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Posted December 10, 2025 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Have you ever come across someone who qualifies her opinions about gender-related issues by assuring her listener that she’s “not a feminist or anything”? That comment wouldn’t be surprising coming from denizens of the Bible Belt or the MAGAverse who are in favor of women’s subservience to men, but it’s disconcerting to hear such a disclaimer from reasonably progressive women. One has to assume that what they’re distancing themselves from is a strawwoman — a tendentious caricature of feminism as humorless man-hating.
I recently found myself wondering whether something similar might be going on when people who are uninterested in, or even actively put off by, the faith in which they were raised, disclaim labels like atheist or agnostic and insist that, though they’re not religious, they consider themselves spiritual.
What exactly does that last word mean? Could its appeal rest partly on dubious assumptions about the first two words?
If you’ve ever watched Miracle on 34th Street, you’ll remember its lesson that people who don’t believe in Santa Claus lack imagination. “It’s not just Kris [Kringle] that’s on trial,” one character says. “It’s everything he stands for. It’s kindness and joy and love and all the other intangibles.” All of which, apparently, are unfamiliar to dour, literal-minded skeptics.
That this is a ridiculously false dichotomy is a lesson I learned from my daughter when she was four years old. Abigail had a mad crush on Clifford the Big Red Dog at the time, so she was practically jumping out of her skin when she spotted a six-foot Clifford one afternoon, greeting children at a fair. She dashed over and wrapped her arms around his fur, excitedly informing him that she had seen him on TV. After a few minutes, she trotted over to me and said in a confidential whisper, “Daddy, you know that isn’t really Clifford. It’s just someone dressed up like him” — at which point she scooted back over and resumed her hugging.
The fact that my daughter understood it was all pretend didn’t dilute her joy one bit. So, too, for the endless imaginative games that all kids play: It’s enormous fun even though they know it’s make-believe. So why do so many adults assume children can’t enjoy the Santa myth unless it’s presented as a literal truth? Given that it’s possible for kids to have fun without our having to deceive them, why not have the best of both worlds: gaiety and honesty?
The same binary thinking may apply when we talk about belief in God rather than in Santa Claus. To be sure, many nonreligious people hesitate to call themselves atheists just because of the stigma and discrimination faced by anyone who does identify as such — a reluctance that, in turn, just feeds the prejudice. But I suspect that some people who don’t believe in a supernatural being (and recoil from rituals premised on such a belief) think of atheists as prosaic, joyless people who are determined to reduce life’s wonder to scientific equations. By contrast, they, themselves, are moved by natural beauty! They don’t think the experience of rapturous joy can be explained entirely by neurotransmitters! They embrace cosmic mysteries, such as why there is something rather than nothing! Thus, they figure they ought to check the “spiritual but not religious” box.
The thing is, those descriptions apply to me, too, and to other atheists who wince at the term spiritual. A spectacular sunrise evokes wonder, even awe, in us. (It doesn’t exactly evoke “gratitude,” though, because one isn’t just grateful for but grateful to. And we don’t believe that sunrises were deliberately created for their beauty.) Similarly, our minds sputter when we try to make sense of how the universe came to be. (Imagining an invisible Creator doesn’t solve the mystery, though — it just sets it back a step. As the 18th-century scholar Laplace said of God, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”)
To acknowledge the limits of science or to feel a deep connection to nature is entirely consistent with atheism. And it doesn’t suggest that one is spiritual. That term is better suited to those who smuggle religion in through the back door by anthropomorphizing the universe — treating it as a sentient entity that has a plan for us. Spiritual people aren’t any more intuitive or empathic or attuned to beauty than atheists are. What does set them apart is that they’ve convinced themselves that everything “happens for a reason” and was “meant to be.” Exactly like churchgoers, they are people of faith, a word that denotes belief in the absence of evidence. They don’t just take time to meditate, a practice common among thoroughly secular people; they think they’re actually communicating with a force Out There (even if they don’t call it God).
So if you’re willing to acknowledge that things actually happen for no reason at all and easily could have turned out otherwise, that no grand plan or transcendent Meaning exists, that nothing is “meant to be,” maybe you can join those of us who don’t shy away from the atheist label. Particularly once you realize that accepting it doesn’t imply a lack of capacity for joy and wonder.
On the other hand, if you’re an adult who believes in literal magic, well, maybe you are spiritual after all…
Alfie Kohn writes about behavior and education. His books include Feel-Bad Education, The Homework Myth, and What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?
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Cut-offs cut deep and wide, their emotional impact reverberating far beyond the combatants. Because much of the suffering is hidden, repair is challenging for everyone, not least of all therapists.
Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
Personal Perspective: On the reluctance to identify as a nonbeliever. – Psychology Today
