"Spiritual but not religious." Secular Buddhism. The Stoic revival. Mindfulness. The New Atheist critique. The post-Christian search for meaning, ethical depth, and contemplative practice — without metaphysical commitments.
A growing category of modern life: people who have left, or never joined, organised religion, but who pursue contemplative practice, ethical commitment, and a sense of meaning that earlier generations would have called religious. The "spiritual but not religious." The seculars-with-a-practice. The post-Christian, post-Jewish, post-anything seekers who do not want the institutions but do want the depth.
The category is now large enough to matter. In the United States, the religiously unaffiliated ("nones") rose from roughly 8% in 1990 to roughly 28% in 2024 — and the largest single subgroup of the nones identifies as "spiritual but not religious." Comparable shifts have occurred across most Western countries. Many of these people meditate, read philosophy, attend retreats, follow ethical commitments. They just don't go to church.
This deck covers the phenomenon, its sources, its major figures (Sam Harris, Alain de Botton, the secular Buddhist teachers, the modern Stoic revival, the mindfulness pioneers, the New Atheists), its critics (both religious and secular), and the question of whether secular spirituality is a coherent project or a transitional category on the way to something else.
"Secular spirituality" is a contested phrase. Different writers stake out different positions:
Wholly naturalist. No supernatural claims. Contemplative practice, ethical commitment, and meaning-making are real human activities; they require no metaphysical commitments beyond the ones science already underwrites. Sam Harris, Robert Wright, Susan Blackmore, Stephen Batchelor work in this register.
Open agnostic. Bracketing the metaphysical question. Practice and ethics first; if any metaphysical commitments emerge, fine, but they are not the entry-point. Most mindfulness teaching operates here. Jon Kabat-Zinn's "MBSR" (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) is paradigmatic: deliberately stripped of Buddhist doctrine for clinical secular contexts, while preserving the practice's structure.
Cultural-religious. Engaging with religious tradition as cultural-philosophical resource without doctrinal commitment. Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists (2012) argues that organised religion's institutional achievements (community, ritual, ethical formation, art) are too valuable to leave to believers; secular institutions should rebuild equivalents. Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart already pointed here.
Mystical-experiential. Pursuing the contemplative experience itself, with the assumption that whatever is experienced is real in some sense to be determined later. The "perennialist secular" position. Aldous Huxley's late work; Sam Harris's Waking Up (2014).
The boundary with traditional religion is fuzzy on one side and with secular humanism on the other. The category is a real one, but its edges are negotiable.
The demographic story. In the U.S., the General Social Survey and Pew Research have tracked the rise of the religiously unaffiliated for decades.
1972 (GSS first survey): 5% reported no religion.
1990: 8%.
2007: 16%.
2014: 22%.
2021: 29%.
2024 (Pew): 28% of adults; 36% of those under 30.
Comparable patterns in other Western countries: U.K., Australia, Canada, Netherlands, Scandinavia. Some have moved further (Sweden's "nones" exceeded 50% by 2020). The pattern is not uniform globally — sub-Saharan Africa, much of Latin America, the Muslim-majority world show different trajectories — but the wealthy-Western pattern is clear.
The internal differentiation matters. The "nones" include:
Atheists — those who explicitly deny God's existence. ~4-5% of U.S. adults.
Agnostics — those who think the question undecidable. ~5-6%.
"Nothing in particular" — by far the largest subgroup. ~17-19% of U.S. adults. Often retains belief in God or a higher power; just doesn't affiliate.
The "spiritual but not religious" cuts across these — many "nothing in particulars" identify so, as do some atheists (especially the Sam Harris cohort). The category is large, growing, and culturally consequential.
Several streams converge into late-20th-century secular spirituality.
The 1960s counterculture. Eastern religious traditions — Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism — arrived in the West through the postwar globalisation and the boomer generation's rejection of institutional Christianity. Many of those who took up Buddhist or Hindu practice did so without taking on the religious framing; the practices were imported, the metaphysics often was not.
Humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Abraham Maslow's "peak experiences" (Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, 1964); the Esalen Institute (founded 1962) as the laboratory of human-potential exploration; transpersonal psychology as a recognised sub-field by the 1970s.
