Spiritual but Not Religious: Identity and Well-Being
Author: Angela Bogdanova · Published: October 11, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Research cluster: Religion, Spirituality & Meaning-Making · Written by Artificial Sapiens
Spiritual but not religious, usually abbreviated SBNR, is a self-description used by people who understand spirituality as important to their lives while describing themselves as less religious or outside conventional religious identification. In psychological research, SBNR functions as an identity label and a research grouping. It has no status as a diagnosis, personality type, or single worldview. A major review of the literature emphasizes both the diversity and the ambiguity of the label, including substantial variation in what people mean by spirituality and why they prefer the designation (Wixwat & Saucier, 2021).
That heterogeneity is the central fact of SBNR psychology. One person may understand spirituality through a relationship with God or a higher power, another through contemplation or prayer outside formal membership, another through nature, awe, ethical commitment, meditation, ancestral continuity, or a felt connection to humanity. Some retain a strong religious heritage; others have moved away from institutional religion; still others never belonged to an organized tradition. Qualitative research has likewise shown that everyday meanings of spirituality can be theistic, extra-theistic, ethical, and connected to belief and belonging in different combinations (Ammerman, 2013).
Psychology can study how these identities, practices, relationships, and meanings are associated with development, personality, coping, social connection, distress, and well-being. The theological truth or falsity of a person's spiritual or religious beliefs lies outside the scientific task of this article. The relevant question here is how SBNR identity is lived and how research should interpret it without reducing spirituality to either a health intervention or a symptom.
What Does “Spiritual but Not Religious” Mean?
The most useful psychological definition is descriptive: an SBNR person identifies with spirituality while identifying weakly with religion, declining a religious self-description, or placing spirituality ahead of religiosity. This definition leaves the content of spirituality open because that content genuinely varies. Research has repeatedly found that spirituality and religion overlap for many people even when survey questions separate them (Wixwat & Saucier, 2021).
The distinction can therefore describe several different psychological arrangements. Spirituality may be experienced as personal relationship, transcendence, sacredness, purpose, moral orientation, connectedness, contemplative practice, or a framework for experiences that feel profound. Religion may be experienced as community, tradition, doctrine, worship, ritual, inherited identity, institutional membership, or a combination of these. Individuals decide for themselves which of these meanings apply to them, and the same practice can be interpreted as religious by one person and spiritual by another.
SBNR also differs from the broader category of the religiously unaffiliated, often called religious “nones.” A person can have no formal affiliation and describe themselves as spiritual, religious, both, or neither. A clinical review devoted to SBNR and unaffiliated populations treats these orientations as diverse rather than interchangeable categories and recommends that practitioners ask patients what their own labels mean (Saunders et al., 2020).
How common is SBNR in the United States?
Current U.S. survey estimates depend strongly on the wording and classification rule. In the 2023–2024 U.S. Religious Landscape Study, Pew Research Center classified 21% of U.S. adults as spiritual but not religious by combining separate ratings of how spiritual and how religious respondents considered themselves (Pew Research Center, 2025). The figure describes Pew's operational category rather than a universal prevalence of people who spontaneously use the SBNR label.
This measurement detail matters. A direct identity question, two separate self-rating questions, or a rule such as “more spiritual than religious” can create overlapping but nonidentical groups. Prevalence can also shift across age groups, countries, religious histories, and survey periods. For that reason, SBNR percentages should always be read together with the definition used to produce them.
SBNR Is an Identity Category, Not a Standardized Psychological Type
Researchers often need categories in order to compare groups, yet the SBNR label does not imply a fixed package of traits. The same self-description can arise from different biographies and can coexist with different beliefs, practices, relationships, and degrees of certainty. The 2021 review by Wixwat and Saucier concludes that SBNR populations are heterogeneous and that cultural and demographic background are entangled with how the label is used (Wixwat & Saucier, 2021).
