The Psychology of Being “Spiritual but Not Religious”

In the foreword to Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith, Richard Dawkins invites us to take an imaginative journey back thousands of years in human history, to a moment in Africa when we are a small hunter-gatherer hominin wandering in search of food. Suddenly, he hears a noise in the tall grass around him. That ancestor of ours faced at least two possibilities: the wind moved the branches and caused the sound, or the rustling in the brush meant a large-fanged predator was lurking nearby. If our ancestor fled assuming a predator when it was only the wind, the cost was low—some wasted energy and a little embarrassment. But if our ancestor stayed put and there really was a big cat, the cost could be death.

In short, the human mind tends to over-detect agency.¹ Wind is an inanimate force with no intention behind it, while a predator does have intention. This logic helps explain why the human brain may be predisposed to attribute intention or presence to ambiguous phenomena—a tendency that can, in turn, feed belief in invisible agents.

Those early humans began attributing intentionality to everything around them—in other words, they began to think that everything was alive, even things that were invisible. This gave rise to what is sometimes called the hyperactive agency detection device (HADD): a mechanism describing the mind’s tendency to detect agency from minimal information and to imagine invisible agents, laying the groundwork for animism and theism—that is, belief in gods or spirits.² If a Homo atheus ever existed, it evidently did not thrive against the Homo religiosus that emerged from this mechanism of attributing human-like intentionality to the natural world. In Darwinian terms, we are the descendants of those who fled the rustling grass, whether or not they guessed its cause correctly.

That human beings came to believe in one or several gods is perfectly understandable … their minds were already primed to detect agents.

Evolutionary psychology does not claim that humans began believing in gods all at once, nor that a “religion gene” exists. The most robust thesis holds that human beings inherited mental mechanisms useful for survival—agency detection, intention inference, the search for protection, the search for purpose, a tendency to remember striking narratives, and the cohesion produced by rituals—with ideas about spirits or gods emerging as a by-product of these mechanisms, later selected for culturally. Or, as anthropologist Pascal Boyer puts it,³ having a human brain does not mean “having religion,” but it does mean being able to acquire certain kinds of religious notions with relative ease. From there, mistaking a shadow for a burglar, attributing intention to the wind or a storm, or believing that an invisible agent can influence our lives and must be prayed to, can all be explained by the same underlying mental mechanisms.

A widespread quality found in the notion of deities is their strategic agency, which draws on theory of mind. Just as it is useful, when dealing with other humans, to attribute intentions, plans, and knowledge to them, it is easy to imagine that invisible agents like gods know, strategically and privately, what we do: who stole, who lied, who deserves punishment, who deserves protection. This makes them relevant to our moral systems and helps explain why so many religions end up linking gods, ancestors, and spirits with morality. Seen this way, morality does not originate in religion; and as has been demonstrated experimentally,⁴ priming (i.e., pre-activating linked mental associations) religious concepts can increase prosocial behavior in anonymous economic games—a finding that supports the idea that a watching god can function as a psychological mechanism of moral surveillance.

Another evolutionary pathway shaping our tendency to believe in one or several gods is the attachment system. Human infants depend on caregiving figures, and seeking the protection of a stronger figure is a basic adaptive mechanism. Believing in a divine attachment figure—invisible, protective, available, and onto whom early emotions of dependency, comfort, and security-seeking are transferred—is therefore an expected outcome. Not all gods are loving or protective, but it is common for them to take the form of a “father” or “mother” figure, which in a sense are natural templates for representing deities as attachment figures.⁵

The human mind tends to over-detect agency … a tendency that can, in turn, feed belief in invisible agents. 