The mindfulness clinical pipeline. Jon Kabat-Zinn's MBSR program at UMass Medical (1979) deliberately translated Buddhist mindfulness into secular clinical form for stress reduction in chronic-pain patients. The program's success (and replication; meta-analyses confirming clinical effects) brought meditation into hospitals, schools, and corporations.
The New Atheism. The post-9/11 wave of public atheism (Sam Harris's The End of Faith 2004, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion 2006, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell 2006, Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great 2007) gave atheism public confidence and articulated a new genre. Some New Atheist figures — especially Harris — went on to articulate a contemplative-secular practice.
The Stoic revival. Late-2000s rediscovery of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca as practical philosophers for moderns.
The most successful single strand of the secular spiritual movement. Jon Kabat-Zinn — biology PhD, Zen practitioner — founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at UMass Memorial Medical Center in 1979 and developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) — an 8-week program teaching meditation, body-scan, and mindful movement to patients with chronic pain and stress conditions.
The program was deliberately stripped of Buddhist framing — no doctrine, no temple, no Pali. The argument: the practice can be demonstrated effective on secular-clinical terms, and the Buddhist-religious framing limits accessibility for non-Buddhist patients.
The follow-on:
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) — Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, John Teasdale, 2002. Adapted MBSR for prevention of depressive relapse. Empirical track record now substantial.
Search Inside Yourself — Chade-Meng Tan, Google, 2007. Mindfulness-and-emotional-intelligence corporate program. Initiated the Silicon Valley mindfulness wave.
Mindfulness in schools, military, sports, prisons. Substantial scaled programs by 2020.
The "McMindfulness" critique. Ronald Purser's McMindfulness (2019) and others argue that secularised mindfulness — stripped of Buddhist ethics, divorced from any account of how to live, deployed as a stress-management tool to make workers more productive in toxic environments — has lost the practice's original critical-ethical-liberatory dimension. The critique has gained traction; the field's defenders are responding.
A separate strand from clinical mindfulness: a deliberate attempt to retrieve Buddhist teaching as a secular philosophy of life — full doctrine, modulated metaphysics.
Stephen Batchelor is the central figure. Former Tibetan and Korean Zen monk, disrobed in 1985, has spent four decades arguing for a "Buddhism without beliefs."
Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening (1997) is the manifesto. Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (2010) presents Batchelor's intellectual autobiography. After Buddhism (2015) develops the systematic framework.
Batchelor's argument: the Buddha's original teaching was a pragmatic-ethical-contemplative project, not a metaphysical doctrine. Rebirth, karmic cosmology, the various supernatural elements that Buddhism inherited from its Indian context, are not essential to what the Buddha was actually saying. The Four Noble Truths can be read as a phenomenological description of human suffering and the way out; the Eightfold Path as ethical-contemplative training; nirvāṇa as the cessation of reactive grasping. All without metaphysical commitments.
Other secular Buddhist voices: Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True (2017) makes the evolutionary-psychology case for Buddhist practice. Sam Harris's Waking Up (2014) presents a Dzogchen-inflected secular contemplative path. Doug Smith's Secular Buddhist Association.
The internal Buddhist response is divided. Some traditional teachers see secular Buddhism as a useful gateway. Others see it as cherry-picking, removing what makes Buddhism Buddhism, leaving a thin self-help shell.
The late-2000s and 2010s saw an unexpected revival of Greco-Roman Stoicism as practical philosophy. The reasons: Stoicism is naturally secular (its theology is compatible with atheism), it focuses on practice rather than metaphysics, and its writers (especially the Roman Stoics) wrote for non-philosophers.
The classical sources:
Epictetus (c. 55-135 CE), the freed slave who taught philosophy in Nicopolis. Discourses (recorded by Arrian) and the brief Enchiridion (handbook). Distinction between what is "up to us" (our judgements, intentions, reactions) and what is not (events, others' actions, the body's fate). Concentrate on the former; accept the latter.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), Roman emperor, Meditations — private notebooks not intended for publication. Stoic practice in the voice of a man who actually had to govern an empire. Probably the most-read Stoic text in the modern revival.
