You ever been to a cookout where somebody asks the new person about church?

The pause hits first.

Then the answer.

“Nah, I’m… not really anything anymore.”

Not atheist. Not “I don’t believe in God.” Not even agnostic. Just… not really anything anymore.

If you’ve heard that, you’ve met one of the largest religious groups in the United States. They don’t have a denomination. They don’t have a building. They don’t have a name brand.

But they are 19% of all U.S. adults, according to Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study.

That’s roughly 50 million people.

Bigger than American Catholics. Bigger than American evangelicals. Bigger than every Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist American combined… and then some.

But here’s the part nobody told you.

Most of them still believe in God.

Now slow down with me. Let’s figure out what we’re really looking at.

The Misunderstood Middle

Pew Research and PRRI (the Public Religion Research Institute) are the two biggest names in tracking American religion. Both of them use a category called “religious nones.” It sounds like “atheist.” It is not.

Nones break into three groups:

1. Atheists. They do not believe in God.

2. Agnostics. They are not sure.

3. Nothing in particular. They don’t claim a religion. But they also didn’t sign up for either of the first two boxes.

Of all American Nones, 17% are atheist, 20% are agnostic, and 63% say “nothing in particular.”

That last group is the biggest by far.

And they don’t act like the first two.

That’s the part the news keeps skipping.

When you read “1 in 4 Americans is religiously unaffiliated,” your brain hears non-believer. Your brain is wrong. The numbers say something different.

What the Receipts Actually Say

Pour yourself some coffee. We’re walking through this.

Among Americans who say their religion is “nothing in particular”:

Two-thirds believe in something spiritual beyond the natural world. 79% believe humans have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical bodies. Most still believe in some form of God or higher power.

It’s not even close.

When you look at prayer, it gets even more interesting.

About 27% of “nothing in particular” Americans pray every day. Another 24% pray at least once a month. Only 48% seldom or never pray.

Stop. Read that twice.

About half of “nothing in particular” America is still praying. Some of them daily. They’re just not doing it in a building you’d recognize.

Now ask yourself: how often did the youth pastor warn you about people who “don’t believe in anything”?

How often did anybody mention that half of them are out here praying without you?

This is what happens when we let one label flatten 50 million people.

Why They Left the Building

Pew asked Nones directly why they don’t claim a religion. The answers were plain.

78% say they can be moral without religion. 64% question many religious teachings. 54% say they don’t need religion to be spiritual.

And then the harder part.

47% of Nones say one reason they’re not religious is that they dislike religious organizations. 30% point to bad experiences they’ve had with religious people.

Catch that.

Three out of ten Americans who walked away from religion can tell you the name of the person, the church, or the moment that made them leave.

Some of them are still bleeding from it.

That’s not rebellion.

That’s grief.

Read more

When people leave organized religion but still search for meaning, healing, wonder, and something bigger.

Before we get into it

If you missed the series intro, here’s the short version.

Beyond the Pew is a 15-part series looking at the worldviews that actually shape life in America. Not the cartoon versions. Not the “well, those people just hate God” versions. The real ones. The ones your coworker holds. The ones your cousin came home from college with. The ones your auntie quietly practices on Sunday mornings now that she stopped going to First Baptist.

This is not a debate series. This is not apologetics in a trench coat. This is honest, scholarly, gloves-off, trauma-informed work for people who are tired of pretending the world only has two categories: “us” and “lost.”

Episode 1 is the one we had to start with. Because if you don’t understand this group, you don’t understand America in 2026.

Let’s go.

The line you’ve heard a thousand times

Somebody says it at a cookout. Somebody types it on a dating app. Somebody whispers it at their grandmother’s funeral while standing in the church she made them attend for nineteen years.

“I’m spiritual... but I’m not religious.”

And depending on which pew you grew up in, you either nodded with quiet recognition... or rolled your eyes so hard you saw your own ancestors.

Here’s the thing.

That phrase is not a vibe. It’s not a TikTok aesthetic. It’s not somebody trying to sound deep at brunch.

It is the fastest-growing spiritual identity in America. And the receipts say it is reshaping how millions of people relate to God, meaning, community, and each other.

