"Spiritual But Not Religious"

The Problem With Spirituality Without Religion

Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous pronouncement that “God is dead, and we have killed him” captures more than the decline of organized religion. It reveals a profound transformation in how Western societies approach meaning, community, and authority. We live in what many consider a post-religious world, where the grand narratives that once structured human experience seem to have dissolved into fragments. Yet, as Fredric Jameson observed in Postmodernism, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the decline of grand narratives and church attendance since the 1960s has not led to their disappearance, but rather to the proliferation of smaller, more individualized forms of meaning-making, such as cults and new-age spiritual fads.

Since the 60s and still to this day, the prevailing view of the urban secular normie in North America when it comes to religion can be captured in a single, ubiquitous phrase: “I am spiritual, but not religious.” Ask people under fifty about their beliefs in any major city and you will encounter this answer constantly. It represents more than a personal preference. It signals a fundamental shift in how we conceptualize the sacred, community, and knowledge itself. Even among those who claim belief in some form of deity, their conception typically diverges sharply from traditional monotheistic frameworks, embracing pantheistic or heavily individualized interpretations that would be unrecognizable to previous generations of believers.

This phenomenon reflects a broader fetishization of diluted Eastern spiritualities that have been carefully stripped of their demanding practices and communal obligations. Buddhism and Hinduism, as they are popularly consumed in the West, become spiritual commodities that provide the aesthetics of ancient wisdom without the rigorous discipline or social commitments that these traditions actually require.

To understand what is being lost in this transition, we need to remember what religion’s social function actually was in human societies. Contrary to the simple-minded assumptions of many new atheist know-it-alls, who perceive religion only as a system of irrational superstitions at best, or a stupefying form of social control at worst, Religion has been a central feature of human societies throughout history for reasons that are rational, even essential to human evolution. Since I can only cover so much ground for such a colossal topic in a simple Substack article, for now, I will outline what I believe are the three most important functions of religion throughout history.

Religion as a Guarantor of Truth and Legitimacy

The first function of religion involves its role as an epistemological foundation. Most religious systems provide a source of authoritative knowledge, whether through divine revelation, sacred texts, or clerical hierarchies that interpret and transmit spiritual truths. This guarantor function prevents societies from dissolving into pure relativism by establishing shared frameworks for understanding reality. At the same time, this mechanism can easily ossify into theocratic authority that stifles intellectual development and critical inquiry.

This knowledge-guaranteeing role creates what we might call “popular dominant myths”, shared narratives that provide social cohesion and order. These myths are powerful because they claim transcendent authority, which makes them harder to challenge than purely secular ideologies. Philosophers from Voltaire onward have pointed out that this function can be corrupted, creating centralized structures that are prone to abuse and manipulation.

Religion as Social Glue

The second function of religion, and arguably its most crucial, is its role as a binding social fabric and a political-juridical framework for the reproduction of society. This social glue is facilitated through a set of ancestral myths, sacred texts,rituals, rules, and customs legitimized through eschatological narratives. Most crucially, religion is the social glue that binds people together in the absence of genetic blood ties. The word “religion” itself is often traced to the Latin religare, meaning “to bind”. Religion creates the rituals, customs, and shared practices that weave individuals from diverse families, clans, tribes, and social classes into coherent communities that can coexist within a single society. This binding function operates through what Emile Durkheim described as collective effervescence, the shared emotional experiences that generate group solidarity and a sense of belonging. Although this basic concept of social cohesion was theorized much earlier by the proto-sociologist Ibn Khaldun in his concept of “asabiyyah” (group feeling /social solidarity), which I discussed at length in an older video essay on The Political Philosophy of Dune, as some 1Dime fans might remember.

Many so-called “primitive” societies demonstrate this binding function most clearly, operating as religious communities without centralized doctrinal authority. These societies show that the social fabric created by religious practice can exist independently of formal theology. This helps explain why secular attempts to create community often fail, because they lack the ritualistic and transcendent elements that religion historically provided.

The misunderstanding of the distinction between spirituality and religion becomes obvious when people romanticize indigenous or ancient practices precisely because they appear less institutional. What they miss is that these practices were never simply individual pursuits. They were deeply communal activities that bound entire societies together.

Social Glue or Social Control?

