Who Are the “Religious but Not Spiritual”?

Not everyone who questions traditional Christian beliefs leaves religion behind.

A growing and understudied group identifies as religious but not spiritual (RBNS). Unlike many religious “nones” or “dones,” these individuals may continue to identify with a religious tradition, participate in a church community, and value religious practices while questioning or rejecting some of the metaphysical beliefs traditionally associated with Christianity.

In the United States, approximately 10% of adults identify as religious but not spiritual. Of these, 91% identify with a religious tradition, including substantial numbers of Protestants and Catholics. Nearly half regularly participate in a church community.

This presents an intriguing picture: people may remain connected to religion even when their relationship to religious belief has changed.

Belonging Without Believing?

For some RBNSs, religion continues to offer something valuable even when traditional beliefs about God have become difficult to accept. Religious communities provide practices, rituals, moral formation, shared narratives, and forms of belonging that do not necessarily disappear when belief changes.

Philosophers and theologians have increasingly explored whether religious participation must depend upon certainty—or even belief—in particular metaphysical claims. Some approaches emphasize trust, hope, or acceptance rather than conventional belief. Others ask whether religious language and practices can remain meaningful even when someone no longer understands their claims literally.

This raises a provocative question: Does belonging to Christianity necessarily require believing all of Christianity’s traditional metaphysical claims?

Rethinking Christian Belonging

Christian identity has often been closely connected to belief: to be a Christian is, at least in part, to believe certain things about God, Jesus, salvation, and the world.

But the RBNS phenomenon complicates that assumption.

What should we make of someone who continues to participate in Christian worship, values its moral vision and practices, and identifies with its community, but can no longer affirm some of its traditional doctrines? Must the loss of belief necessarily mean the loss of Christian identity?

Perhaps Christian belonging is shaped not only by what someone believes, but also by practice, participation, moral formation, community, and shared life.

For the Godless Religion project, the RBNS phenomenon therefore opens a larger theological question: What counts as Christian belonging in an age of doubt, dissent, and changing belief?