So before anybody calls these folks “lost,” “lukewarm,” or “just confused,” let’s actually look at who they are.

The receipts

This is where I bring data, not vibes.

According to Pew Research Center’s 2023 study on spirituality, about 22% of U.S. adults identify as spiritual but not religious. Some surveys put it higher when the question is worded differently. A 2017 Pew survey, for instance, found that around 27% of U.S. adults described themselves this way, an 8-point jump in just five years. Pew Research CenterPew Research Center

And here’s the part that should stop your scroll.

Roughly 70% of U.S. adults can be considered “spiritual” in some way, because they think of themselves as spiritual people or say spirituality is very important in their lives. Pew Research Center

Seventy percent.

That is not a fringe. That is not a Portland-only thing. That is your barber, your boss, your child’s teacher, and probably the person who delivered your last package.

Let me give you a few more receipts.

• 83% of all U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body. Pew Research Center

• 81% say there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it. Pew Research Center

• 74% say there are some things science cannot possibly explain. Pew Research Center

• 30% say they have personally encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force. Pew Research Center

Now here’s where the SBNR group gets really interesting.

71% of spiritual-but-not-religious adults believe spirits or spiritual energies can be found in parts of nature like mountains, rivers, or trees. 59% say being connected with nature is “essential” to what being spiritual means to them. Courthouse News Service

So when somebody tells you they “feel closer to God on a hike than in a sanctuary,” they’re not making a poetic excuse. They’re describing something that millions of Americans report as actual, lived, spiritual experience.

And one more receipt before we move on. Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, often called “nones,” 78% say they can be moral without religion, 64% say they question a lot of religious teachings, and 54% say they don’t need religion to be spiritual. Pew Research Center

That’s not rebellion. That’s a worldview with a thesis.

So what IS spiritual but not religious?

Let me say what it is not first, because that’s where most of the confusion lives.

SBNR is not a religion. It has no founder. No sacred text. No central building. No denomination. No bishop, no imam, no rabbi, no high priestess of the kombucha aisle.

It is a category. A self-description. A way people locate themselves on the map of meaning when the old maps no longer match the territory.

Inside that category, you’ll find:

• People who still believe in God, sometimes very deeply, but no longer attend church.

• People who pray daily but not to anyone in particular.

• People who meditate, journal, sit in nature, do breathwork, go to therapy as a spiritual practice, or read across traditions.

• People who keep Jesus close but left the building.

• People who follow ancestral practices that predate the church their grandparents joined.

• People who believe in a higher power, a sacred energy, a universal spirit, or “the universe” as a kind of soft monotheism without the paperwork.

• People who don’t know what they believe but know they still believe something.

What functions as authority for them?

Personal experience. Intuition. Conscience. Nature. Wisdom drawn from multiple traditions. Sometimes science. Sometimes art. Sometimes silence. Sometimes the still small voice they were told to listen for in Sunday school... that they kept listening to even after they stopped showing up.

And here’s the receipt that surprises most church folks. Among SBNRs, 45% still claim a religious affiliation, including 21% who identify as Protestant and 12% who identify as Catholic. Pew Research Center

Read that again.

Almost half of spiritual-but-not-religious Americans are still on a church roll somewhere. They just no longer locate their actual spiritual life inside that institution.

Why this is happening (the part nobody wants to say out loud)

Here is where the gloves come off.

This is not happening because people got lazy.

This is happening because trust got broken.

In Gallup’s annual tracking, confidence in the church or organized religion hovered at 31–32% from 2022 through 2024, the lowest levels ever recorded. Gallup has tracked this since 1973, when trust stood at 66% and rose to 68% in 1975. Gallup

So we went from two-thirds of Americans trusting the church... to roughly one-third. In about fifty years.

That is not a vibe shift. That is a tectonic plate moving under the foundation.

And the reasons are not mysterious. After the Boston Globe’s 2002 exposé revealed Catholic church leaders were aware of and did not take strong action to stop serial sex abuse by priests, confidence in organized religion dropped sharply to 45%. It never fully recovered. Gallup

Add to that:

• Decades of televangelist scandals.

• Megachurch pastors caught doing in private what they preached against in public.