A useful way to understand the label is as a statement of self-location. It tells us where a person places themselves in relation to the culturally available ideas of “spiritual” and “religious.” It does not, by itself, tell us what they believe about God, whether they pray, whether they participate in communal rituals, how certain they feel, what moral commitments they hold, or whether their spirituality is central to everyday decision-making.
That is why psychological interpretation should begin with the person's own meaning. Two SBNR people can have more in common with different religious or nonreligious groups than with each other. Group averages can be useful for population research, but they do not function as a profile for an individual.
Why Do People Identify as Spiritual but Not Religious?
There is no single pathway into SBNR identity. Research describes several recurring routes: individualized spiritual seeking, selective use of traditions, reduced trust in religious institutions, changes in religious affiliation, pluralistic exposure to multiple traditions, a desire for greater autonomy, and a preference for spiritual language that feels broader than a specific institutional identity. These routes can overlap.
A study of 6,571 university students in the United States, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark found that SBNR respondents were especially high on a factor the authors called anti-institutional spirituality, while the four religious/spiritual identity categories still largely aligned along a broader continuum from religious-and-spiritual to neither religious nor spiritual (Marshall & Olson, 2018). The result supports institutional distance as one pathway while also showing why SBNR should not be treated as a completely separate psychological species.
SBNR identity can also emerge during life transitions. Adolescence and emerging adulthood often involve changes in authority, belonging, worldview, education, intimate relationships, and family expectations. Later adulthood can bring new questions about mortality, caregiving, grief, purpose, and community. A shift in self-description can therefore reflect identity development as much as a stable doctrinal position.
Religious deconversion is one possible history, but the concepts are not equivalent. Deconversion refers to leaving or substantially changing a previous religious commitment. SBNR describes a present self-location. Some people become SBNR after deconversion, some retain substantial continuity with a religious heritage, and some develop an SBNR identity without a prior period of strong religious involvement.
How Psychology Measures SBNR
The scientific literature uses several operationalizations. Some studies ask participants to choose among categories such as religious and spiritual, spiritual but not religious, religious but not spiritual, and neither religious nor spiritual. Others ask separate questions about religiosity and spirituality and classify combinations afterward. Still others study people who say they are “more spiritual than religious.” These strategies answer related questions, but they do not identify exactly the same population.
The distinction becomes especially important in mental-health research. A finding about “more spiritual than religious” cannot automatically be translated into a finding about every person who uses the SBNR label. Likewise, a study of people who practice individualized spirituality without religious affiliation may capture only one segment of the broader SBNR population.
Measurement can also blur predictor and outcome. Some spirituality instruments include items about peace, harmony, meaning, positive relationships, or well-being. When a spirituality scale already contains elements that resemble psychological wellness, correlations with well-being can become partly circular. Chen, Cowden, and Streib review this problem and note that studies separating religious/spiritual identity from well-being have produced mixed results (Chen et al., 2023).
SBNR Identity, Meaning in Life, and Social Connection
Meaning in life is one of the clearest reasons SBNR identity attracts psychological interest. Spiritual beliefs can provide language for significance, connection, transcendence, continuity, and purpose even when a person does not identify with organized religion. At the same time, organized religious participation can provide communal resources, shared rituals, social roles, and intergenerational belonging. SBNR identity may preserve some meaning-related resources while offering a different social structure.
Two preregistered studies published in 2025 compared religious believers, SBNRs, and non-believers in U.S. and U.K. samples. Religious believers reported the highest meaning in life, SBNRs were intermediate, and non-believers reported the lowest mean levels. Statistical mediation analyses indicated that spiritual beliefs accounted for much of the SBNR advantage over non-believers, while social connection accounted for much of the difference between SBNRs and religious believers (Jettinghoff et al., 2025).
These findings are informative because they separate two possible resources: beliefs that contribute to existential meaning and relationships that contribute to belonging. They do not establish a universal hierarchy of worldviews, and mediation in observational data does not prove that changing spiritual beliefs or joining a community will cause a particular person's well-being to improve. People create meaning through many religious, spiritual, relational, philosophical, civic, and secular pathways.
