Spiritual ≠ Religious

**Michael S. Horton** (0:00)
I would tell someone who's kind of working through these things, struggling through these things, spirituality is like nailing jello to the wall.
It's all mix and match. Make it up as you go, cafeteria, whatever helps you. But Christianity is a historical claim. And so it's either true or it's false, but it's not something you can make up. It's not something you could add to your Buddhism or to your Islam or to your spirituality.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
You often hear people say, I'm spiritual, but not necessarily religious.
The philosopher, Pierre Telliard Deschardins, said, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. I believe we are all in our own way, searching for a deeper connection to that spiritual side in order to elevate our lives.

**John Dickson** (1:10)
She needs almost no introduction. Oprah Winfrey, talk show host, producer, author, actress, and also one of the great proponents of being spiritual, but not religious. That clip is from an episode of her TV show, Super Soul Sunday, which ran for 10 years until 2021, where she talked to her guests about spirituality. Way back in 2002, Christianity Today published an article titled, The Church of O, naming Oprah as one of the most influential spiritual leaders in America. The Oprah effect has been described as a key factor in mainstreaming the New Age movement. Fast forward and now we're reading newspaper headlines like, Are We in the Middle of a Spiritual Awakening? and Spiritual But Not Religious Inside America's Rapidly Growing Faith Group. A 2023 study from the Pew Research Center found that 22% of Americans would describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. That's one in five people.
My guest today says this is not really a new phenomenon. The spiritual but not religious category actually has ancient origins. Everything does.
And it's been Christianity's dancing partner, although maybe we should say sparring partner, down through the ages. Where does the spiritual but not religious concept come from? What does it say about us humans? And why do so many people see it as preferable to Christianity? I'm John Dickson and this is Undeceptions.
Every episode at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics, that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to underieve ourselves and let the truth out.
It is remarkable what you've done. So, can you define spiritual but not religious in a way that works for the ancient, the medieval, and the modern descriptor?

**Michael S. Horton** (4:16)
Yeah, well, in brief, I chart the emergence of this strange fellow from the grave close of being a shaman to becoming a sage, a philosopher. And it's really remarkable that, you know, a lot of historians say that around the sixth century BC, something big happened across continents. And religions became less ritualistic and focused on this life, you know, getting the gods to do what you want now by giving them enough sacrifices and so forth, to thinking more metaphysically, philosophically about the afterlife and the soul.

**John Dickson** (5:02)
That's Michael S. Horton, a well-known theology professor from Westminster Seminary in California. He's the author of a bunch of books, including an enormous multi-volume project that charts the intellectual history of this spiritual, but not religious phenomenon.
I'm interested in volume one, Shaman and Sage, the roots of spiritual, but not religious in antiquity.
According to Professor Horton, before the sixth century BC, the stories about creation and the cosmos were mostly about reinforcing boundaries. Know your place in the grand scheme of things. Harmonize yourself with the natural order. You can see it in the myths of the age. As Horton points out, the great Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, which was read out in public each year, has human beings created out of the blood of the losing god Kinju, and they're created for the simple purpose of serving the gods their food, through temple offerings and so on. Public religion in this frame was about the gods, the priests and the people, all following their assigned roles in the great hierarchy of the cosmos. But outside this scheme, there was the shaman, a kind of medicine man, a spiritual entrepreneur, and people would go to him, and mostly it was a hymn, outside the city walls, outside the bounds of the cosmic order, as it were. And through his mediation, folks would be able to commune with the divine directly. They could commune with the powers and even with their dead relatives. It was a kind of private spirituality, unconnected to civic religion. And it became increasingly popular around the world about 500 years before Christ.

**Michael S. Horton** (7:08)