Let us address the elephant in the room: religion has long been associated with social control. Those who are skeptical of religion, whether atheists, anarchists, or radical leftists, are more likely to see religion as a mechanism of social control rather than mere social glue. However, what if both characterizations are true? The line between social glue and social control is often not clear. Some form of binding force—one that functions through rules compelling obedience to authority and structures—is necessary for the reproduction of society itself. What might seem like social control is, in many cases, simply social order.

Critics of religion have a point: religion has often been used to legitimate power relations. The first role of religion, as a guarantor of knowledge, can be dangerous, as it can serve as a doctrinal legitimating mechanism for authority structures and power. The Catholic Church, for instance, legitimized a class that owned land, collected rents, and exploited the poor. This structure is actually far older, going back to shamanism, where shamans claimed access to knowledge outside the community and used this claim to build power. Stateless, communistic societies that were skeptical of hierarchy often made deliberate efforts to identify and be cautious of sorcerers, who used claims of transcendent wisdom to legitimize their own power. Pierre Clastres documents this dynamic extensively in his book Society Against the State.

As a result, spirituality without religion seems appealing to many precisely because it lacks an authoritative structure. However, spirituality without religion is without any structure at all; it is really about belief alone. If one looks at belief psychoanalytically, it is far less important than practice, as belief often boils down to wish fulfillment. Individual belief can lead to productive action; if it is used to fuel the will rather than mollify the mind, and in some cases, belief can even be manifested into reality, as William James discussed in his book The Will to Believe. But most of the time, at an individual level, belief functions as subconscious wish fulfillment and a way to rationalize for coping. In contrast, belief as action requires others to believe it too. For beliefs to metastasize and be practiced, it requires others to share those beliefs or act as if they do. People upholding beliefs is what makes them a norm, and a norm is what transforms into a social rule that must be obeyed. As others obey it, it leads to the reproduction of society.

For instance, it is one thing to believe in the concept of cosmic love, the love of the universe. It is another to obey the social rule of monogamy, which keeps society ordered and intact. If people simply believe something that feels good, it matters very little to those around them or even to themselves. What protects people from themselves is precisely the rules, which only work if others believe them too. This is what religion is.

Strong libertines who view any imposition on individual ego as an encroachment on their freedom may see religion as inherently authoritarian, but it need not be in the real sense. Authoritarianism refers to the concentration of authority and power in a few hands. State authority, economic authority, and religion do not require religious authorities to be in power. This is precisely the concept of the separation of church and state.

It is not without reason that the Founding Fathers of America, for instance, regarded organized religion, such as the Catholic Church in France, as a political institution at odds with liberty. Yet they regarded religion as deeply important to human society and actively promoted it within civil society. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, even created his own edited version of the Bible (“Jefferson Bible”), which emphasized the most “rational” parts of the Bible’s teachings and removed the “superstitious” otherworldly parts of it. Even the most secular of the founding fathers of the American Revolution, like Jefferson and Thomas Paine, believed that religion served an important purpose in promoting social harmony, individual virtue, social cohesion, and collective resilience.

It is for this reason that Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic book Democracy in America, saw religion as one of the greatest strengths of the United States, rather than a liability. This was unlike the radical factions of the Jacobins during the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, who saw religion as essentially at odds with human progress. Those who hold this radical atheist view tend to myopically regard religion as a backward ideology for social control, that people are “programmed” to believe, and therefore must be “re-educated” in the new society. But this problematic view is wrong for many reasons, one of them being that it fails to differentiate the social utility of ideology and religion, which are actually different things, and not just in the sense of religion as an organized institution.

Religion vs Ideology

Even if one believes the questionable atheist view that the discoveries of modern science and the comfort of today’s advanced industrial society make belief in religious deities an unnecessary burden on human advancement, this would only be looking at religious belief, and not religion as a social structure. This would be treating religion as ideology. But not all ideology is religion, even if all religion tends to be ideological as a subjective lived reality. What defines religion as a structure is its existence as an organized social system of institutions, authorities, rituals, and norms that binds a community, whereas ideology can best be described as a background meaning system of various presuppositions and grand narratives that structure, simplify, and rationalize the contradictions in reality in a way that can make sense of the world and/or one’s day-to-day life. In today’s world, most people, including highly religious individuals, are exposed to and influenced by many different forms of ideology rather than a single one, which is part of why an individual’s ideological commitment to supernatural beliefs or religious ideas is less important than the communal practices of religion that influence what people actually do.

