Is “Spiritual But Not Religious” Just Religion With Better PR?

Something interesting happens when someone announces they are “spiritual but not religious.” A quiet argument breaks out – usually inside their own head. They want to signal depth, not shallowness. They are reaching for something real. They just do not want to be associated with hollow performance, social gatekeeping, or teachings that have stopped holding up against life.

And they have often been burned: by services that felt mechanical, by communities that felt cold, by institutions more interested in membership than in meaning.

For Jews, this tension carries extra weight. Jewish identity is famously layered – ethnicity, culture, theology, practice, memory, and obligation all in one package. So when someone calls themselves “spiritual but not religious,” what exactly are they rejecting? God?

Community? Or something Judaism itself has long known – that form without spirit is hollow, and that the real question is whether the fire is still burning inside the vessel?

This article takes that question seriously. Not to score points for the synagogue, but because the stakes – for how we live, what we pass on, and who we become – are genuine. We want to ask whether SBNR is a protest worth hearing, a confusion worth untangling, or some of both.

What Do We Really Mean by “Spiritual But Not Religious”?

The phrase entered mainstream conversation in the late twentieth century, but the feeling it names is much older. Sociologists who study the SBNR movement find remarkable consistency across those who identify this way: they value personal experience, curiosity, and intellectual freedom. They draw on multiple traditions – yoga, mindfulness, occasional Jewish holidays, Rilke, maybe some Stoicism – assembling a private spiritual vocabulary from whatever seems to work. They are skeptical of hierarchies, dogmas, and institutional loyalty.

They want transcendence; they just want it on their own terms.

According to the Harvard Divinity Bulletin’s analysis of the SBNR movement, this stance often retains the functional features of religion – moral frameworks, meaning-making practices, beliefs about ultimate reality – while deliberately avoiding the institutional label. In other words, many SBNR people are doing religion. They are simply declining to call it that.

For Jews, the phrase carries a specific resonance. A person might call themselves “cultural” or “ethnic” without calling themselves “religious,” attending a Passover seder but not Shabbat services, lighting Hanukkah candles but not keeping kosher. Pew Research surveys of American Jews consistently show that substantial numbers of people who do not identify as “religious” still affirm belief in God or a higher power, still feel deeply Jewish, and still seek community and meaning. The desire is real.

The word “religious” has simply gotten complicated.

Jewish Sources on Spirituality, Ritual, and Relationship with God

Here is where Jewish tradition offers something the SBNR conversation often lacks: precision. The rabbis did not use the word “spiritual” the way we do today, but they developed an extraordinarily rich vocabulary for the inner dimensions of religious life – and they were relentless about insisting those inner dimensions could not float free of outward form.

The concept of *kavanah* – usually translated as “intention” or “direction of the heart” – sits at the center of Jewish prayer theology. Talmud Berakhot 31a derives from Hannah’s prayer (1 Samuel 1:13) that authentic prayer is *avodah shebalev* – “service of the heart” – an inner act, not merely a recitation. Hannah prays silently, from genuine anguish and longing. The rabbis hold her up as the model: prayer without inner direction risks becoming empty sound.

But here is what the tradition insists on: *kavanah* is not a replacement for practice. It is the soul *within* practice. Pesachim 50b distinguishes between performing mitzvot *shelo lishmah* (not for their own sake) and *lishmah* (for their own sake), and notes – with characteristic rabbinic realism – that even imperfect motivation is a legitimate starting point, because form precedes and eventually generates genuine spirit.

Parashat Terumah makes this architecturally concrete. God instructs Moses: Exodus 25:8 – “Let them make Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.” Not *in* it. *Among* them. The Mishkan is not a house where God lives; it is the structure through which God’s presence becomes palpable to the people who build and tend it. The physical act – selecting materials, donating, constructing – is the vehicle of encounter.

You cannot have the encounter without the container. But the container’s only purpose is the encounter itself.

Is “Spiritual But Not Religious” Just DIY Religion?

Let us take the provocative framing seriously: is “spiritual but not religious” just religion with better PR?

Sociologically, the answer is partly yes. When a person develops a consistent morning practice that includes meditation, gratitude journaling, and a set of ethical principles they live by, that person is practicing religion in all but name. They have a worldview, a practice, a moral code, and a narrative about human meaning. The Harvard Divinity Bulletin’s analysis uses the phrase “personalized micro-religion” – and it fits.

SBNR does not escape the structure of religion; it relocates religion from community to individual.

This is not a cynical observation. It is, actually, a sympathetic one. The person who says “I am spiritual but not religious” is often protesting something real – experiences of religion as hollow performance, tribal gatekeeping, or intellectual condescension. They are not rejecting God or depth.

They are rejecting the version of religion that felt like neither. And there is a long Jewish tradition of doing exactly that: the prophets spent centuries insisting that sacrifices offered without justice were an offense, not an offering. “What do I need your many sacrifices for?” God asks through Isaiah (1:11). That prophetic critique is not anti-religion.

