Conflate: To fail to properly distinguish or keep separate (things); to treat (them) as equivalent.
Why Does Christianity Claim Spirituality?
Christianity conflates religion and spirituality in an effort to justify it’s existence by distracting secular thinkers from the fact that spirituality is a universal human capacity that doesn’t require belief in the supernatural. This confusion creates a false dichotomy—forcing people to choose between religious faith on one side and a life devoid of spiritual depth on the other.
How Does Christianity Claim Spirituality?
Religions in general represent the relationship between spirituality and religion backward. We’re told that spirituality flows from religion, that religious traditions invented spiritual practice, and that authentic spiritual experience requires religious frameworks. This narrative is historically false.
Spirituality—mankind’s innate need to understand the world and his place in it—predates organized religion.
Early humans engaged in ritualistic practices, contemplated the stars, and grappled with existential questions long before the first religious institutions emerged. As Arik Segev notes, spirituality can be understood as
“a routine practice dedicated to the cultivation of a contemplative mental mode in which one’s attention is directed toward reality as a whole, its foundations and unchangeable aspects, and the place of the observer and humankind within it.”
This definition contains no reference to gods, supernatural forces, or religious doctrine. Yet over time, religious institutions absorbed these pre-existing spiritual practices, rebranded them as exclusively religious activities, and successfully convinced much of humanity that spirituality and religion are one and the same.
The linguistic capture has been remarkably complete. In everyday conversation, “spiritual” has become virtually synonymous with “religious.” Meditation is widely viewed as inherently religious. Ritual, contemplation, and even the search for meaning itself have been reframed as religious pursuits, despite their universal human origins.
Three Critical Confusions
The Supernatural Prerequisite Fallacy
The most damaging confusion created by religious conflation is the false assumption that spirituality requires supernatural belief.
This circular logic—spirituality concerns the “spirit,” spirits are supernatural, therefore spirituality must be supernatural—creates an artificial binary that dominates public discourse: either embrace religious spirituality with its supernatural commitments, or accept a life entirely devoid of spiritual dimension. The possibility of secular spirituality, contemplative practice grounded in naturalistic understanding of reality, becomes conceptually invisible.
This impossible choice forces secular thinkers to either adopt supernatural beliefs unsupported by evidence or dismiss spirituality entirely as illusory fiction. Many choose the latter, inadvertently rejecting their own legitimate spiritual needs: the need for contemplation, for perspective on their place in the world, and for practices that cultivate wisdom and equanimity. By accepting the false premise that spirituality requires the supernatural, they abandon territory that rightfully belongs to anyone seeking deeper engagement with existence, regardless of their metaphysical commitments.
Institutional Gatekeeping
Religious institutions don’t merely claim that spirituality requires supernatural belief—they claim exclusive authority to define what counts as legitimate spiritual experience. When secular individuals develop contemplative practices through philosophy, nature immersion, meditation, or artistic engagement, religious voices often dismiss these as “not truly spiritual,” implying that authentic spiritual experience requires their frameworks, rituals, and theological interpretations. This gatekeeping serves institutional interests by maintaining religious monopoly over a fundamental human capacity, while genuinely confusing secular thinkers about the validity of their own experiences.
This authority problem reveals a fundamental contradiction: if religions can define spirituality, they can exclude secular approaches by definition, but if spirituality is genuinely universal—a human capacity rather than religious invention—then no institution has legitimate authority to gatekeep it. The question becomes whether we accept institutional claims to ownership over human experiences that predate and transcend any particular religious tradition, or recognize that contemplative depth and existential meaning-making belong to everyone regardless of metaphysical commitments.
The Vocabulary Deficit
Perhaps the most insidious confusion is linguistic. Religious traditions have developed rich vocabularies for describing spiritual experiences—contemplative absorption, ego dissolution, connection to something larger, the cultivation of wisdom and compassion—while secular thinkers lack equivalent language. When experiencing what religious people would call “spiritual experiences,” secular individuals struggle to articulate them without borrowing religious terminology that carries supernatural baggage they don’t accept. This vocabulary deficit forces many to avoid the word “spiritual” entirely, describing their contemplative practices in reductive terms like “stress management,” “mindfulness,” or “philosophical reflection”—words that capture something real but fail to convey the depth and significance of genuine spiritual practice.
The result is impoverished public discourse about human contemplative needs. We can either discuss spirituality only in religious terms, or avoid discussing it altogether, leaving secular approaches inarticulate and unable to name themselves. This linguistic gap prevents secular spirituality from being recognized as addressing the same fundamental human needs that religions address through different means, perpetuating the false notion that profound contemplative experience belongs exclusively to the religious domain rather than representing a universal human capacity that can be cultivated through naturalistic understanding.
