“Spiritual but Not Religious” Risks Disrespect and Self-Deception

It’s easy to understand the appeal of “I’m spiritual but not religious.” It signals openness, compassion, and freedom from stifling institutions. It rejects hypocrisy, abuse, and intellectual laziness wherever they appear. But as a stance, taken unreflectively, it also risks disrespecting the very traditions and thinkers that built the vocabulary of meaning we casually deploy. Worse, it can slide into a quiet form of arrogance and even duplicity: reaping the fruits of practices and philosophies while disclaiming any debt to the roots that nourished them.

This is not an indictment of individuals’ sincerity. It is a critique of a posture that can erase history, cheapen wisdom, and discourage accountability. If you truly care about the spiritual life, you owe it a seriousness that honors the minds and communities that safeguarded it.

The false freedom of unmoored spirituality

- The phrase sounds liberating: connection without constraint, meaning without dogma. But “no commitments, no lineage, no teachers” often devolves into consumer spirituality ... shopping for sensations and affirmations while avoiding the rigors that make transformation stick.

- Traditions are not cages; they are curated libraries, laboratories, and clinics. Over centuries, communities tested practices for cultivating honesty, compassion, courage, and awe. They failed often, corrected themselves, and left instructions. To take the techniques (meditation, liturgy, confession, Sabbath, service) while scorning the repositories that preserved them is a kind of intellectual free-riding.

Historical amnesia is not humility

- From the Upanishads to Augustine, from al-Ghazali to Maimonides, from Nagarjuna to Aquinas, from Confucius to Kant and Kierkegaard, the spiritual question has been wrestled with under conditions far harsher than ours. People risked exile, ridicule, or death to articulate honest doubts and hard-won insights.

- C. S. Lewis warned against “chronological snobbery”: assuming the latest posture is inherently superior. “Spiritual but not religious” frequently performs this snobbery, assuming institutions are childish while the lone seeker is adult.

- Respect does not mean uncritical acceptance. It means engaging arguments before dismissing them. Read Augustine’s Confessions on restless desire, al-Ghazali’s Deliverance from Error on skepticism and certainty, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed on reason and revelation, Nagarjuna on emptiness, Kierkegaard on subjective truth, William James on religious experience, Charles Taylor on secular age disenchantment, Durkheim on religion as social glue. If you disagree, do it in conversation with them, not over their heads.

The arrogance hidden in innocence

- Declaring yourself “spiritual” without submitting your interpretations to a community of practice can become a subtle claim to spiritual immunity ... “I feel it; therefore it’s true for me.” But spiritual life is precisely the discipline of inspecting what feels good, flattering, or convenient.

- Traditions demand tests: Does this belief hold under suffering? Does this practice make you more honest? Do your intimates see growth? Without such checks, spirituality risks becoming an aesthetic ... candles and mantras layered over unchanged habits of ego defense.

- Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Hume’s dialogues both press the point: belief without critique is gullibility; critique without humility is hubris. The nonreligious spiritual stance often keeps the critique while skipping the humility.

The duplicity problem

- Duplicity here doesn’t mean malice; it means a split between what is claimed and what is practiced.

- Borrowed capital: using words like grace, karma, dharma, sin, salvation, mindfulness, and sacrament, stripped of contexts that give them depth and guardrails. It’s easy to romanticize “karma” until you must face its implications for justice and responsibility within its source traditions.

- Moral outsourcing: loving the ethical capital of religion (dignity, forgiveness, care of the poor) while refusing the shared disciplines that sustain it (tithing, service, confession, communal obligations). You enjoy the fruit while rejecting the orchard.

- Appropriation without attribution: adopting yoga, meditation, smudging, or Sufi poetry as personal decor while ignoring their provenance, vows, and ethics. Respect asks, Who carried this practice through persecution and poverty? What do I owe them?

- Anti-institutional exceptionalism: rejecting organized religion because some institutions were hypocritical, while trusting your own unorganized impulses as incorruptible. That’s a double standard. The self is an institution too ... full of factions, blind spots, and propaganda.

Why communities matter

- Religion is not just belief; it is apprenticeship. The Stoics had schools; Buddhist sanghas train attention and compassion; Jewish law constructs a life-world of justice and joy; Christian liturgy teaches a grammar of gratitude and repentance; Islamic prayer orders the day and soul; Indigenous ceremonies bind story to stewardship.

