"I Am Spiritual. I Am Not Religious." Now What Could That Mean?

Personal Reflections on a Secular Spirituality

“I am spiritual. I am not religious.” It's a personal identifier that has been around for several decades. When I hear it, I want to ask”What exactly do you mean by 'spiritual'?” Perhaps more slyly I want to inquire as to whether priests, ministers and rabbis, no doubt religious practitioners, don't also think they are doing something spiritual.

But I get the point. Those who are separating themselves from religion, sometimes with an impulse of repudiation, are rebelling against established, organized, religion - with its institutions, doctrines, practices and the heavy weight of authority. In other words, no second hand, hand-me-down religion for them. They are religious free-lancers.

Their numbers have grown significantly, indicating that the United States may belatedly be following Western Europe toward greater secularization. Almost 25 percent of the U.S. population claims to be non-affiliated with an established religion, the so-called “nones.” This exodus from the churches is driven by younger cohorts, among whom upward of 30 percent do not belong to a religious congregation. This lack of adherence is unprecedented in American history since the early decades of the Republic, when it is estimated no more than ten percent of Americans belonged to a church.

Among the nones it is found that perhaps four percent are atheists and additional five percentage are identified agnostics, which means that the majority of nones are religiously indifferent, may engage in traditional religious practice but do so privately, or identify as being spiritual in some sense but not religious.

It is this last category that is my launching off point. Despite what readers may detect as an element of snideness revealed at the opening of this essay, I must confess that I find myself among those fitting this definition.

My placing myself there is a product of rebelliousness, anti-authoritarian impulses and a yearning to be unconventional. As well as intellectual integrity. The religions, intellectually and behaviorally, do come with heavy doses of authority from which I innately recoil. I should mention I don't reject all authority. Legitimate authority is necessary for the responsible transition of knowledge. It is required to bring social stability, order and continuity. Authority is often necessary for seriousness and depth. But I innately reject those authorities that are self-serving or arbitrary, traits which readily morph into authoritarianism.

The free-lance impulse in religion has a long pedigree. Mystics, who comprise a minor population within the traditional faiths, have considered themselves and have been treated as independent outliers. Closer to home, the American sage, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an anti-authoritarian assertion, rhetorically wrote, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Emerson was the original New Ager. America has long had a culture of religious independents and free thinkers.

It is time to get personal. Whether one has a feel for the spiritual not, I believe is a function of temperament. For many people this world and living within its practicalities is enough. Their impulses and imaginations don't require that they think much beyond this world, its mundane demands and pursuits. Indeed, they may indulge their imaginations with entertainment and literature, but their imagination doesn't travel so far as to evoke metaphysical yearnings.

For causes unknown, mine does. This world of practicalities, the world of “getting and spending” as William Wordsworth put it, has never felt totally satisfying to me. I have long felt the need to move beyond, in some sense to get out of this world.

The traditional religions, of course, specialize in appealing to this impulse. They are explicit to propounding, indeed placing the greatest stock in a realm beyond our experiences of space and time. Theirs is a realm beyond the natural one. It is “supernatural,” and is allegedly more real than the one we inhabit where we indulge our normal experiences, and learn to navigate.

But as with many people, supernaturalism runs afoul of my intellect. It demands too completely blindness to evidence. While my temperament inspires me to yearn for more, at the same time that temperament, in the form of conscience, tells me that there is no dignity in believing what is not true. I need evidence. God stands at the center of the supernatural realm, especially in the monotheist faiths, but I can see no evidence of a divine custodian.

Yet, however commanding and compelling my intellectual denial of a supernatural reality, the yen for something more doesn't go away.

So I ask, can I the naturalist and the atheist, still find (“formulate” might be a more apt term) a spiritual reality that puts me in touch with more than the practicalities of daily existence? This disquieting impulse has inspired a quest since my adolescence and to which I continue to devote quite a bit of reflection.

I turn to epistemology and here is where I come out. It is epistemology 101 to frame the following question: If I encounter Mary, do I see Mary as she actually is? Or, does my perception of Mary exist somewhere between how Mary actually is and my interpretation of Mary based on my impression of her that is filtered through my mind? Or does Mary exist exclusively in my head?

I come out at number two. Reality as we experience it lies somewhere between how it is itself and how each one of us interprets it. Yes, there is something objectively there and how all of us perceive it is subject to great overlap. I am not a radical skeptic or solipsist. But how we each know what's there is a function or our individual perspective. The Mary I see is not precisely the Mary you see. As Friedrich Nietzsche asserted, our realities are perspectival. Science is devoted to narrowing down and creating consensus on reality as far as we can know it. But in a our individual experience, we interpret, and in a sense, create our own world.

The romantic poets were much taken with such faculties of mind and their essential role in interpreting reality. For them, what they called “intuition” was a guiding faculty in our coming to know the world. Wordsworth in a line in his nature poem Tintern Abbey, states “ ...of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive.” Again, there is something objectively there, but the mind plays an inescapable role in creating our knowledge of it, that is, our reality.