Real-World Consequences
These confusions aren’t merely academic. They produce tangible harm in individual lives, public institutions, and collective discourse.
For Individual Secular People
When secular individuals internalize the message that spirituality requires supernatural belief, they face a dilemma. Their spiritual needs don’t disappear simply because they reject religious answers. The human need for contemplation, for perspective, for practices that cultivate wisdom and address existential questions—these needs persist regardless of one’s metaphysical commitments.
But if spirituality is understood as exclusively religious, secular people have nowhere to turn. Their spiritual needs go unmet, often unrecognized, sometimes dismissed as non-existent. They may seek fulfillment through inadequate substitutes: consumerism, political ideology, workaholism, or the pursuit of status. These substitutes provide temporary satisfaction but fail to address the underlying contemplative needs.
Others experience alienation from practices that could genuinely help them. Meditation, for instance, is an effective contemplative technique with well-documented benefits. But many secular people avoid it because they perceive it as inherently religious or “New Age.” They’re cut off from valuable practices by the religious framing that dominates public understanding.
Still others experience a kind of spiritual homelessness—they recognize their contemplative needs but find no community or framework to support their practice. Religious communities offer structure, shared practice, and social support for spiritual development. Secular individuals typically lack equivalent resources, leaving them to navigate their spiritual lives in isolation.
For Public Institutions
The religious monopolization of spirituality has systematically excluded contemplative practices from secular institutions. Schools, workplaces, healthcare facilities, and government organizations treat spirituality as a purely religious concern, something to be accommodated for religious believers but not integrated into institutional life.
This creates absurd situations. A hospital might provide a chapel for religious patients but offer no contemplative resources for secular patients facing existential crises. A school might excuse religious students for prayer but never teach contemplative practices that could benefit all students. A workplace might accommodate religious observance but never consider how contemplative practices could enhance employee wellbeing and wisdom.
The problem extends to policy discussions. When spirituality enters public debate, it’s almost always framed as a religious accommodation issue: Should religious employees get prayer breaks? Should religious students be excused from certain lessons? These are legitimate questions, but they obscure the deeper issue: humans have spiritual needs that secular institutions largely ignore.
Scientific research faces similar constraints. The study of contemplative practices and spiritual experiences has been hindered by religious framing. Researchers must carefully distinguish their work from religious claims, sometimes avoiding the word “spiritual” entirely to maintain scientific credibility. This makes it harder to study spirituality as a universal human capacity and to develop evidence-based secular approaches to spiritual development.
For Dialogue and Understanding
Perhaps most tragically, the religious monopolization of spirituality undermines dialogue between religious and secular communities. When religions claim ownership over spirituality itself, they position secular people as spiritually deficient—lacking something essential that only religion can provide.
This framing makes genuine dialogue nearly impossible. Religious believers and secular thinkers talk past each other, unable to recognize shared ground. Both groups experience contemplative needs, both seek meaning and perspective, both engage in practices that cultivate wisdom. But the vocabulary and conceptual frameworks are so different that these commonalities remain invisible.
Religious groups claim ownership of universal human capacities—the ability to contemplate, to find meaning, to develop wisdom—as if these were religious inventions rather than shared human endowments. Secular communities, lacking frameworks to discuss their own spiritual lives, either accept this claim (and thus accept their own spiritual inadequacy) or reject spirituality entirely as religious illusion.
The result is polarization where collaboration should be possible. Rather than recognizing different paths addressing the same human needs, we have competing claims about whether those needs are real, whether secular approaches are legitimate, and whether spirituality can exist outside religious frameworks.
Reclaiming Spirituality as Universal
The path forward requires reclaiming spirituality as a universal human capacity—one that religions address but don’t own, one that can be cultivated through secular means as effectively as through religious practice.
Defining Spirituality in Secular Terms
The first step is definitional clarity. Spirituality must be distinguished from supernatural belief. Segev’s definition provides a useful starting point: spirituality is “a routine practice dedicated to the cultivation of a contemplative mental mode in which one’s attention is directed toward reality as a whole, its foundations and unchangeable aspects, and the place of the observer and humankind within it.”
Notice what this definition includes: practice, contemplation, attention to reality, perspective on one’s place in the cosmos. Notice what it doesn’t include: gods, souls, supernatural forces, or religious doctrine. This is spirituality as a human capacity, not a religious invention.
Historical Precedents
Secular spirituality isn’t a modern invention. Throughout history, philosophical traditions have offered spiritual paths grounded in reason and naturalistic understanding rather than supernatural belief.
Stoicism, developed in ancient Greece and Rome, provided a comprehensive spiritual practice centered on contemplation of nature, cultivation of virtue, and acceptance of what cannot be changed. Stoics practiced daily reflection, contemplative exercises, and the development of wisdom—all without requiring belief in personal gods or supernatural intervention.