The real social utility of religion lies in its collective functions, less so its function as a whole, whereas supernatural beliefs are comparatively the less useful component of religion, that is, when they operate solely as individual coping mechanisms rather than as collectively binding moralities that materialize in real practice. Atheists tend to only focus on scrutinizing the aspects of religion that allow people to escape reality, but where religion actually matters most is precisely its ability to materialize in reality.

The irony is that in today’s world, it is precisely the ideological component of religion, the “irrational” component of religion that new atheists loathe most, that has persisted in modern society, in the form of individualized spirituality. Meanwhile, it is the more rational collective functions of religion that have been lost most. However, even the “irrational” component of religious beliefs’ role as a coping mechanism serves a rational value of its own.

The crucial distinction is whether belief is shared within large-scale communities rather than as an individual private matter: beliefs are reinforced when people share them together as a community, whereas beliefs at the individual level essentially serve as mere convictions or as acts of faith. And the potency and endurance of one’s faith (if it operates solely at the individual level and is not acted out with others) is dependent on the strength of the will of the believer, which can be broken far more easily than a collective of wills bound together by communal religious practice. As Byung Chul Han argues in his book on the Disappearance of Rituals, the decline of religion has had an overlooked disempowering effect, which has possibly contributed greatly to rising rates of depression and suicide. Without religion to bind people together to make sense of human suffering, an individual’s spirit can more easily be broken by the misfortunes of life that hit them. Without a community bound by religious duty and transcendental meaning, the individual loses their will to live when faced with life’s most heartbreaking tragedies, which they cannot reconcile with a life worth living.

Religion as Defense Against Despair

The third function of religion concerns its role as a coping mechanism. Religion helps individuals navigate suffering, uncertainty, and mortality. It offers what Marx called “the heart of a heartless world”: comfort in the face of death, meaning amid chaos, and hope during despair. This coping function can take many forms, from promises of afterlife rewards to beliefs in cosmic justice through karma or divine providence. It functions as a coping mechanism to cushion the spirit, even if often at the expense of the mind. The pessimism of the intellect is often not well-equipped to handle the chaos of reality under conditions of deep despair. Religion fuels the optimism of the will, the will to believe in oneself and to keep moving forward.

This coping mechanism is also the aspect of religion that has attracted the harshest criticism. Marx condemned religion not for its community-building aspects but for its tendency to pacify the oppressed by directing their hopes toward otherworldly salvation instead of earthly justice. Machiavelli worried that Christianity made people too focused on the afterlife at the expense of civic virtue and political engagement. Nietzsche saw religious consolation as fundamentally life-denying, an escape from the hard work of self-creation.

Yet these critiques, while often insightful, miss the paradox of religious consolation. The illusion of divine protection or cosmic justice can foster remarkable resilience in impossible circumstances. The belief that one’s struggles have transcendent meaning can inspire courage and perseverance that sober rationalism might not sustain.

Why Spirituality Loses Its Power Without Religion

The contemporary preference for spirituality over religion represents the systematic dismantling of religion’s binding function while preserving its knowledge and coping functions in highly individualized form. When someone calls themselves “spiritual but not religious”, they are usually claiming access to transcendent truths about interconnectedness, energy, or consciousness while rejecting the communal obligations and shared practices that make religious systems socially effective.

This individualized spirituality is problematic precisely because it eliminates the collective enforcement mechanisms that give spiritual and moral ideas real social weight. Believing in karma or universal balance as a private conviction carries no practical consequence when others are not bound by the same belief. Without shared commitments and mutual accountability, spiritual ideas become personal coping strategies rather than organizing principles for communities.

The practical limits of this approach become clear when we consider how spiritual beliefs address social problems. Individual meditation or crystal healing may provide comfort, but they offer no framework for collective action against structural injustice. The privatization of spiritual experience turns it into a consumable product rather than a transformative practice.

Spirituality without community also tends toward relativism. When each individual becomes their own spiritual authority, determining their own truths about cosmic order or morality, the result is not liberation but fragmentation. The spiritual marketplace becomes just that, a marketplace where ideas are consumed according to personal taste rather than tested through communal life and shared struggle.

Woodstock (1969)

The Economics of Religious Decline

To understand why religion has declined, we have to look at the material conditions that once supported religious communities and how those conditions have been undermined by capitalist development. The transformation from feudal to capitalist social organization fundamentally altered the basis of human community, replacing stable, place-based relations with fluid, market-mediated interactions.