• Political idolatry dressed up as discipleship.

• The weaponizing of Scripture against women, against Black bodies, against LGBTQ folks, against the poor, against anyone who didn’t fit the brochure.

• Church spaces where asking questions got you labeled “rebellious” instead of “thoughtful.”

• Theology that demanded certainty in public while quietly hiding doubt in private.

And meanwhile, 42% of spiritual-but-not-religious Americans say religion causes division and intolerance. Courthouse News Service

So when somebody tells you they’re spiritual but not religious, you have to understand what’s underneath that sentence. For many of them, it’s not, “I want my faith without rules.” It’s closer to, “I want my faith without the people who told me Jesus loved me while protecting the person who hurt me.”

Hear the difference.

It changes the whole conversation.

The Gloves Off moment

Now, let me say what needs saying to my church family.

If your first response when someone says “I’m spiritual but not religious” is to assume they want sin without consequences, you are not practicing discernment. You are practicing a straw man.

A straw man is when you build a fake, weak version of someone’s argument so you can knock it down more easily. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of fighting your shadow and calling it a victory.

You are not engaging the actual person in front of you. You are engaging the cardboard cutout your worldview prefers to argue with.

And while we’re naming fallacies, let’s name another one. The False Dilemma. The “either you’re in church or you’re lost” trap. The lie that says spiritual life only happens inside one building, under one banner, with one set of pre-approved questions.

Scripture itself does not support that framing. The Spirit shows up in wildernesses, on roadsides, in dreams, in foreign houses, at wells, in the bellies of fish, on hillsides, in prison cells, and at tables full of the wrong kind of people. The Spirit was never institutional property. We just acted like it was.

So when 70% of Americans say they’re spiritual in some way, and only 32% of them trust the institution that historically claimed exclusive dealership rights on the Spirit... maybe the problem is not 70% of the country.

Maybe the problem is the dealership.

What SBNR actually offers people

Let me steelman this. Because lazy critique doesn’t help anybody.

The SBNR worldview offers things many people genuinely need.

• A path back to wonder. Without gatekeepers. Without somebody charging admission to the sacred.

• A way to stay connected to God after harm. Some people could not survive returning to the room where their wound was dressed up as discipline. SBNR gives them a way to still seek God without being re-traumatized in the seeking.

• Space for questions. Real questions. The kind that don’t have neat three-point answers. The kind Job asked. The kind Habakkuk asked. The kind Jesus Himself asked from the cross.

• Permission to hold complexity. Many SBNR people are not running from depth. They are running toward it after being handed answers that were too thin for the wounds they carried.

• Integration with the body. Breath. Movement. Nature. Stillness. Most organized religion in America forgot the body existed. SBNR remembered.

• Cross-traditional wisdom. The freedom to learn from Stoics, mystics, indigenous teachers, contemplatives, scientists, poets, and elders without having to convert first.

Now, does that mean every SBNR practice is wise? No. Some of it is shallow. Some of it is consumeristic. Some of it is dressed-up self-help with a candle on top. Critique that, fairly.

But the framework itself? It is responding to a real hunger. And the church would do well to ask why so many spiritually hungry people walked past our buffet to eat somewhere else.

Where SBNR gets fair pushback

Steel-manning works both ways. Let me be honest here, too.

SBNR has some real weaknesses that deserve naming.

• Accountability is harder. When your spiritual authority is “what feels right to me,” it is easier to drift. Easier to mistake preference for revelation. Easier to confuse comfort with truth.

• Community is harder. Solo spirituality often misses what only community can offer. Confession. Correction. Being known by people who won’t let you stay stuck. The witness of strangers becoming family.

• Continuity is harder. Traditions carry tested wisdom across generations. Going it alone means re-inventing the wheel every Tuesday.

• The marketplace can hijack it. When spirituality has no institutional gravity, it can become a product. Crystals, retreats, courses, subscriptions. Capitalism will spiritualize anything if you let it.

These are not gotcha critiques. These are real tensions that thoughtful SBNR people often name themselves.

So this is not a one-sided story. It is a story about two systems, both with strengths, both with real failures, and millions of people trying to find a way to live with meaning between them.

