Spirituality x Religion
What is the difference between spirituality and religion?
Are they basically the same?
Is one better than the other?
Is one or both obsolete? Indispensable?
In this blog post, I will examine these terms in an effort to better understand what spirituality and religion are, their pitfalls, and their essentiality.
What is Spirituality?
“Spirituality,” by definition, has to do with the things of “spirit” (rather than the things of “material”). In animistic cultures, everything has a spirit, so the whole world is “spiritual.” Belief in a “soul” or “ghosts” or a “god” would qualify as “spiritual” beliefs.
But spirituality goes much deeper than belief in “spirits” or the supernatural. Even those who do not believe in the supernatural can be deeply spiritual. For human life is imbued with the non-material. All of our thoughts, ideals, concepts, and symbols are spiritual — for we cannot touch an idea or boil a concept down to material parts. We cannot lay eyes on morality itself, but we are moved strongly by it. Meaning is spiritual. The meaning behind stories, poems, and songs are spiritual. To value anything at all is in some very fundamental sense, a spiritual act.
It is not possible to get away from “being spiritual.” It is built into who we are as humans. But it is possible to get more or less into “spirituality.”
“Spirituality” is our relationship with the non-material. It includes our relationship with value, purpose, and goodness — with symbols and story — with something greater than ourselves. Relating with “something greater than ourselves” is one of the main ways we grow as individuals. We value “justice” and then relate to it (through symbols and practices) and thus learn how to become more just. By valuing and relating to “community” we learn how to better participate in and cultivate community. To grow in one’s “spirituality” means to grow as a human person – to grow in one’s values, one’s character, and one’s virtues — to become a “better person.” This “self-transcendence” — this becoming a better version of oneself — is what “spirituality” (or at least healthy spirituality) is all about.
What is Religion?
“Religion” is collective spirituality. Individuals each have their own way of relating with the spiritual aspects of life, but if they come together and share these aspects with each other, what develops? Shared language for communicating with each other about their spiritual experiences. A shared mythos to explain these experiences. Shared practices which mutually support one another’s spirituality. Shared values about what is good and important.
Already we see that religion, by the very nature of being collective, involves a certain level of institutionalization — which is simply the “establishment of conventions or norms within an organization or culture.” Whenever people gather to practice their spirituality together, norms develop, and these norms can be a great asset to each person’s individual spirituality. There is irreplaceable benefit from practicing together, speaking together, reading together, learning together, eating together, singing together — communing with one another.
When societies do their spirituality collectively, they develop what Vervaeke calls “an ecology of psychotechnologies”* — a diverse, integrated, self-correcting system of tools which help us to function more effectively in the world. Religious ecologies of psychotechnologies tend to be particularly oriented towards correcting self-deception, self-transcending, and maintaining a just and healthy social order. These tools can greatly facilitate an individual’s own personal spiritual growth — and moreso — can facilitate an entire culture’s spiritual growth in a way which can be passed down generation by generation.
Spirituality x Religion
Religion and Spirituality are intimately and perhaps inseparably linked. Of the two, spirituality may be seen as more fundamental, as its focus is upon the individual, and any person can develop their own spirituality independent of others (while no religion can be developed independent of others). Yet individual identity (and personal spirituality) is always formed within the context of being embedded within a collective. One’s family and society provides shared language, mythos, practices, and values (a religious structure) and this in turn provides the ground from which one develops one’s individual spirituality.
Pitfalls of Religion and Spirituality
The primary pitfalls of religion all relate to becoming too rigid and authoritarian. Fundamentalism and literalism confuse belief for faith and reduce religion down to a set of propositions. In actuality, healthy religion does not see propositions (like creeds) as the most important thing to “know” but as helpful tools to serve the purpose of facilitating procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing. Religious governance and hierarchy can become corrupt and mis-managed like any organization. Religions have the ability to harm with instantiated “collective power” that a “spirituality” doesn’t have.
The structure of religion is also its strength. Non-religious spirituality (or unstructured religion) encounters pitfalls related to being chaotic and ungrounded. Without communal support, many people struggle to cultivate their spirituality or direct it towards larger, societal ends. Without a structure of how to do things (including accountability and experience of what works and what doesn’t) many spiritual people cause harm that could have been prevented with safeguards.
Analogies
It may be helpful to think of religion as the “form” and spirituality as the “content.” Religion embodies spirituality. And spirituality is the soul of religion. Spirituality is the water of the river, and religion is the riverbed — channeling the water (increasing its flow and utility while necessarily restricting it). These analogies give an idea of the inter-dependence of religion and spirituality, while indicating that there is a value-priority with spirituality as the water/soul/content… though it comes into excellence through being well-formed and actualized through religion.
Another approach is to see spirituality as providing a bottom-up perspective on relationship with the non-material — while religion provides a top-down perspective. Religion is about receiving the teachings and practices given — accepting the decent of the “greater” into oneself. Spirituality is about creating new teachings and practices – growing oneself more towards the “greater.”
Conclusion
Spirituality is an innate part of every person, and religion provides many helpful tools for channeling the development and impact of spirituality. Religion may be indispensable for passing down spiritual insights and an ecology of psychotechnologies, but religion fails when it becomes too rigid, focused on conformity instead of unity, and propositions instead of transformations.
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* Pyschotechnologies are technologies of the psyche. John Vervaeke defines them as “a socially generated and standardized way of formatting, manipulating, and enhancing information processing that’s readily internalizable into human cognition and that can be applied in a domain general manner” (ep42 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis)). Examples of psychotechnologies are: language, literacy, reflective writing, dialogue/dialectic, mindfulness, visualization, sacrifice, repentance, arithmetic, geometric thought, statistical thought, and graphing thought.
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Note: This post is essentially the content of a short paper I wrote in 2024 defining and differentiating Spirituality and Religion.
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Photo Credits:
Photo by Ümit Bulut on Unsplash
Photo by Shyam raj vishwakarma on Unsplash
Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash
Photo by Derek Sutton on Unsplash