Capitalism’s constant need to mobilize labor and expand markets disrupts the geographic and social stability that religious communities require. Traditional religious life depends on continuity: stable communities where multiple generations share space, rituals, and mutual obligations. The capitalist demand for mobility, flexibility, and individual economic optimization works directly against these requirements.

The rise of bourgeois individualism, the idea that each person is primarily responsible for their own economic success and spiritual fulfillment, undermines the communal obligations of religious life. When individuals are encouraged to see themselves as autonomous economic agents competing in markets, the binding expectations of religious community appear as obstacles to personal advancement rather than sources of meaning.

This is why attempts to preserve traditional religion within modern capitalist societies are riddled with contradictions. Tensions appear wherever religious traditionalism tries to coexist with advanced capitalism. In such contexts, religious revival often functions more as cultural branding, nationalism, or social control than as genuine spiritual community.

None of this should be taken as a simple call to “go back” to traditional religion, as if the past several centuries of social transformation could be reversed through institutional reform or moral revival. The structural conditions that once supported dense, place-based religious communities have been fundamentally altered by capitalist development.

Contemporary efforts at religious restoration frequently become exercises in nostalgia rather than genuine renewal. They reproduce the aesthetics and language of traditional religion while accepting the very social relations that undermined religious community in the first place. The result is often a kind of spiritual consumerism: people selecting religious practices and identities that provide personal comfort without demanding real commitment.

The spread of megachurches, prosperity gospel movements, and individualized spiritual practices within formally religious spaces shows how market logic penetrates even institutions that define themselves against it. When religious participation becomes a matter of personal choice among competing options, rather than an inherited obligation embedded in a stable community, its social function inevitably changes.

This does not mean that authentic religious experience is impossible under contemporary conditions. It does mean that such experience will usually require forms of organization and discipline that run against dominant social pressures rather than with them. Real religious community today would have to consciously resist the individualizing and commodifying tendencies of capitalist culture, which is both a spiritual and a political task.

The Conservative Turn and Its Contradictions

We have been witnessing a growing interest in religion and traditional values in several Western contexts, particularly among younger cohorts. Even in countries like Canada that have third parties (unlike the USA, which doesn’t really have a fully leftist party), young people have increasingly been embracing conservatism, while the political left stagnates. Across the U.S. and Europe, polling data and recent election results show a stronger rightward and conservative presence in the broader electorate, alongside widespread disillusionment with social fragmentation and declining communal life. This should not surprise us. The loneliness epidemic, the collapse of third places, the erosion of stable employment and affordable family formation, the endless scroll of algorithmically curated content that substitutes for genuine human connection: these conditions produce a profound hunger for the communal bonds and transcendent meaning that religion once provided.

Yet here lies a paradox that most commentators refuse to confront: the economic system that political conservatives typically defend is the very force destroying the traditional values they claim to cherish. Capitalism does not merely permit the dissolution of religious community; it actively produces that dissolution. The market does not care about your parish or your congregation. It cares about efficiency, flexibility, and profit maximization. When career advancement requires geographic mobility, extended family networks dissolve. When housing costs consume seventy percent of household income, multi-generational households become impossible. When both parents must work sixty-hour weeks to afford a middle-class life, the time and energy for genuine religious participation evaporates.

This is why it is precisely in the most hyper-capitalistic societies, the major urban centers, the tech hubs, the financial districts, where traditional religion has declined most dramatically. San Francisco and London are not godless just because progressive ideology captured them; they are godless because the economic logic of these places may have made traditional religious arrangements practically impossible. The correlation between wealth concentration and secularization is not coincidental but causal. Liberal-progressive ideology more so functions as the ideological rationale for social decay under capitalism, rather than the principal cause of it.

Ideologies of Capitalist Decay

While mainstream conservatism tends to bemoan social decay without identifying its root cause, liberal discourse spins social decay engendered by capitalism as social progress, and at most seeks to accommodate it rather than identifying it as a problem. The rise of mental illness on a massive scale is treated as a result of “destigmatization” rather than deep social collapse. Population decline and stagnant economies are rebranded as positive “degrowth” developments that are good for the environment. The inability of people to afford a home gets re-positioned as “downsizing” to fit the “small is beautiful” eco-liberal narrative, and renting with multiple roommates in small apartments is marketed as a “community” lifestyle. Meanwhile, the liberal-humanitarian veils of multi-culturalism and promoting “diversity” get used to rationalize the mass immigration supported by capitalist governments (typically via Foreign Worker visas) to offset falling birthrates and allow capitalist employers to continue paying workers at low wages with minimal bargaining power.