What this means for the rest of us

Here’s the practical takeaway.

• If you are a Christian: Stop leading with correction. Start with curiosity. Ask what gave them peace. Ask what broke their trust. Ask what they now use for guidance. Then listen. Don’t sermon-bait. Don’t wait for your opening. Just listen long enough that the person actually feels heard, instead of feeling like a project.

• If you are deconstructing: Notice that you are not alone. Twenty-two percent of America is somewhere in your zip code right now. You are not crazy. You are not a backslider. You are wrestling with a tradition that, in many places, failed to wrestle back honestly. Find people who can hold the questions without flinching.

• If you are skeptical or spiritually curious: You don’t have to choose between intellectual honesty and spiritual depth. Both are available. The deepest minds in history were almost all both. Stay curious. Stay rigorous. Don’t trade one set of certainties for another.

• If you are a leader: Your pulpit, your platform, your podcast, your group chat — they all need to make space for honest questions without weaponizing the answers. If your community cannot survive a real question, it was never strong. It was just loud.

The bottom line

Some people did not leave God.

They left the noise. They left the control. They left rooms where their pain was treated like a discipline problem.

Some of them still pray. Some of them still read Scripture. Some of them sit in nature on Sunday mornings and feel closer to the Spirit than they did in twenty years of pews.

That does not mean every spiritual path is wise. It does not mean every church is toxic. It does not mean SBNR is above critique.

It just means lazy labels will not help us love real people.

Understand different. Engage deeply. Love boldly.

That’s the work.

Reflection questions

• For Christians: Can you ask someone why they no longer trust organized religion without secretly preparing your rebuttal while they answer?

• For deconstructing believers: Which parts of your spirituality belong to you now, and which parts are still reacting to what hurt you? Can you tell the difference yet?

• For skeptics or spiritually curious folks: If formal religion is off the table, what is on the table? What grounds your ethics, your sense of awe, your way through grief, when no one is watching?

Common biases to drop before this conversation gets anywhere

• Straw man. Lazy: “SBNR people just want vibes without truth.” Better question: What kinds of truth, healing, and meaning are people actually seeking outside organized religion?

• False dilemma. Lazy: “You’re either religious or you have no real spiritual life.” Better question: How do people practice moral reflection, compassion, awe, and healing outside formal religious institutions?

• Confirmation bias. Lazy: “I met one shallow spiritual person, so the whole category is shallow.” Better question: What’s the actual range of practices and beliefs that fit under this label?

• Outgroup homogeneity bias. Lazy: “They all believe the same vague nothing.” Better question: Where do SBNR people genuinely differ from each other on God, ethics, community, and practice?

• Appeal to tradition. Lazy: “If it doesn’t happen in church, it can’t be spiritually meaningful.” Better question: Where, across history, have people encountered the sacred, and how have institutions both helped and harmed that encounter?

Sources

If you want to check my work, here are the receipts:

• Pew Research Center, Spirituality Among Americans (2023).

• Pew Research Center, Who Are ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ Americans? (2023).

• Pew Research Center, Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe (2024).

• Pew Research Center, 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (2025).

• Pew Research Center, Why Many U.S. Adults Are ‘Nones’ (2025).

• Gallup, Confidence in Institutions: Church/Organized Religion (annual tracking, 1973–2025).

• PRRI, Searching for Spirituality in the U.S.

Sources are public. Go look. Don’t take my word for it. That’s part of the point of this series.

Call to action

Thanks for reading the first episode of Beyond the Pew.

Drop your thoughts in the comments. Don’t come in swinging. Come in curious.

If this work helps you think deeper, connect with me at www.abide4us.com, follow ABIDE on TikTok and Facebook, and consider becoming a paid subscriber on Substack so we can keep doing this work with depth, honesty, and no padding.

Next episode, we go deeper into the territory most folks won’t touch honestly.

Understand different. Engage deeply. Love boldly.

This is Beyond the Pew.

America didn’t stop believing.

It changed what it trusts.

That one shift… is the whole story.

For a long time, the church told itself a comfortable story. The story went like this: most Americans are Christian, the rest are atheists, and a few folks somewhere are Buddhist, Jewish, or Muslim. End of list. Pass the offering plate.

