In 1997, a team of psychologists offered participants four ways to describe themselves, including “spiritual but not religious.” A Gallup poll put the phrase to a national sample in 1999. By then the words were familiar enough to serve as a survey answer. Their history also includes older arguments about personal experience and newer places where Americans could explore practices across traditions. Those strands help explain how the phrase became recognizable and why people who use it can mean different things.
Older arguments for taking personal experience seriously
In his 1838 Divinity School Address, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke to graduating students at Harvard’s divinity school. He treated the ability to recognize moral truths inwardly as central to religion. He also asked prospective ministers to speak from their own lives and experience. The setting matters: Emerson was addressing people who were about to teach and preach, and his criticism concerned the kind of religious authority their work should have. The address gives an early American example of a debate about the place of intuition and firsthand experience in religious life. Emerson’s 1838 address
William James made a related distinction in the lectures published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience. In his second lecture, James sets the scope of his inquiry by focusing on how individuals experience and act in relation to what they regard as divine. He says he will spend little time on church institutions and theology. That was a choice about what to study. His subject was still religious experience, and his way of isolating it helped give private experience a place in the study of religion. William James, Lecture II
Places to explore practices across traditions
In 1962, Michael Murphy and Richard Price founded Esalen in Big Sur, California. Murphy recalled wanting a meeting place where people could explore what he called human potential. Esalen’s own accounts describe the influence of the psychologist Abraham Maslow and workshops in tai chi and Daoism led by the translator Gia-Fu Feng. In the same institution, people could encounter forms of practice and inquiry that ordinarily belonged in different settings. The workshops made personal exploration a social activity with teachers, scheduled meetings and fellow participants. Esalen is one example of the institutions that made these encounters possible. Esalen’s founding history · Esalen’s account of Maslow and Gia-Fu Feng
How the phrase entered research and polling
In the 1997 study, Brian Zinnbauer and colleagues asked 346 people from 11 groups to choose a description and also to define religiousness and spirituality in their own words. Nineteen percent chose spiritual but not religious. Most of the participants chose both spiritual and religious. The percentages describe the particular groups the researchers recruited. The study shows that the phrase could be offered alongside other descriptions and that participants could then explain what the words meant to them. Zinnbauer and colleagues, 1997 study
In December 1999, Gallup’s poll offered U.S. respondents a choice among religious, spiritual but not religious, and neither. Respondents could volunteer that they were both, but the poll did not offer that answer in the question. Thirty percent chose spiritual but not religious. The question’s structure is part of the history of the label. Presenting the whole phrase as a choice asks a different thing from asking each person independently about religion and spirituality. Gallup’s 1999 question and results
What the category measures today
In its 2023 U.S. spirituality survey, Pew Research Center asked separately whether people considered themselves spiritual and whether they considered themselves religious. It also asked about the importance of each in their lives. Based on the two self-description questions alone, 25 percent said they were spiritual and did not describe themselves as religious. After Pew incorporated the importance questions into its classification, 22 percent fell into the category. In that group, 45 percent still named a religious affiliation when asked about it separately. Someone might identify as Catholic or Protestant when asked for a religious affiliation and use different language when asked to describe their own outlook. Pew’s 2023 definitions and results · Pew’s findings on affiliation
Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study used graduated answers such as “very” and “somewhat” for each word. It classified 21 percent of U.S. adults as spiritual but not religious and 53 percent as both. Reading those numbers alongside the Gallup poll highlights how the response options shape the estimates. The dates establish when the phrase and related distinctions were measured. The surveys’ differing questions make the figures unsuitable as a single time series. Pew’s Religious Landscape Study, reported in 2025
Conclusion
Emerson and James gave personal experience a prominent place in American writing about religion. Institutions such as Esalen gave people settings in which to explore practices and ideas together. Surveys later turned the phrase “spiritual but not religious” into a category that could be counted. The history of the phrase is therefore partly a history of changing questions. A person’s sense of the sacred, connection to a religious tradition and choice of words about themselves can each tell a different part of their story.
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