Seneca (c. 4 BCE-65 CE), advisor to Nero, Letters from a Stoic and the moral essays. The most literary of the Stoics.
The contemporary movement:
William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life (2008) opened the revival. Massimo Pigliucci (philosopher, ex-evolutionary biologist), How to Be a Stoic (2017). Donald Robertson's work on Stoicism and CBT (Stoicism's link to cognitive behavioural therapy is genuine — Aaron Beck cited Epictetus).
Modern Stoicism — the annual "Stoicon" conferences, the "Stoic Week" exercises, online communities. Non-academic, practice-oriented, deliberately ecumenical with other secular-spiritual approaches.
Sam Harris (b. 1967) — neuroscientist (UCLA PhD, 2009), public intellectual, and the most influential contemporary advocate of secular contemplative practice.
Harris's first book, The End of Faith (2004), was a New Atheist polemic against religious belief. But his later work moved toward articulating a positive secular spirituality.
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014) is the central text. Harris draws on Theravada vipassana training (with U Pandita), Tibetan Dzogchen practice (with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Tsoknyi Rinpoche), and his own neuroscience training to argue for two claims.
First: the contemplative experience is real and reliably accessible through training. The dissolution of the felt sense of self, the recognition of awareness as already free of the apparent constructed self, are not mystical claims but reproducible facts of contemplative experience.
Second: this can be pursued without religious metaphysics. The practices work whether or not karma, rebirth, or theistic claims are true. The reduction of suffering and the discovery of awareness's already-liberated nature are available as direct experience.
Harris's 2018 launch of the Waking Up meditation app extended the project. The app teaches a Dzogchen-inflected secular contemplative practice, includes substantial guest-teacher content (Joseph Goldstein, Loch Kelly, others), and has reached millions of users.
Harris is intellectually sharp, philosophically literate, and willing to argue for unfashionable positions. His secular spirituality is rigorous in a way many Western post-religious projects are not.
Alain de Botton (b. 1969) — Swiss-British essayist, founder of The School of Life (London, 2008), advocate for a "religion for atheists."
Religion for Atheists (2012) is the central work. The argument: organised religion has solved practical problems of human life — community formation, moral education, art that consoles, ritual that marks transitions, calendar that organises attention to recurring themes — that secular modernity has not solved. Atheists who simply walk away from religion lose access to these institutional achievements without replacing them. The grown-up secular response is not denunciation but selective borrowing.
De Botton proposes specific institutional moves: secular temples (a planned Temple to Perspective in London, never built); restaurants designed for stranger-conversation; art museums organised around emotional rather than chronological categories; companies that take ritual seriously.
The School of Life — de Botton's institutional embodiment of the project — runs courses, publishes books, produces YouTube content addressing emotional and ethical questions. Its catalog is essentially a secular curriculum of life-skills traditional religions used to teach: how to grieve, how to love, how to deal with envy, how to think about death.
The critics: de Botton's "religion lite" misses the depth that religious commitment — including its harder, less consoling aspects — provides. The fans: at minimum, de Botton has given secular life a richer institutional vocabulary than the New Atheist polemics did.
The post-9/11 New Atheist wave shaped the public reception of religion in the early 2000s. The major books:
Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004), Letter to a Christian Nation (2006).
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006).
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006).
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great (2007).
The shared argument: religious belief is intellectually unjustified (the empirical and philosophical case for God's existence is weak); morally damaging (religion produces violence, discrimination, ignorance); and culturally deferred to in ways that other unjustified belief systems are not. The remedy: open public criticism, social marginalisation of religious authority, replacement of religious frameworks with secular-scientific ones.
The internal divisions: Harris was always more open to contemplative practice and to a "spirituality without religion" than Dawkins or Dennett; Hitchens treasured certain aspects of religious literature even while attacking religious institutions.
The legacy: by the late 2010s, the New Atheist movement had largely fragmented. Harris went toward secular spirituality. Dawkins has remained committed to evolutionary-scientific atheism but has become increasingly controversial on adjacent culture-war issues. Hitchens died in 2011. Dennett continued academic work; died 2024.
