the word Americans reach for first.
A word of caution about those two reports: they were built differently, asked differently, and cannot be averaged or blended. The 2023 study is the deep portrait — the one that lets us see inside the SBNR group. The 2025 study is the wide-angle update on the whole religious map of the country. Read side by side, they agree on the shape of things: about one American in five, give or take, stands in the spiritual-but-not-religious column.
3. The Belief Portrait: One in Five, and Three in Four
Here is where the SBNR group separates most sharply from the religious Americans next to them.
Ask about God, and the two groups part ways almost completely. One in five SBNRs — 20% — say they believe in the God described in the Bible. Among Americans who are both religious and spiritual, the same figure is 84% [1]. Flip the question, and the picture inverts just as cleanly: 73% of SBNRs say they believe in "some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe," a view shared by 15% of the religious-and-spiritual group [1].
That 73% is the heart of the portrait, and it deserves to be read precisely. It does not mean that three-quarters of SBNRs have abandoned the sacred. It means they have placed it somewhere other than the biblical throne — in a force, a presence, a something-else that the survey allowed them to name without committing to a doctrine. What that "some other higher power" is, Pew did not ask; the phrase is a wide container, and honesty requires leaving it wide. Readers sometimes fill it with the vocabulary of energy and vibration, and some in this group surely mean exactly that. But the survey itself did not measure it, and the number should not be stretched to say more than it can [1].
On other questions, the group looks less like a departure and more like a variation. Eighty-eight percent of SBNRs believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it — close to the 92% of religious Americans who say the same. Most believe human beings have a soul or spirit in addition to the body. And a striking majority locate spiritual presence in the world around them: 71% say spirits or spiritual energies can reside in parts of nature like mountains, rivers or trees, compared with 45% of religious Americans, and 78% say the same of animals other than humans [2]. Forty-two percent say that objects like crystals, jewels or stones can hold spirits or spiritual energies — a view held by 24% of religious Americans [2].
Read together, these answers describe a spiritual imagination that is less about a ruler in the sky and more about a presence woven through things — which is why a walk in the mountains and a stone on a windowsill can carry as much meaning for this group as a psalm.
One more detail, from our companion essay on how Americans define spirituality: when SBNRs were asked what the word means, the true self came first. Connection with "my true self" was essential for 72% of them; connection with something bigger than themselves, 62%; connection with God, 33% [1][2]. The order of that list is the whole story of the group in three lines. The search is real, and it is aimed inward.
4. The Practice Portrait: Inward, Not in Pews
If SBNR belief moves the address of the sacred, SBNR practice moves its schedule.
Start with what is absent. Just 2% of SBNRs attend religious services weekly or more often. Among Americans who are both religious and spiritual, the figure is 40% [1]. Twenty-one percent of SBNRs pray daily, compared with 64% of religious Americans overall [2]. On the surface, that looks like a portrait of drift — a group that kept the adjective and dropped the calendar.
But the next few numbers tell a different story. Seventy-eight percent of SBNRs spend time "looking inward or centering themselves" at least a few times each month — higher than the 67% among Americans who are both religious and spiritual [1]. This is a group that, in the privacy of its own rooms, keeps a practice: quiet sitting, journaling, walking, breathing, whatever the practice looks like when nobody is watching. The setting has shifted from sanctuary to living room, but the discipline has not vanished with the pews.
Community, too, has been rewired rather than abandoned. Only 11% of SBNRs say they are involved in a religious community, compared with 62% of religious Americans. But 13% belong to some kind of spiritual community — a group that helps them find connection with something bigger, with nature, or with other people — and many more find connection through volunteer and service groups that carry no religious label [2].
The relationship to religious institutions, in other words, is not so much severed as loosened. Fifty-four percent of SBNRs claim no religious affiliation at all. But 45% still name one — about one in five identifies as Protestant, and 12% as Catholic — even as they describe their spiritual lives in terms of inwardness rather than instruction [1][2]. People rarely leave a tradition the way they leave a building. More often they keep a corner of it, quietly, and let the rest go.
5. What They Say About Religion Itself
Ask SBNRs about organized religion and the temperature drops.
Forty-two percent say the statement "religion causes division and intolerance" describes their view a great deal, compared with 11% of religious Americans. Thirty-eight percent say religion does more harm than good [2]. These are not subtle differences of emphasis; they are the clearest explanation available for why this group exists at all. Many SBNRs did not drift away from the religious world. They stepped back from it deliberately, having concluded that the institution was not doing what a spiritual life is for.
It is important to hear that judgment precisely, though, because it is easy to overread. The critique is aimed at religion as an institution — at division, at intolerance, at structures that fail — far more than at faith as such. Forty-five percent of SBNRs hold on to a religious identity anyway [1]. Most say they have become more spiritual over time rather than less. And the demographic backdrop helps explain the tone: 58% of SBNRs are under 50, compared with 45% of religious Americans, and 60% lean Democratic, compared with 39% [2]. This is a young group, coming of age in a decade of loud public arguments about religion, and it has formed its judgments in that weather.
None of which makes the group's position a rejection of the sacred. A person can leave an institution precisely because the thing the institution promised still matters to them. That is not the sound of belief ending. It is the sound of belief changing its address, and saying so out loud.
6. A Portrait of a Generation, or a Snapshot?
Now the hard question, the one that makes this portrait interesting rather than merely tidy: is the SBNR group actually growing?