Ideologies of decay aren’t exclusive to the left or right, however. The global decline in relationships gets rationalized by Red Pill manosphere ideology as men voluntarily “going their own way” after “becoming red pilled and waking up to the hard truths about female nature.” Meanwhile, the rise in celibacy and singleness among women as well gets rationalized by pseudo-feminist discourses as a free act of female independence that gives women more time to “focus on themselves” and achieve “personal growth” because they “don’t need men” anyway. However, it would be a mistake to blame the root cause of the increasingly polarized gender divide all on right-wing manosphere influencers, who are merely symptoms, just as it would be simple-minded to blame capitalist decay all on liberals, feminists, and communists as individuals. Ultimately, these polarized ideological currents are more products of the socio-economic environment to which they respond rather than being causes of it. That being said, one-dimensional discourses from hyperpolarized sides of the gender wars often pollute the discourse surrounding social problems and confuse our ability to actually get to the bottom of the matter, as they tend to either mindlessly scapegoat the symptoms of decay (reactionary discourses) or try to rationalize social decay as liberation (as liberal-progressive discourses tend to).

The Limits of Conservatism in a Capitalist Economy

The fundamental contradiction between the nature of capitalism and conservative values and traditional lifestyles poses uncomfortable implications for those who imagine religious revival can occur through winning the cultural wars and moral restoration alone. A genuine restoration of the religious community is impossible without a fundamental economic transformation. You cannot have stable congregations when your members must chase employment across the country. You cannot maintain religious traditions across generations when economic pressures demand constant adaptation to market signals. You cannot build the material foundation for family life, which is the bedrock of religious transmission, when young people cannot afford housing, healthcare, or children.

Modern Russia provides the cautionary tale. Despite banning expressions of progressive sexuality, restricting divorce, and officially promoting “traditional family values,” Russian society exhibits astronomically high rates of divorce, domestic violence, alcoholism, and social dysfunction. Why? Because Russia combines reactionary social legislation with oligarchic capitalism, systematically destroying the material conditions for stable family and religious life while using state power to maintain appearances. Legal enforcement of tradition is futile; the moment you need laws to maintain moral norms, you have already admitted those norms have failed in civil society.

Conservative morality and religious tradition only thrive when embraced voluntarily by families and communities that have the economic security to make traditional arrangements viable. Immigrant communities often outperform native-born populations in maintaining strong family structures and religious observance precisely because they have maintained collective economic strategies that capitalism tries to dissolve: pooling resources, supporting extended families, and creating informal safety nets. In other words, they practice a form of organic socialism that makes conservative values a matter of practical common sense rather than an aspirational political doctrine.

If young people genuinely want religious revival, they must recognize that such revival requires socialist economic transformation: guaranteed housing, healthcare, education, and meaningful work that would provide the stability for communities to form and traditions to be transmitted. Without collective institutions capable of resisting the atomizing pressures of capital, any “return to religion” will remain aesthetic nostalgia, a lifestyle brand consumed by individuals rather than a binding force capable of reproducing genuine community across generations. The conservative case for religion is, whether its proponents realize it or not, ultimately a socialist case.

The contemporary opposition between spirituality and religion rests on a false choice that obscures what both were historically trying to do. Spirituality without community easily collapses into narcissistic self-absorption. Religion without genuine spiritual life devolves into empty ritualism or crude social control. Both fail when they are separated from the elements that once made them powerful.

What is missing from most contemporary discussions is any serious effort to think about how authentic spiritual community might be reconstructed under present conditions. That would require moving beyond both the individualistic spirituality that dominates popular culture and the nostalgic traditionalism that imagines we can simply revert to earlier forms of religious life.

The real question is how the fundamental human needs that both religion and spirituality have tried to address, for meaning, community, and transcendence, can be met through new forms of social organization. Those forms would have to avoid reproducing the alienation of capitalist individualism on one side and the authoritarianism of rigid religious hierarchies on the other.

Seen this way, the crisis of religion and spirituality is at root a crisis of community. It cannot be solved by affirmation of private belief alone. It requires social and political transformations that create the conditions in which genuine human community, and with it a deeper form of the sacred, can flourish again.