The lasting effects: a generation of secular intellectuals who take it as given that religious claims should be evaluated on the same terms as any other claims; a public language for atheist self-identification; and — for those with contemplative interests — a frame within which secular spirituality could be articulated without slipping back into the religious frame.
The most demographically significant single secular-spiritual practice in the West. Yoga in 2026 is a roughly $90B global industry; ~36 million U.S. practitioners; ~300 million globally.
The historical irony is sharp. Yoga in the classical tradition (Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras, c. 200-400 CE) is a contemplative-philosophical path with eight limbs, of which only one (āsana, posture) is the centre of contemporary Western yoga. The remaining limbs (ethics, breath, sense-withdrawal, concentration, meditation, absorption) have been substantially trimmed in most studio yoga.
The transmission story: 19th-century Hindu reformers (Vivekananda's 1893 Chicago World Parliament appearance; Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, 1946) introduced yoga to Western audiences; mid-20th-century gurus (Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, Bikram Choudhury) systematised the postural traditions for global export; the late-20th-century Western fitness industry absorbed it.
The result is genuinely secular for most practitioners. Yoga in a contemporary studio is exercise + stretching + breathing + meditation-lite, with vague spiritual framing that most participants neither commit to nor reject.
The retrieval movement: serious practitioners often discover, over years, the deeper traditions — Hatha yoga's tantric-physiological framework, Patañjali's contemplative philosophy, the Bhagavad Gītā's ethical teaching. The studio is sometimes a gateway. Some practitioners stay at the level of fitness; some move toward more thoroughly traditional engagement; many remain in the secular-spiritual middle ground.
The 21st-century psychedelic research revival (Johns Hopkins from 2000, NYU, Imperial College London, MAPS) has generated a substantial new literature on psilocybin-induced "mystical-type experiences" and their long-term effects.
The findings, replicated across studies: a single dose of psilocybin in a controlled supportive setting produces, in roughly 60-80% of participants, an experience the participants rate as among the most meaningful of their lives — comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Long-term effects (six months and beyond) include improvements in mood, openness, and life-satisfaction.
The framing question is open. Roland Griffiths and his Hopkins colleagues have used the language of "mystical-type experiences" because the participants' descriptions strikingly converge with the descriptions in the classical mystical literature (cross-tradition unity, ineffability, noetic quality, transformation).
The secular spiritual integration: many practitioners now combine contemplative practice with occasional psychedelic ceremony, often in clinical-or-ceremonial settings. The traditions vary — ayahuasca circles drawing on Amazonian sources, MDMA-therapy contexts, psilocybin-retreat programs. The Western legal frameworks are shifting (Oregon Measure 109 legalised supervised psilocybin use in 2020; Colorado followed in 2022).
The risks: psychedelic experience can produce destabilisation, particularly without integration support. The traditions that have used these substances longest have elaborate frameworks for managing the experience; secular contexts often do not.
The integration of psychedelics into secular spiritual life is one of the field's most rapidly evolving zones.
One of the more distinctive 21st-century secular-spiritual movements: effective altruism (EA). Founded around 2009 by Oxford philosophers Toby Ord, William MacAskill, and others, EA frames moral commitment as a project of maximising well-being through evidence-based action.
Core moves:
Earning to give. Take a high-paying career; donate a substantial fraction (10%, 50%, in some cases more) to maximally cost-effective charities (initially mostly global health interventions: bednets, deworming, direct cash transfers).
Cause prioritisation. Some causes save more lives per dollar than others. Rigorous comparison should drive allocation. GiveWell's research on charity effectiveness was foundational.
Longtermism. Future people matter; existential risks (engineered pathogens, misaligned AI, nuclear war) deserve serious resources. MacAskill's What We Owe the Future (2022).
The movement has institutional substance: GiveWell, Open Philanthropy, the Centre for Effective Altruism, 80,000 Hours career-advisory. Significant philanthropic flows. A genuine community with conferences, in-person retreats, shared vocabulary.
The 2022 collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange — Sam Bankman-Fried, an EA-identified figure, was a major movement funder, and his fraud raised hard questions about the movement's intellectual culture and incentive structures — damaged EA's public reputation.
