The root cause of the modern spiritual gap is a mismatch between our outer progress and our inner orientation: our ability to shape the world has grown far faster than our shared ways of making sense of life. Our material power has exploded; our tools for meaning, purpose, and guidance have not kept pace.
For most of human history, religion and cultural traditions provided shared stories about where we came from, why we are here, what is good, and how we ought to live. These stories were not just abstract ideas; they structured daily life, anchored communities, and gave people a sense of identity and destiny. They told us who we were, what mattered, and how to face suffering and death.
Over the last few centuries, however, the authority of those traditions has eroded. The rise of science and historical criticism showed that many religious narratives were not timeless truths, but products of particular cultures and eras. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and evidence made it harder to simply accept inherited doctrines about God, the soul, or an afterlife. Sociologist Max Weber described this shift as the “disenchantment of the world”: a process in which phenomena once explained by gods and spirits are increasingly understood through rational, scientific accounts, draining the world of its old sense of mystery and sacred order.
Nietzsche captured this transformation with his famous phrase “the death of God.” He did not mean that a literal being had died, but that belief in a single, unquestioned religious framework could no longer serve as the foundation for meaning and morality. His warning was not about atheism itself, but about the vacuum that can follow when old sources of meaning collapse and nothing equally deep and honest replaces them—a potential slide into nihilism, where values and purposes seem arbitrary or empty.
At the same time, our capacity to understand and control the material world has grown dramatically. Science, technology, and medicine let many of us live longer, safer, more comfortable lives than most humans could have imagined. Yet none of this tells us what we should care about, how we ought to treat one another, or how to face loss, guilt, and mortality. We know more and can do more, but we are not necessarily wiser, more grounded, or more fulfilled.
In this new landscape, many people turn away from doctrine and toward personal experience, ethics, art, relationships, and inner exploration as sources of meaning. Philosopher Charles Taylor describes our age as one in which belief in God is no longer the default but just one option among many, a situation that produces a “nova effect” of competing worldviews and spiritual possibilities. This plurality gives us freedom, but it also intensifies a sense of being pulled in many directions at once, with no single, shared story to hold it all together.
Yet without a new, coherent narrative or set of practices to replace the old religious frameworks, the search can feel confusing and fragmented. Viktor Frankl observed that at the beginning of human history we lost some basic animal instincts that once secured our behavior, and in recent times the traditions that buttressed our behavior are rapidly diminishing; no instinct tells us what we have to do, and no tradition tells us what we ought to do, so sometimes we do not even know what we wish to do and instead either imitate what others do or submit to what others tell us to do. Frankl called this condition the “existential vacuum,” a state in which people suffer not primarily from material deprivation but from a lack of meaning and direction. We are left caught between conformity (following the crowd out of fear) and submission (giving ourselves over to systems that promise order at the cost of freedom and authenticity).
This is the heart of the modern spiritual gap. The outer world has changed faster than our inner maps. Traditional religions no longer function as unquestioned sources of meaning for many people, yet we have not fully developed alternative, reality‑based forms of spiritual orientation to take their place. Our tools for explaining the universe have improved, but our tools for answering “How should I live?” and “What truly matters?” have lagged behind. As Taylor suggests, we now live in a secular age in which faith, doubt, humanism, and various spiritualities coexist as live options, leaving many of us feeling both free and haunted by the question of what to ultimately commit our lives to.
If religion in its traditional forms no longer works for many of us, but the need for depth, orientation, and guidance remains, we need a different path. The next section explores one such path: a secular, grounded form of spirituality that does not rely on supernatural beliefs, yet still speaks to our need for meaning, connection, and inner growth.