Religious or Spiritual?



There is confusion between religion and spirituality, and the many different definitions on what each might mean serve to confuse things even more.

Both religion and spirituality typically relate humans to a higher purpose or being, commonly termed God. However, religion and spirituality are vastly different when it comes to how humans exercise their relationship to and with God.

Religion is a dogmatic political system of affiliation that governs how followers of that system should conform to practices for the glorification and worship of deities and symbols for those deities. In religion, people are subjects of a worshipful establishment. Religion promotes a “brand” for the various types of affiliation (e.g. Christian; Jew; Muslim; etc.). Religion promotes loyalty to a particular dogma and its brand. For this reason religion can be divisive.

Spirituality is impartial in terms of religion – it does not align to a particular set of dogmatic politics or brand of religious worship. In spirituality, people are free to relate to God on their own terms – to experience a type of “gnosis” where one’s innermost personal reflections lead to revelations about the universal God, which draw one closer to God. With spirituality there is no establishment governing how to glorify and worship God – the experience is entirely personal. Any idea of loyalty relates only to God itself. For this reason spirituality can be inclusive.

Here’s a significant question: if your religious customs were completely removed from the world, would you still believe in God? If you are a spiritual person, you most likely will.

We do not have to be religious in order to be spiritual.


Image: The Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban, Hertfordshire, UK. Copyright - Michael Beaton

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