EA's relevance to secular spirituality: it offers, for some, the missing piece — concrete ethical commitment, a community, a calendar, a vocabulary, a sense of meaningful action — that more contemplative-only secular spiritualities lack. Whether EA is "spiritual" depends on what one means; it functions as one for many of its adherents.
The project has serious critics from multiple directions.
From traditional religion. Secular spirituality is consumerist religion-lite. It takes the practices that worked in traditional contexts and removes the framework — community, doctrine, ethical demand, suffering, accountability — that made the practices work. The result is self-help with incense. The criticism is sharper from intellectually serious religious traditionalists (David Bentley Hart, Rod Dreher, the more philosophical Catholics; and from Buddhist traditionalists like Bhikkhu Bodhi).
From secular humanism. Why "spiritual" at all? The category preserves religious vocabulary that should be retired. What people actually need is good ethics, good community, good education, good politics — none of which require the freighted "spiritual" register. A.C. Grayling, Steven Pinker have made versions of this argument.
From critical theory. Mindfulness in particular has been criticised as ideological tool: a stress-management practice that helps individuals tolerate intolerable workplaces and political conditions, rather than changing them. Ronald Purser's McMindfulness (2019). Slavoj Žižek's broader critique of "Western Buddhism" as the ideal capitalist religion.
From within. Some secular-spiritual practitioners report that the project, after a decade or so, runs out of road — that contemplative practice without metaphysical or communal anchoring tends to plateau, that the lack of demand corrodes the practice, that the lack of community shrinks the life. The result is sometimes return to traditional religion (often Christianity); sometimes deeper engagement with one specific tradition (often Buddhism); sometimes secular life without continued contemplative practice.
The intellectual frame for much of secular spirituality. Pierre Hadot (1922-2010), French historian of philosophy, argued in Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995) and What Is Ancient Philosophy? (1995) that ancient philosophy — Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean, Skeptic — was not primarily theoretical. It was a way of life: a set of spiritual exercises (exercices spirituels) by which one re-formed oneself.
The claim's force: contemporary academic philosophy is a thin descendant of the ancient version. The Stoics did not just have a theory of the good life; they had practices — daily examination, pre-meditation of evils, view-from-above exercises — that produced (when done) particular kinds of human beings.
Hadot's book influenced Foucault's late work on "techniques of the self," Martha Nussbaum's writing on Hellenistic ethics (The Therapy of Desire, 1994), and the contemporary Stoic revival. It also offered a frame for secular spirituality in general: "spiritual" practice need not be religious; it is the form of any sustained discipline aimed at human transformation. Yoga, meditation, Stoic exercise, certain therapeutic practices, certain artistic and athletic disciplines — all qualify as spiritual exercise on Hadot's frame.
Hadot's own religious position was reserved (Catholic upbringing, departure from the priesthood, lifelong rich engagement with both Christian and pagan philosophy without doctrinal commitment). The book is not a polemic; it is a recovery.
Behind much secular spirituality is the meaning question: what makes a life worth living, after religion?
The classical secular answers:
Existentialism. Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir. Meaning is constructed; there is no given. The honest response is to recognise the absurdity (Camus) or to author one's life in radical freedom (Sartre). Bracingly austere; demanding; not consoling.
Naturalism. Meaning emerges from human relationships, work, beauty, knowledge, love. No metaphysical underwriting needed. The position of much contemporary academic ethics. Susan Wolf's Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2010) is the careful philosophical version.
Religious return. Some seekers conclude that secular spirituality cannot bear the weight; the meaning question requires religious answers; they return (or convert). The "Russell Brand turning Christian" trajectory, the Tom Holland conversion, the various Catholic and Orthodox conversions of secular intellectuals over the past decade.
Meaning crisis discourse. John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lecture series (50+ episodes, YouTube, 2019) became unexpectedly influential. Argument: modernity has produced a "meaning crisis" — the loss of traditional sources without adequate replacement — and the response requires sustained engagement with cognitive science, contemplative practice, and the philosophical tradition (especially Neoplatonist).