That story is broken.

Not damaged. Broken.

This series is about that. The whole thing. The whole messy, beautiful, complicated room. The people sitting next to you at work. Your cousin who burns sage and reads Marcus Aurelius. Your coworker who says she’s “spiritual, not religious.” Your neighbor who quotes the Qur’an. Your friend who left church and never looked back. The kid in your family who says, “I don’t know what I believe yet, and I’m okay with that.”

Welcome to Beyond the Pew.

Gloves stay off. Hearts stay open.

• • •

The receipts: what America actually looks like now

Pew Research just dropped its 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study. The numbers are not opinion. They are the room. Twenty-nine percent of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated. That is five percent atheist, six percent agnostic, and nineteen percent “nothing in particular.”

Seven percent belong to non-Christian religions. Two percent Jewish. One percent each Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu. Stack that all together and roughly thirty-six percent of America is not Christian in any meaningful sense.

That’s more than one in three of your neighbors. More than one in three of the people who shop at your grocery store, sit on your jury, vote in your elections, and raise children in your school district.

And here’s the part that should stop you mid-scroll. Pew also found that seventy percent of U.S. adults still consider themselves spiritual in some way. Eighty-three percent believe people have a soul or spirit. Eighty-one percent say there is something spiritual beyond the natural world. Twenty-two percent describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.

Read that again.

Not less spiritual. Less religious.

There is a difference. A big one. And if the church misses that difference, it will keep preaching to a room it doesn’t actually understand.

• • •

Why “non-Christian worldviews” and not just “other religions”

Here is where most church teaching gets it wrong. We were trained to think the only options outside Christianity are other religions. Buddhist. Muslim. Hindu. Jewish. Like a buffet line of competing brands.

That framing is too small. And honestly, a little lazy.

Because most people walking away from church are not converting to anything. They are not becoming Buddhist monks. They are not running off to join a synagogue. They are doing something different. Something more American. Something more 2026.

They are building a worldview from scratch.

A little meditation here. A little science over there. Some Stoic philosophy from a podcast. A grandmother’s wisdom. A therapist’s reframe. A YouTube video on neuroplasticity. A trip to the ocean that felt holier than any sermon they ever heard. A funeral that broke something open. A church experience that broke something else.

They are not lost. They are looking. There is a difference.

So this series doesn’t just cover religions. It covers worldviews. The whole landscape. The way real Americans actually think, hope, doubt, grieve, and try to make sense of their lives in a country that is changing faster than most pulpits can keep up with.

• • •

The fifteen we’ll be sitting with

This is not a perfect rank by membership. Worldviews overlap. A person can be culturally Jewish, scientifically minded, spiritually curious, and morally humanist all before lunch. The list is survey-informed, ordered to move from the most familiar in everyday American life toward more specific traditions.

Here’s where we’re going.

• Spiritual but Not Religious

• Nothing in Particular / Religious Nones

• Agnosticism

• Atheism / Secular Naturalism

• Secular Humanism

• Judaism

• Islam

• Buddhism

• Hinduism

• New Age / Metaphysical Spirituality

• Paganism / Wicca / Earth-Centered Spirituality

• Unitarian Universalism

• Sikhism

• Bahá’í Faith

• Indigenous / Native American Spiritual Worldviews

Some of these will surprise you. Some will challenge you. Some will make you mad. A few will probably make you say, “Well, I didn’t know that.” Good. That’s the point.

• • •

How we’re gonna do this

Three rules. I’m saying them out loud so you can hold me to them.

One. Steelman first. That is a fancy word for: I’m going to describe each worldview the way someone who actually holds it would describe it. Not the cartoon version. Not the “those crazy people over there” version. The real version. The version where, if a Buddhist or a humanist or a Wiccan read it, they would nod and say, “Yeah… that’s actually what I believe, and you said it better than I usually do.” That’s the bar.

Two. Theological pushback after, not instead. This is Gloves Off Theology, not Gloves Loaded Theology. We engage from a Christian center. We hold a clear theological line. But we do it after we have actually listened. Because anything less is not theology. It is just yelling with extra steps.