And what about rituals? Evolutionary psychology has studied their role in belief in deities and in the intensity that religious experience can take on. One dimension of rituals is that they function as costly, hard-to-fake signals of commitment to the group—fasting, sacrifice, physically painful initiations, exhausting dances, or monetary donations—through which the group strengthens its cohesion.^6, 7 Additionally, our brains become highly activated by the excitement that typically accompanies religious rituals involving music, dance, cooperation, physical contact, trust, meditation, and heightened emotional arousal. Religious rites can activate reward pathways (dopamine), attachment and trust pathways (oxytocin), calm (serotonin), alertness (norepinephrine/adrenaline), and euphoria and analgesia (endorphins)—a combination that helps explain why rituals feel so intense and engage body, emotion, group, and brain all at once.^8, 9

That human beings came to believe in one or several gods is perfectly understandable from this view: our minds were already primed to detect agents, attribute intentions, seek protection, perceive purpose, imagine minds separate from bodies, remember mildly supernatural stories, and use rituals to bind groups together. It was a gradual process—as evolution always is—that led ordinary cognitive mechanisms to produce extraordinary concepts, such as the existence of one or several beings with divine characteristics.

So, where does spirituality come from?

Skeptic recently published “God Isn’t Dead: The World Is Becoming More Religious,”¹⁰ which showed that, globally, religious affiliation is projected to keep growing overall—driven not by conversion but by demographics, particularly higher fertility rates and younger median ages among Muslim and Christian populations, especially in Africa. That picture is accurate, and it is a useful corrective to Northern Hemisphere assumptions about religion’s terminal decline. But it describes a different phenomenon from the one this article is concerned with. The demographic story is about population-level growth in affiliation worldwide; what follows here is about individual-level psychology within the specific populations—chiefly the United States and Western Europe—where formal religious affiliation is, in fact, declining. The two pictures are not in tension: a population can be religiously non-affiliated in growing numbers in the West while religious affiliation still grows globally in absolute terms, driven by fertility elsewhere. The question this section asks is narrower and more psychological: among the people who are leaving organized religion, what happens to the cognitive machinery that evolutionary psychology has just described?

The same cognitive mechanisms that lead to belief in God(s) can also produce a “spirituality without gods.”

Just as evolutionary psychology and neuroscience (neurotheology) explain religion and belief in God(s), they can also shed light on “secular spirituality.” Several U.S. surveys show shifts in how people experience their spiritual lives. The Pew Research Center study “Spirituality Among Americans”¹¹ finds that 70 percent of U.S. adults consider themselves “spiritual” in some sense, while 22 percent identify as “spiritual but not religious,” 48 percent as both religious and spiritual, and 21 percent as neither. The share identifying as “spiritual but not religious” rose 8 percentage points over five years. In addition, the share of adults with no religious affiliation reaches 28 percent overall and 43 percent among adults under 30. Furthermore, 88 percent of those who are “spiritual but not religious” believe something spiritual exists beyond the natural world, even if they cannot see it, and 42 percent say religion causes division and intolerance.

Gallup’s “Religion and Social Trends” survey finds that just under half of U.S. adults describe themselves as religious, while 33 percent say they are spiritual but not religious, and 18 percent say neither—alongside a historic low of 20 percent of Americans who now say they believe the Bible is literally true.

A final data point, from the Springtide Research Institute,¹² focuses specifically on young people: 71 percent identify as at least somewhat religious and 79 percent as spiritual; three-quarters claim a specific religion, tradition, or worldview, including “spiritual but not religious,” while a quarter identify as atheist, agnostic, or “none.” 

The same cognitive mechanisms that lead to belief in God(s) can also produce a “spirituality without gods.” That is, HADD, theory of mind, attachment systems, and ritual do not disappear when religious affiliation declines—they simply find expression in activities such as yoga, meditation, contact with nature, or a felt connection to “energy” or “the universe.” In this sense, the demographic decline of organized religion in the West and the persistence—even growth—of secular spirituality are not contradictory trends; they are two faces of the same evolved psychology, one losing its traditional object of belief while the underlying mechanisms remain fully active.

We’re human. Not believing in God(s), not living a spiritual life, or not taking part in religious rites is, considering the evidence, something extraordinarily difficult to stop from happening—even when the god is gone.