The fastest growing spiritual identity you’ve never heard named

Pew Research defines SBNR adults as those who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, maintaining beliefs in souls, spirits, higher powers, energy fields, karma, reincarnation, or other transcendent concepts while explicitly rejecting institutional religious affiliation and participation. 22% of US adults fell into this category in Pew's 2023 "Spirituality Among Americans" report (N=11,000+), making it one of the fastest-growing identity categories in American religious life. The label was popularised in academic sociology by Robert Wuthnow's After Heaven (1998) and Wade Clark Roof's Spiritual Marketplace (1999), which charted the post-1960s shift from "dwelling spirituality" tied to single religious institutions to "seeking spirituality" drawing eclectically across traditions. Pew's typology distinguishes SBNR from religiously affiliated, religiously unaffiliated atheists/agnostics, and "nothing in particular" without spiritual practice. Approximately 79% of SBNR adults report praying or meditating, 51% engage with crystals, energy work, or astrology, and 65% believe in a soul that survives death, indicating active rather than passive belief. The category cuts across political and demographic lines, complicating simple narratives of secularisation.

Approximately 22% of US adults identified as spiritual but not religious in Pew Research's 2023 "Spirituality Among Americans" report (N=11,000+), or roughly 57 million people based on US adult population estimates. That makes SBNR a larger group than the United Methodist Church (approximately 6 million US members), the Episcopal Church (1.5 million), and most mainline Protestant denominations individually. The proportion has grown significantly: comparable Pew data from 2007 found roughly 14% in equivalent categories, meaning the SBNR share has risen by approximately 8 percentage points or roughly 60% in volume terms over 16 years. Institutional religious affiliation has declined sharply (Christian identification fell from 78% in 2007 to 63% in 2021 per Pew), but supernatural belief has remained relatively stable: roughly 83% of US adults still report belief in God or a higher power, while only 63% identify as Christian. The gap between supernatural belief and institutional affiliation is precisely where SBNR identity has expanded. Globally, the SBNR category is largest in the US and parts of Europe (Sweden 30%+, UK 19%) and smaller in highly religious countries.

Researchers debate this. One interpretation: SBNR represents genuine doctrinal coherence, a third path between institutional religion and secular materialism that maintains supernatural belief while rejecting institutional authority. This is the position of Robert Fuller in Spiritual but Not Religious (Oxford, 2001) and of more recent scholarship by Linda Mercadante (Belief Without Borders, 2014), which interviewed 85 SBNR adults and identified five coherent sub-types ranging from "Dissenters" who reject religion outright to "Casuals" who treat spirituality as wellbeing. Another interpretation, advanced by sociologists like Phil Zuckerman, holds that SBNR is a transitional state toward secular non-belief, with the supernatural component declining in subsequent generations. Pew 2021 data shows roughly 32% of millennials are SBNR or unaffiliated compared with 13% of those over 65, consistent with both interpretations: it could reflect a permanent generational shift or a transitional cohort moving toward fuller secularism. ARIS data tracking the same individuals over decades suggests SBNR identity is moderately stable: roughly 65% of self-identified SBNR adults retain the label 5 years later. What is not disputed is that it is a large, growing category with an internally consistent profile.

Pew Research 2023 surveys consistently find SBNR adults cite several reasons. Disagreement with doctrinal positions (particularly on LGBTQ inclusion, abortion, and women's roles) was cited by 60% of religious "nones" who left organised religion. Negative personal experiences with religious communities, including clergy abuse scandals (the Catholic Church abuse crisis is a frequently named driver in qualitative research, with US Catholic identification dropping from 24% to 20% between 2007 and 2021), accounts for a sizeable share. The perceived gap between stated values and institutional behaviour, particularly the politicisation of US evangelicalism per the 2020 PRRI report, drives departure for an estimated 25 to 30%. A belief that institutions are not necessary for genuine spiritual experience appears in roughly 60% of SBNR self-descriptions per Pew. Mercadante's qualitative interviews (Belief Without Borders, 2014, N=85) found that approximately 80% of SBNR adults had religious backgrounds and moved away deliberately, often in their late teens or 20s, making them distinctly different from "nothing in particular" adults raised secular. PRRI's American Values Atlas 2023 found 20% of former Catholics now identify as SBNR or unaffiliated.

Yes, and roughly 22% of Americans already identify this way per Pew Research 2023, with substantial populations across Europe, Australia, and Latin America showing the same pattern. Spirituality, defined as belief in and orientation toward something beyond the physical (souls, divinity, transcendence, energy, karma, reincarnation), does not require institutional membership, doctrinal adherence, or communal worship. The Big Three psychological benefits associated with religiosity in the wellbeing literature (purpose, community, transcendent experience) can be achieved through non-institutional means: meditation produces mystical-equivalent experiences in fMRI studies (Newberg et al., 2001), private prayer is reported by approximately 79% of SBNR adults, and yoga and breathwork practices have measurable parasympathetic nervous-system effects per the 2017 systematic review in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. The community aspect is harder to replicate outside organised structures: Sasaki et al. (2013, Psychological Science) found that the wellbeing-religion link is partly mediated by social belonging, which is one reason SBNR adults score slightly lower on social-support measures than actively religious peers but higher than non-spiritual unaffiliated adults. The Harvard Adult Development Study consistently identifies social connection as the strongest predictor of long-term wellbeing.