- These are not mere shells to be cracked for inner pearls. They shape attention, identity, and action over time. They hold you when your private inspiration dries up. They teach repair after rupture ... something “just vibes” rarely does.

Philosophers didn’t avoid religion; they wrestled with it

- Socrates submitted to Athens’s laws even as he criticized them; his “daimonion” was a religious notion. Plato embedded metaphysics in liturgical imagination. Aristotle grounded virtue in habituated practices ... again, community and ritual.

- Augustine and Aquinas synthesized classical philosophy with theology, insisting reason and revelation refine each other. Maimonides and al-Ghazali confronted the limits of reason without dismissing it. Confucius rooted ethics in ritual propriety; Laozi critiqued ossification without scorning wisdom. Kierkegaard agonized over faith’s paradox; Nietzsche diagnosed the collapse of shared meaning; James cataloged religious experience; Weber charted disenchantment; Taylor mapped the modern imaginary. None simply waved away religion as childish. They probed, argued, revised.

The false dichotomy: religion versus authenticity

- The slogan implies you must choose between heart and institution. False. A living tradition is precisely the marriage of moral imagination (heart) and shared practices (institution). When institutions calcify, prophets rise ... from Amos to the Buddha to Francis of Assisi ... to reform them from within, not by scorning the idea of a people, a path, or a promise.

- Authenticity is not doing whatever you feel; it is fidelity to what is true and good even when you do not feel like it. That is what religious forms try ... imperfectly ... to train.

So what does respectful, serious spirituality look like?

- Acquire religious literacy. Learn the vocabulary, history, and controversies of at least one tradition deeply. You can still dissent; your dissent will be meaningful.

- Credit your sources. If you meditate, learn where your method comes from and what commitments accompany it. If you quote Rumi, meet the Qur’anic world that formed him.

- Submit to practices you do not control. Try a season of structured prayer, Sabbath, almsgiving, confession, or pilgrimage. Notice how constraint can be a teacher.

- Find a community and a teacher. Not a cult of personality, but a tradition-bearer accountable to a community. Ask how they handle harm, money, and power. Accountability is part of wisdom.

- Embrace repair. When you harm, apologize; when harmed, seek just reconciliation. Religions obsess over repair because humans break things.

- Keep both lenses: reason and experience. Read serious texts; test insights in your life; let others interrogate your conclusions; revise.

- Practice gratitude for your inheritance. Whether you stay within a religion or not, acknowledge the line of caretakers who delivered the practices you cherish.

A better posture than “spiritual but not religious”

- Try this instead: I’m spiritually serious, and religiously literate. I am cautious about institutions, but I honor the traditions that midwifed humanity’s deepest questions. I borrow with attribution. I practice with accountability. I submit my inspirations to critique. I measure my insights by whether they make me more truthful, more courageous, more compassionate, and more reliable to others.

- That posture is humble, not haughty; grateful, not parasitic; integrated, not duplicitous.

Final word

If you’ve said “spiritual but not religious,” you likely meant: I won’t be coerced; I will seek what is good and true. Good. Keep that flame. But aim it toward the storehouses that kept the fire through winters you never had to face. The philosophers and faithful who came before you are not obstacles to your freedom; they are the scaffolds that make it possible. To honor them is not to chain yourself to their limits; it is to receive their gifts with gratitude, test them with courage, and pass them on ... brighter, truer, and more humane ... than you found them. That is how a soul grows up. That is how a culture remembers. That is how spirituality becomes more than a slogan.

Julia O’Hara 2025

THANK YOU for reading my work. I am a global nomad/permanent traveler, or Coddiwombler, if you will, and I move from place to place about every three months. I am currently in Peru and heading to Chile in a few days and from there, who knows? I enjoy writing articles, stories, songs and poems about life, spirituality and my travels. You can find my songs linked below. Feel free to like and subscribe on any of the platforms. And if you are inspired to, tips are always appreciated, but not necessary. I just like sharing.

YouTube Top Song List.

https://www.YouTube.com/results?search_query=julia+o%27hara+top+songs

Amazon PlayList

https://www.amazon.com//music/player/artists/B0D5JP6QYN/julia-o'hara

Spotify PlayList

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2sVdGmG90X3BJVn457VxWA

You can also purchase my books here:

https://www.lulu.com /spotlight/julie-ohara

I am also a member of Buy Me A Coffee – a funding site where you can “buy me a cup of coffee.”

https:www.buymeacoffee.com/JulieOHara