This brings me to spiritually. “Spiritual” like the word “religion” has changed its meaning through time. The classical meaning of spiritual, which still reflects the orthodox position of the traditional religions, is that that there exists a real spiritual realm outside and separate from the material world of quotidian experience we inhabit. Christianity, especially, borrowing from Plato accords this reality a higher and exalted status.

The spiritual is a realm independent from nature and is inhabited by real spiritual beings. God, angels and ghosts are spiritual beings. They are incorporeal and eternal. As I have made clear I do not believe is a spiritual realm nor spiritual beings in this literal ontological sense.

As a naturalist what am I left with? Spirituality for me is a product of perception and how I interpret the reality I experience. In my imaginative sense I construe reality as multi-tiered. There is the surface of things and there is the underlying structure or form. Perhaps some will see an element of Aristotle in my thinking. Aristotle speaks of “formal causes” which are the indwelling and abstract rational structures that lie within material objects. We can describe a chair, for example, by its appearance, size and purpose. Or, we can describe it in terms of the mathematical formulae that underlie the relations and proportions of its outer components.

When I view the painting, I appreciate its color, its theme and the talent of the artist who created it. But beneath the manifest surface of the painting, there resides an indwelling form and order. It is the order we identify with aesthetics and my sense of spiritually ultimately partakes of aesthetics and an aesthetic appreciation.

This appreciation I can apply to human beings as well and it resides at the heart of my humanism. When I encounter another person, I perceive the face, the voice, the body, the gestures and the manifest appearance of the other. But beneath the surface, lies their humanity, their distinctiveness and uniqueness emerging out of their subjective being. It is perhaps ineffable and ultimately unknowable but it renders the other invaluable and certainly more complex than initial impressions suggest.

The pandemic has turned my focus toward smaller things closer to home. It has encouraged me to focus my attention more intensely on details. This has brought me closer to nature. With a spacious backyard I have become attuned to the nuances of the many and diverse flowers I have planted around my house. I have become more perceptive of their growth, their details, and their well being. I see beneath their surface a type of beauty and order that has been set in place by the processes of natural selection. When visited by pollinators I am moved by the larger order manifest in ecological interdependence and the ultimate unity of nature. I find this deeper more studied appreciation edifying and I identify it with a type of naturalistic spirituality if you will. I contemplate the splendid trees in my backyard, some 250 years old. When I walk through my forest I feel a kinship with these trees, because both they and I are living things. They become much more than objects. There is a living process beneath their surface. My trees respond to their environment and are interdependent with it. It is the multilayered quality of this reality and experience and the interplay of these dimensions that I identify with a spiritual sensibility.

The two-fold perception of things, as they appear of the surface and their ulterior structure and form, informs my appreciation of these two tiers. On their surface objects of our perception can be employed by us for their utility, that is, how they serve our interests. When we contemplate their underlying structure, they exist not for exploitation nor use. They stand on their own, not to be used, but exclusively to be appreciated. And when we contemplate the intrinsic humanity of our fellow human beings, for their respect and reverence. The beauty exists within the flower to be admired and appreciated, and we can be uplifted and edified by that experience.

Tennyson's “Flower in the Crannied Wall” points to my understanding of the spiritual:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.  

Close but not totally there. In my view, we should not pick the flower but just let it be. Tennyson's approach is assertive and analytical; I would assume a more passive posture. But its Tennyson's implication that the flower beneath its surface partakes of broader connections with nature and the cosmos (God) and with us, all members of a common reality. There an underlying elegance is revealed.

This suggests a second component that can make for secular spirituality, if you will. And that is the felt connection with something larger than oneself, a larger reality in which one finds a place. This something can be an idea, a mathematical formulation, or as cited before, the indwelling sense of form and order, the aesthetic that lies beneath the surface of things. When in contact with this ulterior dimension, I can feel moved in a particular way. I can be uplifted and edified and feel that I am in touch with something that is not trivial nor mundane. It is perhaps the closest we naturalists can come to a sense of transcendence without postulating an independent transcendental reality: To sense and feel a connection with the beauty within the painting, the elegance in an idea, the order in nature, the humanity that lies within the person we encounter. Connection is the operative term.

The paradigmatic experience in this instance is what is often referred to as “nature mysticism.” I walk through the woods and a feeling of my smallness which is ironically uplifting comes over me. I gaze at the night sky and sense that I and the innumerably stars and galaxies lying at unfathomable distances are constituent parts of the same universe. As William Blake wrote:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour

This sensibility has applications all around us – in our relations to nature, in our perception of underlying beauty and elegance, to our communion with ideas and with the humanity of others - there lies the elements of a spirituality which all people, whether secular or traditionally religious, can engage.

And maybe in these times of environmental destruction and the salience of fraught relations among our own kind such reverence would serve to heal, at least in part, a hurting world.

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