Depends what we mean by 'spiritual'?
This can range from a belief in the New Age, Gaia, faeries, dream-catchers, ghosts, messages from beyond the veil, etc. through prayers and devotions to the traditional religions and there into very deep and dark waters (speaking metaphorically) ...
As discussed before, when people identity as 'spiritual but not religious' they are rejecting 'organised religion', and I'm inclined to ask what a 'disorganised religion' might look like, and how effective might it be?
What distinguishes the 'SBNR' from an atheist or agnostic?
Spirituality, for some, merely means a set of moral and ethical standards, the practice of empathy and altruism. But there are many moral/ethical codes that operate on rational principles — the Golden Rule — without the need of invoking spirituality.
Spirituality is often packaged along with a set of practices that are subjectively and reassuring beneficial and quite possibly promoting 'a healthy lifestyle'. Meditation, yoga and tai chi are forms of exercise that make sense independent of any spiritual justification.
We keep coming back to the point that 'spiritual' refers to the terrain of religion, a terrain in which one has a priori rejected maps, guidebooks and even the destination, along with the tools of traverse. As someone once commented, SBNR is like putting to sea without compass or chart, but with a sense that one will find once's destination somehow ...
If religion can be refuted on the lack of acceptable evidence, then the SBNR are standing on even more uncertain ground. They have nothing to fall back on at all, other than a subjective conviction.
In the absence of evidence for objective meaning, the most plausible explanation for why people are SBNR is that it allows them to reject the traditional framework, but keep just enough in touch or intact to validate self-worth and emotional security. At worst, it's FOM: 'I reject all that religious crap, but if there's something to it, I want in!'
Religion provides reassurance that we are not as cosmically insignificant as science might suggest. Disaffection with traditional religions shifts people’s attention toward (even) more amorphous kinds of reassurances that spirituality seems to offer and support.
The reality however is that spirituality is no better than religion at making sense of the world in ways consistent with the contemporary argument, rather it's worse, in that it often lacks a philosophical and metaphysical foundation, or is obliged to borrow from the very thing it rejects to formulate one.
In the words of one psycho-analyst: If you don’t like religion, you shouldn’t be spiritual either.
+++
I sometimes think the SBNR argument is a recourse to old superstitions. It's a way of making sense of the universe on purely subjective grounds. 'It', whatever 'It' might be, is warm, cuddly, benign. The idea that everything happens for a reason. It's interesting that the SBNR and the New Age share the past – Druids, Wicca, Gnostics, Gaia, etc., dream-catchers, drum camps, dance tents, etc. On the one hand there is a marked tendency to accept these modern narratives without any kind of critical evaluation or discernment, whilst on the other well-reasoned 'traditional' religions are rejected out-of-hand and often on the most spurious basis.