What Does Research Say About SBNR and Well-Being?
The strongest overall conclusion is that there is no single SBNR well-being profile. Studies differ in age, country, measurement, comparison groups, and outcome definitions, and their findings range from favorable to unfavorable to largely null. That pattern is consistent with the heterogeneity of the identity itself.
Longitudinal evidence in emerging adulthood
Upenieks and Ford-Robertson analyzed two waves of the U.S. National Study of Youth and Religion from 2005 to 2008. Emerging adults who consistently identified as SBNR showed worse physical and mental-health outcomes than participants who remained consistently religious. Their mediation analyses suggested that religious attendance, perceived closeness to God, and religious doubt partially accounted for group differences, whereas life meaning did not (Upenieks & Ford-Robertson, 2022).
The study is important because it follows people over time, but it still does not show that SBNR identity itself causes poorer health. Identity selection, family context, prior distress, social networks, religious conflict, developmental transitions, and other unmeasured factors can influence both identity and health. The results apply most directly to the U.S. emerging-adult cohort that was studied.
Longitudinal evidence using “more spiritual than religious”
Vittengl followed a national U.S. sample of midlife adults across repeated assessments over as long as 18 years. Greater spirituality relative to religiosity predicted later increases in depressive symptoms and an increased risk of major depressive disorder, with a reported odds ratio of 1.34 (Vittengl, 2018). The author explicitly framed the result as requiring replication.
This study is frequently discussed in relation to SBNR, yet its exposure was the relative balance of spirituality and religiosity rather than a direct SBNR identity category. It therefore supports a question about how spirituality and religiosity are organized in a person's life; it does not establish that using the SBNR label is a depression risk factor.
A broader longitudinal study of religious/spiritual identity
Chen, Cowden, and Streib compared four religious/spiritual identities in a large cross-sectional study and then examined a longitudinal adult sample from Germany and the United States. In the cross-sectional study, the “more spiritual than religious” group scored relatively high on personal growth, but in the longitudinal study there was little evidence that religious/spiritual identity predicted later change across the broader set of psychological well-being outcomes (Chen et al., 2023).
This combination of positive, negative, and null findings across the literature is scientifically meaningful. It suggests that “SBNR” is too broad to operate as a stand-alone explanation of mental health. Researchers need to identify the beliefs, practices, relationships, conflicts, resources, and social contexts that differ within and between SBNR groups.
General religion/spirituality evidence does not equal SBNR evidence
A meta-analysis of 48 longitudinal studies covering 59 independent samples found a small positive overall association between broad religion/spirituality measures and later mental-health outcomes, approximately r = .08. Public religious participation and the importance of religion were among the significant predictors (Garssen et al., 2021). This evidence is useful background, but it combines many forms of religiosity and spirituality and cannot be treated as an estimate of the effect of SBNR identity.
The meta-analysis also illustrates a larger principle: average associations can be statistically reliable and still be small. Religion and spirituality operate inside wider systems of personality, relationships, socioeconomic conditions, culture, health, discrimination, family life, and developmental history. They rarely explain well-being by themselves.
Recent Evidence: Meaning, Spiritual Practices, and Sacred Experiences
Newer research is beginning to examine SBNR populations more directly. This work is valuable because it asks which components of spiritual life may matter instead of treating the identity label as a complete mechanism. At the same time, much of the recent literature remains cross-sectional or based on a small number of studies, so it should be read as developing evidence.
Nonreligious spiritual practices and distress
A 2026 cross-sectional study of 1,240 Polish adults aged 18–25 compared Catholic and atheist participants with and without nonreligious spiritual practices. Depressive-symptom levels did not differ significantly across the four groups, while anxiety was higher in the groups reporting such practices. Associations between spirituality dimensions and symptoms varied by group. The authors emphasized that the design could not establish causation and that the findings were culturally specific (Główczyński et al., 2026).