It is the deepest pro-religion statement imaginable, insisting that inner life and outer form must genuinely correspond.

The real danger of purely self-directed spirituality – and here Chabad-style Hasidic teaching has something sharp to contribute – is the risk of becoming the architect of your own god.

When we curate our spiritual practices entirely according to our preferences, our spiritual life tends to confirm what we already believed, challenge us in ways we already find comfortable, and stop just short of genuine encounter with something genuinely other than ourselves. Covenant, by contrast, involves being obligated to something beyond personal preference. That is exactly what makes it spiritually serious.

Denominational Perspectives: How Different Movements Hear SBNR Language

The phrase “spiritual but not religious” lands differently across the Jewish denominational spectrum, and understanding those differences helps us locate where we ourselves stand and what conversation we are actually trying to have.

Orthodox communities tend to view SBNR with concern – not because they distrust inner life, but because they understand halakhah as the specific medium through which inner life is expressed and formed. Mitzvot are not optional spiritual supports; they are the covenant itself. The concern is that purely self-directed spirituality risks becoming idolatry of the self, substituting personal preference for divine command.

Orthodox thinkers will acknowledge that institutions can fail people and that *kavanah* is indispensable, but the answer to empty religion is not less religion – it is more genuinely inhabited religion, practice met with full consciousness and love.

Conservative Judaism tends to engage SBNR as a sociological reality worth meeting with honesty rather than defensiveness. The movement’s theological touchstone, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, modeled a Judaism of “radical amazement” – wonder as the foundation of religious life – while insisting that wonder without discipline becomes episodic and thin. His formulation captures the tension precisely: “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive… unless the person praying is readied for the utmost.” That kind of prayer requires sustained practice, not spontaneous feeling alone.

Reform Judaism shares some of SBNR’s instincts, having historically emphasized ethical monotheism and individual conscience over halakhic conformity. Reform perspectives on Jewish spirituality often frame ritual as a vehicle of meaning that can be reinterpreted rather than discarded.

For Reform thinkers, the SBNR impulse is understandable but incomplete: community, shared narrative, and even structured ritual – reimagined where necessary – are not optional extras but essential carriers of meaning across generations.

Reconstructionist Judaism, which understands Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, is perhaps most naturally in dialogue with SBNR sensibilities. It makes room for non-theistic and metaphorical understandings of God, values democratic communal creativity, and treats practice as a living inheritance rather than a fixed obligation. But Reconstructionist thinkers caution that even the most flexible spirituality needs shared language and communal structure to avoid thinning into consumer self-help.

Religion is reframed not as dogma but as a shared vocabulary for serious spiritual life – and that vocabulary, however open-ended, still needs to be learned and practiced together.

When Ritual Feels Empty: Reclaiming Meaning in Jewish Practice

Many people who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” are not rejecting God or depth. They are reporting an honest experience: the rituals felt empty. This testimony deserves a real response, not a defensive one.

Parashat Ki Tisa includes one of the Torah’s most shattering scenes – the people build a Golden Calf while Moses receives the Torah on Sinai. The traditional reading focuses on impatience and idolatry, but there is another layer worth sitting with. The people were trying to have spiritual experience without waiting. They wanted the encounter, the presence, the felt sense of divine connection – and when the structure that carried that encounter was delayed, they improvised their own.

The sin was not wanting nearness to God; it was demanding it on their own schedule, in a form of their own design.

The Talmudic tractate Shabbat discusses the laws of the Sabbath in extraordinary detail, but the entire system rests on a theological claim: Shabbat is not a list of prohibitions, it is *menuha* – a particular quality of rest and wholeness that cannot be achieved by simply not working. The form exists to carry the content. When we experience only the form and not the content, the honest question is whether we have not yet learned to receive what the form is offering.

Jewish spirituality, as scholars of Jewish religious life have observed, is unusual among world traditions in locating the sacred primarily in time rather than space, in community rather than solitude, in text rather than pure unmediated experience. This means Jewish spiritual technologies – Shabbat, study, prayer, lifecycle ritual, ethical practice – require patient learning to unlock. They are not instantly intuitive. They are more like a language than a shortcut: demanding to acquire, but capable of expressing depths that improvised, individually curated spirituality rarely reaches on its own.

The invitation is not to perform empty ritual because obligation demands it. It is to ask what a given practice is trying to teach, what relationship it is designed to build, what kind of person it is gradually forming – and then to bring those questions into the practice itself, not as a complaint but as a genuine inquiry.

Faith, Doubt, and Belonging: A Jewish Reframe of SBNR

Perhaps the most honest thing we can say is that “spiritual but not religious” names a genuine experience while offering an incomplete response to it.

