The Mental Health of the "Spiritual But Not Religious" (2024)

There is a long tradition of wondering about the mental health implications of religious practice. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung famously claimed to have seen almost no practicing Catholics in decades of clinical practice. Others have failed to replicate this result, but the idea that religious practice has some meaningful impact on mental health persists.

For Jung, speaking in 1939, the world could be divided into two categories: those who practiced a religion (which for Europeans of Jung's era primarily included Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism) and those who did not. Any serious contemporary consideration of this question, however, would need to introduce a third category. Many people today reject "organized religion," but do not quite identify as secular either. They report having a spiritual life while disavowing any particular religious practice. They are, in a phrase, "spiritual but not religious."

This fact introduces a new question for psychology: What are the mental health benefits of this spiritual attitude? One might reasonably suppose that they are positive. After all, many people who take this attitude engage in practices that are widely held to be beneficial to mental health, such as meditation, even if they do not accept the background theology of Buddhism or other major religions that encourage meditative practices. This spiritual orientation is also a part of 12-step programs that encourage individuals to find their own "higher power," outside the bounds of traditional religious belief. So, one might think that this kind of spiritual orientation to the world is associated with positive mental health.

Mixed Research Results

The empirical literature on this question, however, is decidedly more mixed. Consider an important 2013 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry. The authors consider data from approximately 7,400 individuals in England. Of these, most identify as either religious or as non-religious and non-spiritual, but about a fifth (19 percent) identify as spiritual but not religious. The prevalence of mental disorders in the first two groups (the religious and the non-religious non-spiritual) is roughly the same, but the spiritual but not religious are different: Among other things, they are significantly more likely to have phobias, anxiety, and neurotic disorders generally. In short, being spiritual but not religious is a significant predictor of mental distress, compared to the general population.

This correlation between spirituality without religiosity ought to give us pause, in part because it is confirmed by subsequent studies. For example, one more recent study (Vittengl, 2018) finds that people who are more spiritual than they are religious are at greater risk for the development of depressive disorders. As I said, all this is very puzzling. What explains these somewhat dispiriting findings? And what lessons should we draw from it?

Three Caveats

To begin with, we should note three caveats or complications.

First, as the authors emphasize, these findings say nothing about cause and effect. It could be that spiritual practices outside of traditional religion are a cause of mental distress. Or it equally well could be that people in mental distress seek out spiritual but non-religious practices. Or it could be that these two phenomena—being spiritual but not religious and experiencing mental distress—are common effects of some shared cause.

Second, many people do not seek their spiritual orientation, in the first place, because of its mental health benefits. People who are drawn to spirituality while rejecting traditional religious frameworks are in the first place pursuing their own spiritual values, rather than seeking mental health. So these correlations should not, on their own, lead anyone to doubt their own spiritual convictions.

Third, as all of the authors discussed above acknowledge, these correlations remain very poorly understood. This is partly because we are stuck in a dichotomous way of thinking about spirituality—on which people are religious or not religious—that the introduction of a third category remains something of a novelty. Furthermore, this third category remains poorly understood, in part because "spirituality" itself admits so many different understandings.

With those qualifications in place, however, I think these correlations ought to be better known and recognized by practicing clinicians. Many clinicians will see the development of a spiritual life in a client, outside the bounds of traditional religion, as a sign of psychological growth. And, indeed, it is often that. But it is, at the same time, something of a risk factor for many mental health disorders, and so is not exactly an unalloyed good.

Here as elsewhere, there are few unambiguous goods in therapy, and what may be good for one person may be concerning in another. Modes of evaluation that commend a spiritual life, without due reflection on the role and structures involved in that life, should be regarded with some caution. The empirical evidence, such as it is, suggests that being "spiritual but not religious" is a more ambivalent state than it is usually taken to be.

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