Who Gets to be Spiritual?

Is It Time to Expand Our Definition?
Why limiting spirituality to religion leaves out millions of people having profound experiences.

By John Aher 

A few years ago, my friend Sarah—a self-described atheist and data scientist—came back from a solo hiking trip transformed. She kept trying to describe what had happened during a sunrise on a mountain peak: the sense of being connected to something vast and eternal, a feeling of profound peace that lasted for weeks afterward. But every time she used words like “transcendent” or “spiritual,” she’d catch herself and add, “Well, not spiritual exactly, since I don’t believe in God.”

This awkward dance around language happens more often than you might think. We’ve somehow decided that “spiritual” experiences belong exclusively to religious people, leaving millions of others—atheists, agnostics, the religiously unaffiliated—without adequate words for some of life’s most meaningful moments.

It’s time to reclaim spirituality from its religious gatekeepers.

The Great Spiritual Divide

Walk into any bookstore and you’ll find the “Spirituality” section sandwiched between “Religion” and “Self-Help,” reinforcing the idea that spiritual seeking requires supernatural beliefs. This wasn’t always the case. Some of history’s most celebrated thinkers used spiritual language without religious baggage.

Carl Sagan, the astronomer who gave us “Cosmos,” wrote that “science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” Albert Einstein spoke of the “cosmic religious feeling” that comes from contemplating the universe’s mysteries. Neither man was conventionally religious, yet both found profound meaning in what they experienced as spiritual dimensions of existence.

Christopher Hitchens, in the famous Munk Debate with Tony Blair in 2011 noted, “I’m a materialist…yet there is something beyond the material, or not entirely consistent with it, what you could call the Numinous, the Transcendent, or at its best the Ecstatic.” (Hitchens, Munk Debates)

Today, philosopher Sam Harris argues that we need to rescue spirituality from religion entirely. “People of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences,” he writes. The difference isn’t in the experience itself, but in how we interpret it.

So, what exactly are we talking about when we say “spiritual”?

Beyond Belief: What Spirituality Actually Feels Like

Rather than defining spirituality by what people believe, what if we focused on what they experience? When you strip away the theological baggage, spiritual experiences share some common qualities:

They involve connection to something larger than ourselves—whether that’s nature, humanity, the cosmos, or simply a sense of profound interconnectedness. They often include feelings of awe, wonder, or transcendence that shift our perspective beyond everyday concerns. They can bring deep peace, clarity, or insight that feels meaningful and lasting.

Think about the last time you felt genuinely moved by a piece of music, stood in wonder before a natural landscape, or experienced that sense of flow during creative work. These moments share qualities that people throughout history have called spiritual, regardless of their religious beliefs.

My friend David, a committed materialist who teaches philosophy, describes his morning meditation practice as “spiritual discipline.” When I asked him about the apparent contradiction, he shrugged. “I’m cultivating awareness, compassion, and wisdom. I’m working on integrating different parts of my experience. If that’s not spiritual work, what is?”

The Secular Spiritual Underground

It turns out there’s a whole underground of secular spirituality happening in recovery groups, mindfulness communities, and personal development circles. People are finding meaning, transformation, and transcendence through practices that don’t require belief in anything supernatural.

In addiction recovery, for instance, many people struggle with the “higher power” language of traditional twelve-step programs. But secular recovery groups have found ways to tap into the same transformative experiences through connection with nature, commitment to values, or simply the power of community itself.

Kevin Griffin, a Buddhist teacher and addiction counselor, writes about how meditation can become “another kind of high”—not as a replacement for substances, but as a doorway to the kind of transcendent experiences that help people heal. The key insight? These experiences don’t require religious belief to be profoundly meaningful.

The Dark Side: When Good Intentions Go Wrong

But here’s where things get interesting—and complicated. It turns out you can have all the problems that come with traditional spiritual bypassing without any religious beliefs at all.

Psychologist John Welwood coined the term “spiritual bypassing” to describe how people use spiritual ideas to avoid dealing with emotional pain or psychological wounds. Think of the person who insists they’ve “transcended” anger when they’re clearly just suppressing it, or someone who uses meditation to escape difficult feelings rather than process them.

The secular version looks different but follows the same pattern. The intellectual who analyzes every emotion to death rather than actually feeling it. The social justice warrior who channels all their personal rage into activism while never addressing their own trauma. The mindfulness enthusiast who uses meditation to numb out rather than tune in.

This parallel suggests something important: whatever human needs spirituality addresses—for meaning, transcendence, connection, integration—these needs exist whether someone has religious beliefs or not. The potential for both authentic growth and spiritual bypassing shows up regardless of your theology.

A Bigger Tent

Expanding our definition of spirituality doesn’t diminish its power or importance. Instead, it acknowledges that the experiences that give rise to spiritual seeking—the need for meaning, connection, transcendence, and integration—are broader than any single tradition or belief system.

This matters for practical reasons. In healthcare settings, understanding that patients might have spiritual needs that aren’t religious opens up new possibilities for healing and support. In education, recognizing that wonder and awe are natural human experiences can inform how we teach everything from science to ethics.

It also matters for social cohesion. In an increasingly polarized world, finding common ground in shared human experiences—the capacity for transcendence, the need for meaning, the power of connection—might be more important than ever.

The Science of Spiritual Experience

Modern neuroscience is revealing the biological basis for what we’ve long called spiritual experiences. We now know that practices like meditation literally reshape the brain, that feelings of awe activate specific neural networks, and that experiences of transcendence have measurable effects on stress, immune function, and overall well-being.

This doesn’t explain away spiritual experience—it validates it. The fact that transcendent states have neurological correlates doesn’t make them less real or meaningful, any more than understanding the brain basis of love makes love less profound.

If anything, the science suggests that spiritual experiences serve important functions in human development and well-being, regardless of how we interpret them theologically.

Making Room at the Table

So where does this leave us? Maybe it’s time to think of spirituality less as a category of belief and more as a dimension of human experience—one that’s available to anyone willing to engage with questions of meaning, connection, and transcendence.

This doesn’t require abandoning religious frameworks for those who find them meaningful. Instead, it opens up space for the millions of people who are having profound, transformative experiences but lack language to make sense of them.

My friend Sarah never did become religious after her mountain experience. But she stopped apologizing for using spiritual language to describe what happened to her. She joined a secular meditation group, started volunteering for environmental causes, and generally became more intentional about cultivating the sense of connection and meaning she’d discovered.

Was this spiritual growth? I think so. And I think it’s time we all got comfortable with that possibility.

The human capacity for transcendence, meaning-making, and profound connection doesn’t require a particular set of beliefs to be real and transformative. Maybe the question isn’t who gets to be spiritual, but rather: what happens when we make room for everyone who’s genuinely seeking?

John Aher has been sober and clean since 1981 and involved in Secular Recovery since 2014.  His primary interests, aside from sobriety and recovery, are in neuroscience, Interpersonal Neurobiology, the study of theologies and philosophy, and indigenous rights, history, and beliefs.  He is currently working on a book about Spiritual Bypassing and the solutions he’s found in AA as well as through theories of Embodied Mind, IPNB, and many forms and experiences leading to connecting the whole body within. His homegroup, the Freethinkers Living Sober Group, has also produced numerous workshops on Emotional Sobriety and the Varieties of Secular Experience available on their YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@freethinkerslivingsober.

For a PDF of this article, click here: Who Gets to be Spiritual.