Spiritual but Not Religious?

Our bodies do not always do what we prefer. They succumb to illness. They smell bad when not bathed. They grow old and begin to weaken and deteriorate. Yet amid all this, we still cherish our bodies. We treasure them so much that the very thought of being divorced from them leaves us uneasy. The reason death terrorizes us so much is that the idea of being severed from our bodies seems to mutilate our very being and identity. We do not experience our bodies as something foreign to us, something apart from our personhood. Rather, we experience our bodies as an intrinsic and unique expression of our souls, the forum of our humanity in relation to others. Our bodies inherently bespeak of us and manifest our souls to the world. We cannot be divided from them without losing something of what we are and muting part of our soul.


In the 5th century, St. Augustine used the experience of body-soul unity as an analogy for the relationship between the Holy Spirit and the Church, stating, “what the soul is in our body, that is the Holy Spirit in Christ’s Body, the Church.” In light of contemporary cultural climate, I think it reasonable to expand St. Augustine’s notion more broadly. In the Marist poll done by the Knights of Columbus earlier this year, 41% of the current college aged generation polled identified themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” Of those Catholic millennials polled, 50% answered in like manner. Sadly, those who harbor such a belief seemingly are unaware that living spirituality without religion is akin to living as a soul bereft of a body. Just as a body gives expression to the human soul, so religion offers a “voice” to spirituality.

As the human spirit remains intangible and disconnected from the world without a body, so also is spirituality apart from religion. Religion is the body of spirituality. When we think of a human spirit that is no longer associated with a body, what do we call it? A person who has died. A ghost. Just as it is with the human person, so also it is with religion and spirituality. You take the body away, and spirituality becomes a specter, a disembodied soul adrift in the world. Ghost movies always seem to be tantalizing and intriguing precisely because we look upon the image of ghost, a human spirit detached from its body, and we perceive it as something eerie, bizarre, and distorted. We see it as an aberration of our humanity, a state that does violence to the full expression of what it means to be human, a circumstance that should not be. We see a spirit that ought to possess a body but finds itself peculiarly severed from one. We see the face of the unnatural. And this is what we do to our spirituality when we detach it from religion – we steal away its body and restrict its full expression. We divide it from the tangible, the palpable, and set it adrift with no direction, no destination, no lungs with which to breathe and no arms with which to embrace – only a spirit - solitary, vague, and reduced.

Religion may not always do what we prefer, just like our bodies. But this makes religion no less valuable to our spirituality than the body is to the soul. We would never willingly cast off our bodies in some misguided illusion of freedom of the soul. Let us treat religion with the same attitude and respect and permit our spirituality to experience a full life and satisfaction. Do not settle for a ghostly spirituality – unite the soul to the body and discover a more complete spiritual experience, one alive with the fullness of our humanity.