The long view says yes. A generation ago, "spiritual but not religious" was a marginal phrase; today it names one of the largest categories in American spiritual life, a group bigger than most denominations and more stable than any poll-time fashion. Sociologists saw the current coming long before the polls did. Robert Wuthnow's landmark study of American spirituality described the twentieth-century migration of religious life from a "spirituality of dwelling" — faith anchored in church, parish, and inherited tradition — toward a "spirituality of seeking": an individual, questing relationship with the sacred, assembled from many sources rather than received from one [4]. The SBNR portrait is what that migration looks like when it settles in and takes a name.
The recent readings, however, are more complicated. Commentary on the trend has pointed to a rise from 19% of Americans in 2012 to a peak of 27% in 2017, followed by a fall to the 22% recorded in 2023 [5]. If that arc is taken at face value, the group shrank in the last decade rather than grew.
But the honest answer is that we do not yet know — and the reasons are methodological, not evasive. The 2023 study was, by Pew's own description, a baseline: the first time many of these questions had ever been asked in a national survey, which means there is no clean "before" to compare it with. Earlier surveys asked different questions, used different instruments, and built their categories differently; the SBNR label of 2012 or 2017 is not guaranteed to mean the same thing as the four-question definition used in 2023 [1]. Even where the same ground has been covered, movement appears in both directions: the share of Americans describing themselves as "very spiritual" rose from 28% in 2017 and 27% in 2022 to 32% in the 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study [3].
So the fairest reading is this: over the span of a generation, the identity plainly grew from a footnote into a chapter; over the span of the last few years, the numbers are stable to slightly soft, and whether that is a real turn in the culture or a seam in the measuring tape is a question still waiting for the next survey — and the one after that. Anyone who tells you the trend is settled is telling you more than the data can support.
7. What the Numbers Can and Cannot Say
A portrait drawn from surveys should end with a clean statement of its own edges.
These numbers measure self-description, not metaphysics. When 73% of SBNRs say they believe in some other higher power, the survey has recorded what people say they believe — not whether that power exists, and not how deeply the belief is lived. A poll can map a culture's vocabulary with great precision and still say nothing at all about the truth of what the words point to. That is not a weakness of the method; it is the boundary of it, and both the hopeful and the suspicious should feel free to notice.
The numbers also describe groups, not persons. Twenty-two percent is not a person; it is what is left when you average thousands of different lives. Real SBNRs are people who meditate on a cushion at dawn, people who say a prayer they learned as a child and never mention to anyone, people who feel most themselves on a hiking trail, people who quietly believe in nothing at all and use the word for lack of a better one. The category holds all of them, and a category this wide is a starting point for understanding, never an explanation.
And the category itself was built, not discovered. Four questions, answered in a certain way, produce it; a different set of questions would draw the lines elsewhere. The SBNR of Pew's 2023 study is a well-made, carefully documented statistical object — one of the best we have — but it is a map, and the territory is tens of millions of inner lives.
8. Conclusion: The People Behind the Label
Step back from the tables for a moment, and the portrait resolves into something simpler.
The spiritual-but-not-religious are not a denomination, a movement, or a phase. They are the largest single answer to a question Americans have been asking themselves for more than half a century: what do you do with the longing for meaning when the institutions that used to hold it no longer fit? Their answer — keep the longing, loosen the institution, look inward for the authority, and stay open to the sacred wherever it appears — is not a rejection of spiritual life. It is one of its most durable contemporary forms.
That is why the label has outlasted so much of the commentary around it. It is not an argument. It is a position, honestly held by about one American in five, and it says something true about the age: that people will keep the search, even when they put down the map they were given. Whether the next round of surveys shows the group larger, smaller, or exactly the same size, the search itself will still be there — and portraits like this one exist so that it can be seen clearly, and met with understanding rather than alarm.
If you recognised yourself anywhere in these pages, you are in the company of tens of millions of your neighbours — and, increasingly, of the way a culture now describes the deepest part of its life. For how that vocabulary of connection took shape in the same survey data, our essay How Americans Define Spirituality — The Triple Direction of Connection traces the three directions inward, upward and outward. And for the wider story of how this modern, experience-centred spirituality differs from traditional religion, see What Is Modern Spirituality? Six Fundamental Differences Between the Spiritual-but-Not-Religious and Traditional Religion.
References
- Pew Research Center. Spirituality Among Americans. December 7, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/spirituality-among-americans/
- Pew Research Center. Who Are "Spiritual But Not Religious" Americans? December 7, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/who-are-spiritual-but-not-religious-americans/
- Pew Research Center. Spiritual and Religious Self-Descriptions (2023–24 Religious Landscape Study chapter). February 26, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/spiritual-and-religious-self-descriptions/
- Wuthnow, R. After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
- Religion News Service. Americans are becoming less spiritual as well as less religious. December 11, 2023. https://religionnews.com/2023/12/11/americans-are-becoming-less-spiritual-as-well-as-less-religious/
More in the Healing & Inner Growth series: What Is Modern Spirituality? Six Fundamental Differences Between the Spiritual-but-Not-Religious and Traditional Religion, The New Age Movement: The Awakening of Consciousness and the Revival of Ancient Wisdom and the series guide, The Healing-Spirituality Nexus: A Journey Toward Wholeness in the Modern World.