Jordan Peterson's mythological-archetypal meaning project. 12 Rules for Life (2018) — religious-symbolic readings of psychological depth without explicit religious commitment. Controversial figure, large audience, distinctive niche in the meaning-conversation.
The most consistent weakness of secular spirituality, by both practitioner self-report and outside critique. Religious communities offer something secular-spiritual programs largely do not: a stable group of people who meet weekly, know each other across years, take responsibility for each other's lives, structure shared time, and provide care across the life cycle (births, weddings, illnesses, deaths).
The secular-spiritual attempts:
Sunday Assembly (London, 2013-) — secular congregations explicitly modeled on church services without theology. Community singing, talks, coffee. Has grown to dozens of chapters worldwide; participation has declined since peak.
Meditation centers and sanghas. Spirit Rock, IMS, the Plum Village network, urban Zen centres. Many provide substantial community, though usually for the seriously practicing rather than the casually attending.
The School of Life (de Botton's London project, multiple international branches) provides education-and-community without congregation.
Effective Altruism community. Genuine ongoing community for those committed to the EA project; conferences, retreats, group houses, professional networks.
Burning Man and the festival circuit. Annual ritualised gatherings with strong shared identity. Provides intense periodic community without the weekly continuity.
The general pattern: secular-spiritual communities are often retreat-based or interest-based rather than congregation-based; they don't claim the comprehensive life-cycle role that religious communities do; they often work well for some life-stages and not others. Many practitioners report continued community-shaped longing.
The secular spiritual movement has had to develop its own resources for the human transitions that traditional religions have always handled.
Death. The last 15 years have produced a secular literature of remarkable depth. Atul Gawande's Being Mortal (2014) reframed end-of-life care for a generation of clinicians. BJ Miller's palliative-care work and TED talk. Frank Ostaseski's The Five Invitations (2017) — Buddhist-derived but secular-accessible. Stephen Jenkinson's Die Wise (2015). The death cafe movement (Bernard Crettaz / Jon Underwood, 2011-) — public conversations about mortality. The Order of the Good Death (Caitlin Doughty, 2011-). End-of-life doulas as a recognised profession.
Grief. Megan Devine's It's OK That You're Not OK (2017). Francis Weller's The Wild Edge of Sorrow (2015). The shift from "grief work" to "continuing bonds" in psychological theory.
Marking. Secular wedding officiants are now standard. Secular funeral celebrants (the Humanist Society network) provide service alternatives. Naming ceremonies for newborns. The development is uneven but real.
What still does not exist at scale: secular-spiritual chaplaincy in hospitals (it is growing — the Harvard Divinity humanist chaplaincy model is one example — but spotty); secular funeral homes that are recognisably secular and recognisably ceremonial; secular grief support that operates with the consistency of a religious community.
The capacity is being built. It is not yet at the level of the religious provision.
The hardest practical question for the project. Parents who left religious tradition often want to give their children depth without giving them the religious framework. What does that look like?
Dale McGowan's Parenting Beyond Belief (2007) and Raising Freethinkers (2009) offer the explicit secular-parenting curriculum. Camp Quest (atheist summer camps, founded 1996). The Ethical Society for secular Sunday schools.
The parent-reported difficulties: secular children miss the cultural-literacy that religious children pick up automatically (Christmas as more than presents; Passover as more than spring; the meaning of "communion" or "mitzvah"); they miss the moral-formation rhythm of regular community; they miss the calendar-of-meaning that organises religious children's years.
The compensating moves vary. Some secular parents reach back to family religious tradition for cultural literacy without doctrinal commitment ("we celebrate Hanukkah for the family history, not for the theology"). Some construct deliberate secular alternative calendars (Earth Day, equinoxes, Darwin Day). Some send children to secular humanist Sunday schools where these exist. Some accept the loss as the price of secular life.
The longer-term question: will children raised in the secular-spiritual frame retain its ethical-contemplative orientation as adults, or will the absence of the formation produce religiously-affiliated grandchildren in either direction (return to religion; or pure secular indifference)?
The data is not yet in. The 2026 children of secular-spiritual parents are mostly still under 25.
Secular spirituality has had a complicated political reception.