More common, with consistent year-over-year growth. The proportion of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated rose from approximately 8% in the early 1990s (per Smith and Snell tracking on the General Social Survey) to 28 to 29% in the Pew 2023 Religious Landscape Study (N=36,000+), one of the steepest religious-identity shifts ever recorded in US polling. Within that trend, SBNR has grown as a distinct sub-category: people who left institutional religion but retained supernatural beliefs. Pew 2023 found 22% of US adults are SBNR, up from approximately 14% in equivalent 2007 measurements. Generational data points strongly toward continued growth: 36% of Gen Z and 32% of Millennials identify as religiously unaffiliated versus 13% of those born before 1946, per Pew. Whether SBNR continues to grow as its own category or eventually transitions toward full secular non-belief is an open empirical question that generational tracking will resolve over the next 20 years. Comparable secularisation patterns in Western Europe, where religious affiliation collapsed earlier and faster (UK Christian identification fell from 72% to 46% between 2001 and 2021 per ONS census), suggest the SBNR sub-category may persist for at least one to two further generations before resolving.

Pew Research's 2023 Religious Landscape Study found that 29% of US adults now describe their religion as "nothing in particular," atheist, or agnostic, a category collectively known as "nones." This compares to approximately 16% in 2007, when Pew first conducted large-scale national religious landscape surveys. The rise is driven primarily by disaffiliation rather than immigration or demographic replacement: substantial numbers of Americans raised in religious households are reporting no religious identity by adulthood. Millennials are the most religiously unaffiliated cohort in modern US survey history, with approximately 40% describing themselves as nones. Projections from the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project suggest the nones share will continue to grow at least through the 2040s under most modelling scenarios.

Millennials (born approximately 1981 to 1996) are the generation most likely to identify as SBNR in current Pew data. They show both higher rates of religious disaffiliation overall and higher rates of maintaining spiritual beliefs compared to Gen X and Baby Boomers who left institutional religion. Gen Z shows even higher rates of non-affiliation than Millennials, but a smaller proportion of Gen Z non-affiliates describe themselves as spiritual, suggesting a possible generational shift toward more fully secular non-belief rather than the SBNR middle position. Older generations show the reverse pattern: they are more likely to remain religiously affiliated, and those who disaffiliate are more likely to retain conventional theistic belief than younger leavers.

Pew Research's 2023 "Spirituality Among Americans" survey found that SBNR adults engage in a distinctive set of spiritual practices that largely bypass institutional settings. 51% reported that they feel a deep connection with nature at least monthly. 43% reported meditating at least monthly, compared to 29% of religiously affiliated adults. 38% reported feeling a deep sense of wonder about the universe regularly. Only 2% reported attending communal worship services. SBNR adults were also notably more likely than religiously affiliated adults to report spiritual experiences in non-structured settings, including during time in natural environments, during creative activities, and during physical exercise. The profile is one of deeply personal, individually structured spiritual engagement with no institutional component.

British sociologist Grace Davie coined the phrase "believing without belonging" in her 1994 book of the same name to describe a pattern she observed in British religious life: a persistent, stable level of private religious and supernatural belief alongside a dramatic decline in institutional religious participation. The concept anticipated and framed much of the subsequent research on SBNR identity. Davie argued that institutional religion and private belief are separable social phenomena with different sociological drivers, and that secularisation theory had mistakenly assumed they would decline together. Subsequent research has largely confirmed the pattern Davie identified, particularly in Northern Europe and increasingly in the United States, while also noting that "believing" itself has shifted from traditional theism toward more diffuse spiritual belief in many non-participants.

Yes, substantially. Pew and Gallup data consistently find that SBNR adults have higher rates of belief in non-traditional supernatural phenomena than either the religiously affiliated or the fully secular. Approximately 60% of SBNR adults report belief in psychic phenomena, compared to around 45% of religious adults and 23% of secular non-believers. Belief in astrology, reincarnation, and spiritual energy in physical objects is also notably higher among SBNR adults than in either comparison group. This suggests that SBNR identity is not simply a diluted form of conventional religion but a distinct belief orientation that is more open to a wider range of supernatural claims, unconstrained by doctrinal frameworks that institutional religions use to define orthodox and heterodox belief.

SBNR adults in the US lean Democratic in their political affiliations more strongly than religiously affiliated adults, but less strongly than fully secular non-believers. Pew Political Landscape data finds that approximately 60% of SBNR adults identify as or lean Democratic, compared to around 70% of self-described atheists and agnostics and approximately 38% of weekly church attenders. On social issues, SBNR adults show high levels of support for same-sex marriage, abortion access, and marijuana legalisation, which distinguishes them clearly from frequent churchgoers. On economic issues, the SBNR group is more heterogeneous, with views closer to the general population median. The political profile is consistent with the SBNR emphasis on individual autonomy in belief, which maps onto liberal social positions more naturally than onto either conservative religious politics or left-secular economic politics.

The health research literature has generally found the strongest positive associations between institutional religious participation and health outcomes, rather than spiritual belief alone. A meta-analysis by McCullough et al. (2000) across 42 independent samples found that religious involvement was associated with significantly lower mortality, with a relative risk reduction of approximately 29%. The mechanisms proposed include social support from congregational communities, health-promoting behavioural norms, and psychological benefits of meaning and purpose. SBNR adults, who have spiritual beliefs but lack institutional community, tend to show health outcomes between those of regular religious attenders and fully secular non-believers. The community component of institutional religion appears to account for a meaningful share of its health benefits, independent of belief content.

WIN/Gallup International's Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism found dramatic cross-national variation in religious self-identification. Ghana, Nigeria, and Armenia ranked among the most religious nations, with over 95% of adults identifying as religious. France, Czech Republic, and Japan ranked among the least religious, with under 30% identifying as religious. The UK presents a striking case: WIN/Gallup 2012 found only 53% of British adults identifying as religious, yet much higher proportions reported believing in some form of higher power. Northern Europe follows the believing-without-belonging pattern most strongly. In contrast, in countries where religious identity is deeply intertwined with national or ethnic identity, such as much of the Middle East, South Asia, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the SBNR position is culturally less available and less common in survey data.