The genuine experience is real: many people, including many Jews, have encountered religion as performance, as social pressure, as intellectual dishonesty, or as a system that excludes rather than welcomes. Their desire to step back and find something authentic is not laziness or selfishness. It is a spiritual instinct, and it deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms.

The incomplete part is also real: a spirituality that is entirely individual, curated, and unaccountable tends to confirm rather than challenge the self. It thrives in good seasons and struggles when we face loss, moral failure, or obligations that genuinely cost something. The tradition’s insight is that genuine spiritual life requires community and covenant – not because institutions are inherently trustworthy, but because growth requires friction, accountability, and the persistent presence of other people whose needs are different from our own.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks drew a distinction worth holding onto here: spirituality is the individual’s openness to transcendence. Religion is the shared language, story, and practice that shapes and sustains that openness across generations. Neither is sufficient on its own. Spirituality without religion becomes a hall of mirrors.

Religion without spirituality becomes a museum. The task is not to choose between them but to hold both honestly at the same time.

Parashat Kedoshim (Leviticus 19) opens with one of the most radical commands in the Torah: *Kedoshim tihyu* – “You shall be holy.” The command is addressed to a people, not to individuals in isolation. Holiness in this vision is not a private achievement – it is a communal project. We become holy through how we treat the widow, the stranger, the worker, the person who disagrees with us. Spirituality and religious life converge precisely at the point where they become accountable to someone other than ourselves.

That is not religion with better PR. That is religion doing its deepest and most demanding work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can I call myself “spiritual but not religious” and still be authentically Jewish?

Jewish identity has never been reducible to a single category, and there is genuine room in Jewish life for people who are still working out their relationship to practice, belief, and community. That said, the tradition would gently push back on “spiritual but not religious” as a permanent resting place, because Judaism understands the inner and outer dimensions of Jewish life as deeply interdependent. Calling yourself spiritual while staying genuinely curious about what Jewish practice might offer – and why it takes the particular forms it does – keeps the conversation alive in the most productive way possible.

Q: If rituals feel empty to me, does that mean I’m not spiritual or not religious enough?

Neither. The experience of ritual feeling empty is extremely common, and the tradition addresses it directly – the rabbinic concept of kavanah exists precisely because the rabbis knew that practice could become mechanical over time. When ritual feels hollow, the more useful question is usually: do I understand what this practice is trying to do? Have I learned enough about its sources, history, and community context to receive what it is offering? Sometimes emptiness is a symptom of unfamiliarity rather than a sign of fundamental mismatch. Exploring the meaning behind a practice often changes the experience of actually doing it.

Q: Is “spiritual but not religious” just another form of individualized religion?

In sociological terms, largely yes. Scholars who study the SBNR movement note that people who identify this way typically maintain consistent worldviews, moral frameworks, and regular practices that function exactly like religion – just organized around the individual rather than a community or institution. This does not invalidate the impulse behind SBNR, but it does complicate the claim to be “not religious.” A more honest framing might be: “I practice religion in a highly personalized way, and I have real concerns about what formal religious institutions often become.” That framing opens up more interesting and productive conversations than the either-or label does.

Q: How do different Jewish denominations view “spiritual but not religious” language?

Orthodox thought tends to be skeptical, viewing SBNR as a separation of inner experience from the covenant structure through which it should properly be expressed and shaped. Conservative Judaism engages SBNR as a sociological reality worth meeting with intellectual honesty, often through the lens of thinkers like Heschel who modeled deeply inner religious life. Reform Judaism is sympathetic to the protest dimension of SBNR while insisting that community and narrative are indispensable carriers of meaning over time. Reconstructionist Judaism is perhaps most naturally in dialogue with SBNR values, while still arguing that spirituality needs communal structure and shared language to avoid becoming thin consumer self-help.

Q: Do I need to believe in God to have a Jewish spirituality and not just “be religious”?

Jewish tradition has always made more room for doubt, argument, and non-standard theology than its external reputation might suggest. The Talmud is full of disagreement, and Jewish history includes rich traditions of wrestling honestly with God’s nature, presence, and apparent absence. Reconstructionist and some Reform frameworks explicitly make room for metaphorical or non-theistic understandings of God while still engaging fully with Jewish practice and community. The question “do I believe in God?” is worth asking with honesty – but in Jewish tradition it is almost always the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.

The choice between “spiritual” and “religious” can feel like a choice between authenticity and institution, between the inner life that matters and the outer obligation that grinds. But that binary may itself be the problem worth questioning. Jewish spirituality, at its most serious, has never accepted that split. The mitzvot are called *ot* – signs, signals of a living relationship. The rituals are not ends in themselves but invitations.

And the invitation, repeated across millennia in different forms and different keys, is essentially the same: come close, bring your whole self, argue if you need to, and do not confuse the map for the territory or the vessel for the fire. The fire is real. Whether we find it is not primarily a question of whether we call ourselves “spiritual” or “religious.” It is a question of whether we are paying attention.