From the left: criticism that the movement is individualist, consumerist, and politically demobilising — "wellness" as opiate, mindfulness as workplace anaesthetic, Stoicism as resignation to injustice. The McMindfulness critique fits here.
From the right: criticism that it lacks the moral seriousness and communal grounding that religion provides; that it produces atomised individuals without shared norms; that "spiritual but not religious" is the mood of late liberalism's failure mode.
Internal political range. Sam Harris's politics: idiosyncratic centrist-liberal, with sharp criticisms of Islam, of the academic left, and of Trump. Alain de Botton: cultural conservative on family and ritual, liberal on most else. The secular Buddhist scene: predominantly progressive, with engaged-Buddhist commitments. The Stoic revival: politically heterogeneous (early on, slightly right-coded; now more mixed). EA: nominally apolitical but with internal commitments (utilitarianism, technocracy) that play out politically.
The general trend: secular spirituality is more politically heterogeneous than the New Atheist movement was. The early-2000s atheist movement was reliably progressive; the 2020s secular-spiritual landscape includes substantial right and centre populations alongside the left. The category has loosened.
One short Harris meditation, one de Botton talk, and one Harris-on-mindfulness clip.
Sam Harris · A nine-minute mindfulness meditation
And two further:
— Alain de Botton on Atheism 2.0. The TED talk version of Religion for Atheists — what atheists could borrow from religion.
— Sam Harris on mindfulness without religion. The position statement.
Read alongside: Sam Harris, Waking Up (the secular-contemplative manifesto). Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs and After Buddhism (the secular Buddhist project). Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (the philosophical foundation). Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (the philosophical history of how we got here). Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic.
What works. The contemplative practice — when sustained — produces real effects. The neuroscience confirms the reports. Stress reduction, attention regulation, emotional resilience, the sense of awareness as already free of the constructed self: these are reliable findings of regular contemplative practice, regardless of metaphysical framing.
The philosophical-ethical work — when done — produces real effects. Marcus Aurelius read daily for a year reorganises a life. The same is true of Seneca, of Epictetus, of the Bhagavad Gītā in serious translation, of the major modern secular ethical writers. The "spiritual exercises" frame is not metaphor.
What does not work as well. The community problem persists. Secular-spiritual communities tend to be thinner and more fragile than religious ones; they handle life-cycle events less reliably; they are more dependent on the energy of individual founders.
The depth problem in some forms. Mindfulness without ethics, Stoicism without metaphysics, secular Buddhism without the institutional sangha — each can produce a tradition that is shallower than its source. Practitioners who go deep often find themselves either retrieving more of the source tradition than they planned to, or hitting a ceiling in the secular form.
The intergenerational question is open. Will secular-spiritual traditions persist into a third generation? Religious traditions have demonstrated their multi-millennial durability; secular spirituality has not yet had time to. The next 30 years will tell.
Three claims.
It is the religious form of the post-religious West. Whether one approves or not, secular spirituality is what a large and growing population of educated Westerners actually do for the meaning-and-practice work that religion used to do. To understand 21st-century religious life, one has to understand this category.
It is exporting contemplative practice to populations that would never enter a temple. The mindfulness, secular Buddhism, Stoic-revival movements have brought serious contemplative practice into therapeutic, educational, military, and corporate settings on a scale the source traditions could not have managed alone. The cost is loss of frame; the benefit is enormous diffusion.
It is a real intellectual project, not just a market trend. The major figures — Harris, Batchelor, de Botton, Hadot, the careful contemplative-neuroscientists — are doing work that engages the religious traditions seriously and produces something new. The work is uneven; the project is worth taking seriously.
The best response to secular spirituality is neither dismissive (from religious traditionalists) nor uncritical (from its boosters): take its real achievements seriously, identify where the project runs out of road, and ask what fuller forms might address the limitations.
Four directions.
Continued growth, then plateau or contraction. The "nones" demographic is approaching saturation in some Western contexts (the U.K., Sweden); will likely continue rising in the U.S. for some time but may plateau by 2035-40. The secular-spiritual movement's growth depends on its ability to meet the community-and-formation needs that the older religions have addressed.