Three. No false comfort. We are not here to make Christians feel superior or to make seekers feel small. We are here to tell the truth about what people believe, why they believe it, and what the gospel actually has to say to all of it. Some of it will challenge them. Some of it will challenge us. Both can be true at the same time.

• • •

Who this is for

This series is for the deconstructing Christian who isn’t sure what’s left when the building burns down.

It’s for the lifelong believer who is tired of pat answers and wants something with some real meat on the bone.

It’s for the curious agnostic, the cautious skeptic, the spiritual seeker, the bruised church kid, the Bible study leader who is starting to realize their material is forty years old, and the pastor who knows the room is changing but doesn’t have the bandwidth to read fifteen books to figure out how.

It’s for the parent whose teenager just said, “I don’t think I believe in any of this.” And the teenager who said it. And the grandmother who heard it and felt her stomach drop.

It’s for anyone who is tired of pretending the only choices are blind faith or blind unbelief. There is a wider room than that. And we are walking into it together.

• • •

A word about humility

Real talk. I am a Christian theologian. I have a clear conviction about who Jesus is and what the gospel is. That is not changing. If anything, this series will sharpen it.

But sharpening a conviction is not the same as broadcasting an opinion at a closed door.

I have sat across from atheists who quoted more Bible than some deacons. I have sat with Muslims who put my prayer life to shame. I have sat with “nothing in particular” folks whose moral compass made some Sunday school teachers look lost.

That doesn’t mean every worldview is equally true. It means every person is worth listening to before being preached at. Those are different sentences.

A theology that cannot listen is not a theology. It is a megaphone with a cross taped to it.

• • •

What you can expect from each episode

Every installment in this series will follow the same spirit but not the same skeleton. Different worldviews call for different shapes. Buddhism is a philosophy story. Indigenous spirituality is a survival and sovereignty story. Spiritual but Not Religious is a sociology story. Forcing all of them into the same template would flatten the very thing we are trying to honor.

That said, every episode will give you these things:

• A real, honest description of the worldview from the inside out

• The history, the sources, and the key voices that shape it

• The deepest, fairest version of why intelligent people actually hold this view

• The places where Christian theology agrees, where it differs, and where it stands its ground

• Practical wisdom for how to engage real people with real respect, not scripts

• Receipts: scholarly sources, primary texts, Pew data, named voices, no hand-waving

That last one is non-negotiable. We don’t do vibes around here. We do work.

• • •

Why this matters more than people think

Here is the part that should land heaviest.

If your neighbor’s worldview is invisible to you, you cannot love them well.

You can be polite. You can be friendly. You can wave from your driveway. But you cannot love them in any deep, biblical, ABIDE kind of way. Because you are loving a version of them you made up in your head. Not the actual person standing in front of you.

And the gospel was never designed to work on people we made up. It was designed for the actual room.

So this series is, at its core, a love letter. To the church, asking it to grow up. To the seeker, asking them to stay at the table a little longer. To the “nothing in particular,” the “spiritual but not religious,” the agnostic, the atheist, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Wiccan, the Sikh, the Bahá’í, and the Indigenous wisdom-keeper. We see you. We are not afraid of you. And we are not coming to argue. We are coming to learn, and then to speak honestly. In that order.

• • •

Where we go from here

Episode 1 drops next. We start where the cultural conversation is actually hottest: Spiritual but Not Religious. Twenty-two percent of America. Maybe more if you count the folks who haven’t found the words yet. The biggest unmarked door in the country. We’re going to walk through it together.

After that we keep moving. Fifteen worldviews. Real receipts. No fluff. No fear. Substack subscribers will get the long, deep, scholarly versions. The kind of work you can underline, save, and come back to.

If this series matters to you, do three things.

• Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. The deep dives only live here.

• Share this with one person who needs it. Not to convert them. Just to invite them to think.

• Tell me in the comments which of the fifteen you most want to understand. I read everything.

This is going to be a long, honest conversation. I am glad you’re in it.

Beyond the pew, there is still a whole lot of God-shaped room left. Let’s go see what’s in it.

—Joe

ABIDE of NC | Gloves Off Theology | abide4us.com