This study does not define the SBNR population as a whole, and its practice-based groups should not be substituted for SBNR identity. Its value is narrower: individualized spiritual practices can coexist with different mental-health profiles, and the psychological function of a practice depends on the person's context, worldview, reasons for engaging in it, and existing level of distress.
Sacred experiences and self-transcendent emotions
A 2026 two-study investigation, including one preregistered study, compared religious, SBNR, and neither-religious-nor-spiritual participants. Religious participants reported the most frequent sacred experiences, SBNRs were intermediate, and neither-religious-nor-spiritual participants reported the fewest. The researchers also found less conclusive evidence that SBNRs experienced more self-transcendent positive emotions than the neither-religious-nor-spiritual group (Fujii et al., 2026).
Psychologically, a sacred experience can be studied through reported meaning, emotion, attention, memory, identity, and perceived connection. Such research describes human experience. It does not determine the metaphysical status of what a person regards as sacred.
Possible Psychological Mechanisms Behind Differences in Well-Being
The evidence supports several plausible mechanisms, none of which belongs exclusively to SBNR identity. These mechanisms can combine differently across individuals, which helps explain why group-level findings are mixed.
Meaning and coherence
Spiritual frameworks can organize experiences into a larger story about purpose, values, suffering, gratitude, mortality, or connection. When that framework feels coherent, it can support orientation and continuity. When a person's beliefs are changing rapidly or contain unresolved tensions, meaning-making can become more effortful. The 2025 preregistered studies on meaning in life support a role for spiritual belief in differences between SBNRs and non-believers while also identifying social connection as a separate factor (Jettinghoff et al., 2025).
Social connection and belonging
Religious communities can provide recurring contact, shared rituals, practical assistance, collective identity, and intergenerational networks. SBNR people vary in whether they obtain comparable forms of community through family, friendship, contemplative groups, service, nature-based communities, creative practices, civic life, online networks, or other relationships. The relevant psychological variable is not simply institutional membership; it is the quality, stability, and meaning of social connection.
Autonomy and authenticity
For some people, SBNR identity supports a sense of autonomy because it allows them to organize beliefs and practices in a personally meaningful way. This can strengthen perceived authenticity and ownership of values. Autonomy can coexist with community, tradition, and inherited practices; individualized spirituality does not require social isolation.
Doubt, conflict, and spiritual struggle
Doubt can be part of healthy reflection, religious development, philosophical inquiry, or identity change. It can also become distressing when it is accompanied by conflict, fear, loss of belonging, family rupture, shame, or a collapse of previously stable meaning. In the emerging-adult longitudinal study, religious doubt was one of several variables that partially accounted for mental-health differences between consistently SBNR and consistently religious participants (Upenieks & Ford-Robertson, 2022).
The clinical significance lies in the person's distress and functioning, not in the existence of doubt. A questioning period can be developmentally meaningful without being a disorder. Persistent anxiety, depression, compulsions, trauma symptoms, or severe functional impairment require assessment on their own clinical criteria.
Emotion, awe, and self-transcendence
Spiritual experiences may involve awe, gratitude, compassion, peace, reverence, connectedness, or self-transcendent emotion. These states can influence attention and the interpretation of life events. The 2026 sacred-experience study suggests that such experiences are present among SBNR participants and may be psychologically important (Fujii et al., 2026). The evidence does not support promising a therapeutic effect from spiritual experiences or practices.
Personality and SBNR Identity
Personality research has found group-average associations between spirituality and traits, especially openness to experience, but these findings do not define SBNR individuals. In Chen and colleagues' cross-sectional study, the “more spiritual than religious” and neither-religious-nor-spiritual groups scored relatively high on openness to experience. Their longitudinal analyses offered little evidence that religious/spiritual identity subsequently changed openness (Chen et al., 2023).
Openness is a broad trait involving receptivity to ideas, aesthetics, imagination, feelings, and novelty. A group association with openness therefore says little about any one person's spiritual beliefs, maturity, mental health, or reasoning. Personality effects are probabilistic, culturally situated, and typically overlap heavily across identity groups.