Psychedelic integration. The legal-clinical-ceremonial integration of psychedelics into secular contemplative life is the field's most rapidly evolving zone. Oregon's program, the eventual FDA decisions on psilocybin and MDMA, the growing private retreat industry — all reshape the terrain.
AI and meaning. The rise of capable AI introduces new pressures on meaning-making (the threat to skilled work; the question of what humans are distinctively for). Some secular-spiritual writers have begun to address this; the literature will grow.
Religious return. A subset of secular-spiritual practitioners is returning to traditional religion — Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, traditional Buddhism — having concluded that secular forms cannot bear the weight. This is currently a small flow but a culturally visible one. Whether it grows or remains marginal is one of the open questions.
For readers who want to engage:
Sit. Twenty minutes a day of formal contemplative practice. Whatever instruction you can follow — Sam Harris's Waking Up app, the free guided meditations from Tara Brach or Tricycle or Plum Village, a local meditation centre's beginner's program. Regularity matters more than which specific method.
Read. One short serious text, slowly, repeatedly. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations (the Hays translation). The Bhagavad Gītā. Epictetus's Enchiridion. The Pali Suttas in Bhikkhu Bodhi's anthology. Eckhart's German sermons. Pick one. Stay with it.
Find people. Even if not full community, regular companionship of other people with serious contemplative-or-ethical practice. A meditation group. A reading group. An EA chapter. A Stoic Week cohort. A 12-step meeting (12-step groups are functionally secular-spiritual communities for many participants). Practice is harder alone.
Take the ethical commitments. Whatever the framework, secular-spiritual practice without ethical demand becomes self-help. Choose: the giving pledge, regular volunteering, climate-or-justice work, simple ethical austerities (vegetarian, no air travel, etc.). Ethics is not an add-on to contemplation; it is part of how contemplation deepens.
Stay open. The category may not be where you end up. Some people who begin with secular spirituality return to religion; some go deeper into one specific contemplative tradition; some remain comfortably in the middle ground. The path is its own teacher.
Secular spirituality is, in 2026, a real and growing category — but it may also be transitional. The "spiritual but not religious" identification might be the holding pattern for a generation that left organised religion and has not yet decided what comes next. What comes next is various: full atheism for some, return to traditional religion for others, deeper engagement with one specific tradition for still others, and — for the largest group — continued life in the secular-spiritual middle.
The deeper question the movement raises is one religious traditions had already addressed: human beings need contemplative practice, ethical formation, community, ritual, and meaning-making structures, to live well. Where these are not provided by tradition, they have to be built. The building is harder than the leaving was.
What the next several decades will reveal: whether secular forms can carry the weight of these needs across generations, or whether the project finds — through the empirical test of trying — that some of religion's institutional achievements are not separable from religion. Either way, the experiment is being run, by tens of millions of people, in real time. The honest stance is to take the experiment seriously, hope it works, and pay attention to what it learns.
If you want to take the secular-spiritual project seriously enough to test it:
Spend two years. Daily contemplative practice; weekly study; monthly retreat or group; quarterly engagement with one specific tradition (Stoic, Buddhist, Christian-monastic, Jewish, Sufi). At the end of two years, evaluate. Most evaluations at that point shift the practitioner — some toward fuller traditional engagement, some away from contemplative practice altogether, some into deeper secular-spiritual commitment.
Learn one tradition seriously. The "perennialist" temptation — sample widely, commit to none — works for surface engagement and not deeper. Most contemplative depth comes from going far in one tradition rather than miles wide in many. Pick the one that calls.
Build community as you go. Don't try to do this alone. Even one practice partner makes a difference; a sustained group is better. The meaning of regular shared practice over years is hard to overstate.
Don't decide too early. The category "secular spiritual" is roomy and the answer to "what is this finally" probably comes after a decade, not after a year.
The project is real. The work is the same work humans have always done, in conditions our ancestors did not face. We have to figure out how to do it now.
Secular Spirituality — Volume XV, Deck 10 of The Deck Catalog. Set in Inter on bone-white. Ink-black with vermilion accents.
Twenty-eight leaves on what religion's practices and questions look like, for those who have left or never joined the institutions but kept the questions.
↑ Vol. XV · Rel. · Deck 10