Confucianism, while sometimes classified as a religion, functions primarily as a philosophical and ethical system. It offers practices for cultivating wisdom, virtue, and proper relationship to society and cosmos, grounded in naturalistic understanding of human nature and social order.
Even Buddhism, often categorized as a religion, contains strong secular elements. The Buddha’s teachings focus on observable aspects of human experience—suffering, its causes, and practices for its cessation—rather than theological speculation. Many modern practitioners engage with Buddhist contemplative practices while rejecting supernatural elements like rebirth or karma as cosmic force.
Epicureanism offered another ancient path, combining naturalistic philosophy with contemplative practices aimed at achieving tranquility and freedom from unnecessary fears, including fear of death and divine punishment.
These traditions demonstrate that secular spirituality has deep roots. The religious monopolization of spirituality is a historical development, not a timeless truth.
The goal isn’t to create a new religion or to replace existing religions, but to recognize and support the spiritual dimension of human life for those who approach it through secular means.
Addressing Counter-Arguments
Reclaiming spirituality as universal inevitably provokes objections, primarily from religious quarters but sometimes from secular skeptics as well.
“Spirituality Without Religion is Meaningless”
This objection claims that spirituality derives its meaning from religious context. Without belief in the supernatural, contemplative practices become empty exercises, meaning-making becomes arbitrary, and spiritual experiences lose their significance.
The response is straightforward: this argument confuses one answer with the question itself. Religions provide answers to spiritual questions—answers involving gods, afterlives, cosmic purposes. But the questions themselves arise from human nature, not from religious doctrine.
Why are we here? How should we live? What matters? How do we face suffering and death? These questions emerge from human consciousness and our capacity for reflection. They’re spiritual questions not because religions ask them, but because they concern fundamental aspects of human existence and our place in reality.
Secular approaches offer different answers—answers grounded in naturalistic understanding rather than supernatural belief. These answers can be just as meaningful, just as profound, and just as effective in addressing human spiritual needs. The meaning doesn’t come from supernatural belief; it comes from genuine engagement with fundamental questions about existence.
“Secular Approaches Lack Depth and Tradition”
This objection suggests that secular spirituality is shallow, a recent invention lacking the depth and wisdom accumulated by religious traditions over millennia.
This objection is factually wrong. As noted above, secular spiritual traditions like Stoicism, Confucianism, and philosophical Buddhism have existed for thousands of years. They’ve produced profound insights, sophisticated practices, and demonstrated effectiveness in cultivating wisdom and addressing human spiritual needs.
Moreover, the depth of a spiritual path doesn’t depend on its age or institutional power. It depends on whether it genuinely addresses human spiritual needs and effectively cultivates contemplative understanding. A practice can be ancient and still be inadequate; it can be recent and still be profound.
The real issue isn’t depth or tradition—it’s visibility and institutional support. Religious traditions benefit from centuries of institutional development, cultural transmission, and social recognition. Secular approaches often lack these advantages, making them less visible and accessible, not less deep or effective.
“This Diminishes Religious Experience”
Some religious believers worry that recognizing spirituality as universal diminishes the special status of religious experience. If secular people can be spiritual too, what makes religious spirituality distinctive?
This concern misunderstands the claim. Recognizing spirituality as a universal human capacity doesn’t deny that religious approaches exist or that they’re meaningful to practitioners. It simply contextualizes them as one set of answers to universal human questions, one path among several for addressing spiritual needs.
Religious paths remain distinctive in their specific content—their theological claims, ritual practices, community structures, and historical traditions. What they lose is monopoly status, the claim that spirituality itself is exclusively religious.
Conclusion: Toward a Pluralistic Understanding
The religious monopolization of spirituality has created unnecessary confusion and conflict. It’s forced a false choice between supernatural belief and spiritual emptiness, excluded secular approaches from recognition and support, and prevented dialogue based on shared human experience.
The way forward is clear: we must recognize spirituality as a universal human capacity that predates and transcends any particular religious tradition.
Spiritual needs—for contemplation, meaning, perspective, and wisdom cultivation—are human needs, not specifically religious needs. They can be addressed through religious means, but also through secular philosophical practice, naturalistic contemplation, and evidence-based approaches to human development.
For secular thinkers, this recognition is liberating. It validates their contemplative experiences, legitimizes their spiritual practices, and provides vocabulary for articulating needs that have long gone unnamed. It allows them to reclaim spirituality without compromising their commitment to naturalistic understanding.
Note: I created this is article using AI tools, then I edited and refined it to reflect my views and opinions. But it contains ideas and/or information that I’m not completely familiar with and haven’t independently verified so I suggest you do so before relying on it. Follow this link for more information on how I use AI tools on this site.