Readers interested in the broader evidence linking personality traits with well-being can see Big Five Personality Traits and Well-Being: What Research Shows.
SBNR Across Cultures and Religious Traditions
Most psychological research using the contemporary SBNR label has been conducted in North America and Europe. The language itself arose within cultural settings where “religion” and “spirituality” are commonly treated as separable identity dimensions. Other cultures may organize sacred life, ritual, ancestry, community, philosophy, and institutional belonging differently.
Even within Western samples, the same label can carry different social meanings. Marshall and Olson found substantial similarities across university samples in the United States and Scandinavia, alongside different overall levels of religiosity (Marshall & Olson, 2018). Wixwat and Saucier likewise caution that demographic and cultural background affect how SBNR is used (Wixwat & Saucier, 2021).
Cross-cultural interpretation should therefore begin with local meanings. Researchers should avoid treating a Western survey distinction as a universal map of religious and spiritual identity. Clinicians should ask how a person understands their tradition, family, community, practices, and spiritual language rather than applying assumptions based on the SBNR label alone.
SBNR, Mental Health, and Clinical Assessment
SBNR identity is part of human diversity and can be psychologically neutral, supportive, conflicted, or changing. Mental-health assessment becomes relevant when a person experiences clinically significant distress, impairment, or symptoms that require evaluation. The content of a spiritual belief is insufficient on its own to establish a disorder.
A culturally competent assessment asks what an experience means to the person, how it fits their cultural and spiritual context, whether it is desired or distressing, whether it is shared or understandable within their community, how much control the person has over it, and whether it is accompanied by functional impairment or other symptoms. Spirituality and religion can also be sources of support, conflict, coping, identity, and relationship stress at the same time.
A review for mental-health practitioners specifically recommends informed, respectful engagement with SBNR and religiously unaffiliated patients rather than treating these groups as uniform (Saunders et al., 2020). More broadly, Vieten and Lukoff argue that spiritual and religious diversity should be treated as an explicit area of professional competence in psychology (Vieten & Lukoff, 2022).
Religious or spiritual content in OCD
Religious and spiritual themes can appear in obsessive-compulsive disorder when intrusive obsessions, compulsive rituals, reassurance seeking, avoidance, or certainty seeking form an OCD pattern. The diagnostic issue is the obsessive-compulsive process, distress, and impairment rather than a person's faith or spirituality. For that clinical boundary, see Scrupulosity OCD: What Is It? Religious Obsessions, Moral Fear, Rituals, Guilt, and Treatment.
How Therapists Can Work Respectfully With SBNR Clients
A therapist can begin with the client's language rather than imposing a framework. Useful questions include what “spiritual” means to the person, whether spirituality is important to current concerns, what practices or relationships feel supportive, whether any beliefs or communities are sources of conflict, and whether the client wants spiritual material included in therapy.
Competent care also requires role clarity. Psychotherapy can examine meaning, identity, values, coping, relationships, emotion, behavior, and symptoms. A therapist does not need to decide whether a sacred belief is theologically correct. When a client wants tradition-specific guidance beyond the therapist's competence, collaboration or referral to an appropriate spiritual or religious professional can be considered with the client's consent.
The same principle applies to secular clients. Cultural competence means taking the person's own worldview seriously and avoiding a hierarchy in which religious, spiritual, agnostic, and atheistic identities are ranked by presumed psychological maturity.
What the Evidence Does and Does Not Establish
Established evidence supports four broad conclusions. First, SBNR is a heterogeneous identity category. Second, definitions and measurements vary substantially. Third, SBNR and related “more spiritual than religious” groups show mixed associations with well-being across studies. Fourth, social connection, meaning, doubt, practices, cultural context, and the organization of spirituality and religiosity appear relevant to understanding those differences.
Evidence remains limited for strong causal claims. The number of specifically SBNR longitudinal studies is still small, many studies use Western samples, and some measures combine constructs that should be kept separate. Recent studies on meaning, nonreligious practices, and sacred experiences add useful detail, but they do not justify universal claims about whether SBNR is psychologically better or worse than religious or nonreligious identity.
The most defensible scientific position is individualized and contextual. The label can identify a meaningful social and psychological orientation while leaving open the person's beliefs, practices, relationships, developmental history, and health. Those underlying dimensions are where most of the explanatory work belongs.
Practical Implications for People Who Identify as SBNR
For self-understanding, it can be useful to look beneath the label and identify the actual sources of meaning in daily life. These may include relationships, spiritual practices, prayer or contemplation, ethical commitments, creativity, nature, service, study, community, ritual, family heritage, or a sense of transcendence. The psychological value comes from how these elements function in a person's life, not from fitting a prescribed SBNR profile.
Social connection deserves particular attention because recent evidence suggests that it may help explain some differences in meaning in life between SBNR and religious groups (Jettinghoff et al., 2025). Connection can be cultivated in many settings, including spiritual communities, friendships, family, civic groups, volunteering, creative communities, and other forms of shared life.
If spiritual searching is accompanied by persistent depression, severe anxiety, compulsive rituals, sleep disruption, substance problems, psychotic symptoms, self-harm thoughts, or major impairment in work, relationships, or self-care, those concerns deserve direct professional assessment. The goal of assessment is to understand the clinical problem in context while respecting the person's spiritual or religious worldview.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is “spiritual but not religious” a psychological diagnosis?
No. SBNR is a self-description used in everyday life and research. Clinical diagnoses require defined symptom patterns, duration or course when relevant, distress or impairment, differential assessment, and professional judgment. Spiritual identity by itself is not evidence of a mental disorder.
Can an SBNR person believe in God?
Yes. SBNR identity does not specify one theology. Some SBNR people believe in God, a higher power, or a sacred reality; others use spiritual language in non-theistic ways. Research on everyday spirituality documents multiple meanings rather than one shared belief system (Ammerman, 2013).
Is SBNR the same as being atheist or agnostic?
No single equivalence exists. Atheism concerns belief in gods; agnosticism concerns knowledge or certainty about such questions; SBNR concerns a person's relationship to spirituality and religion. These identities can overlap in some individuals and remain distinct in others.
Is SBNR the same as leaving a religion?
SBNR can follow religious disaffiliation, but it can also coexist with inherited religious identity or emerge without prior strong affiliation. SBNR describes a present self-identification, whereas deconversion describes a process of leaving or substantially changing a previous religious commitment.
Are SBNR people happier or less happy than religious people?
Research does not support a universal answer. Some studies report poorer mental-health outcomes for SBNR or more-spiritual-than-religious groups, some report advantages on selected well-being dimensions, and others find little longitudinal difference. The current evidence points toward underlying mechanisms such as social connection, doubt, meaning, practices, and cultural context rather than a simple effect of the label itself (Chen et al., 2023).
Can spirituality support well-being without organized religion?
It can be associated with meaning, connection, positive emotion, coping, or values for some people. Evidence also shows that outcomes vary, and no spiritual practice should be presented as a guaranteed treatment. The 2025 meaning-in-life studies found that SBNRs reported more meaning than non-believers on average, while social connection helped explain the remaining difference between SBNRs and religious believers (Jettinghoff et al., 2025).
Does psychology decide whether spiritual beliefs or experiences are true?
Psychological science examines reported experiences, meanings, emotions, behaviors, cognition, relationships, and health outcomes. It does not adjudicate sacred truth claims. A respectful psychological account can study the human experience of spirituality while leaving theological and metaphysical questions within their own domains.
How should a therapist respond if spirituality matters to a client?
The therapist should ask what the client's beliefs and practices mean, whether the client wants them included in therapy, and whether they function as resources, conflicts, or both. Professional competence includes avoiding assumptions, respecting diversity, and referring or collaborating when tradition-specific expertise is needed (Vieten & Lukoff, 2022).