CeleryKills

We were up before dawn at Bryce Canyon, the kind of early that feels slightly unreasonable even when you chose it on purpose. The road to the rim was empty, the air sharp enough to sting, and the sky still undecided about what it planned to do next. I had coffee cupped between my hands; my wife had hot chocolate, steam rising from the lid in small, defiant clouds. We stood there in near silence as the light began to move, not all at once, but step by step, spilling across rock formations that dropped a thousand meters down and then, somehow, kept going in the imagination all the way to plains and states far beyond what we could see.

Nothing about the moment suggested intention or message. There was no sense of being addressed, judged, or guided. What it evoked instead was scale, improbability, and a quiet awareness of being temporary witnesses to something that did not need us. The feeling was deep and steady, the kind people often reach for the word spiritual to describe. For us, though, it was unmistakably humanistic. The meaning came from being there together, from the cold, the light, the shared stillness, and from knowing that the experience mattered precisely because it would pass.

The word spiritual has a way of slipping into conversations uninvited. It appears at trailheads, in hospital waiting rooms, during long silences after good music, and in emails that begin with “I’m not religious, but…” People reach for it when something feels meaningful in a way that ordinary language fails to capture. Moments like that morning at Bryce Canyon make the impulse understandable. The trouble is that the word arrives carrying centuries of theological luggage, whether we asked for it or not.

Before sorting out what spiritualism might mean today, it helps to be precise about what we are talking about.

Definition

spiritual (adjective)
Relating to human experiences of meaning, connection, awe, depth, or moral significance that arise from cognitive, emotional, and social responses to events, relationships, or environments, without requiring belief in supernatural beings, forces, or realms.

And alongside it, a parallel refinement.

Definition

spirituality (noun)
The interpretive framework through which individuals or communities make sense of experiences of meaning, awe, connection, or moral depth, whether those experiences are understood in supernatural, deistic, or entirely natural terms.

These definitions do not deny the intensity or sincerity of spiritual experiences. They simply locate them where they occur, in human perception, interpretation, and response.

That move turns out to be older than it sounds.

A Short History of “Spiritual”

Historically, spirituality was not primarily about feelings. In early Christian usage, spiritus referred to alignment with divine will, contrasted with the material or fleshly life. Medieval spirituality focused on discipline, obedience, and moral formation, not subjective experience (McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 1991).

The modern sense of spirituality began to emerge in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, when internal experience started to matter as much as doctrine. Think of Rousseau walking alone, or Wordsworth overwhelmed by landscapes that felt instructive rather than inert (Taylor, A Secular Age, 2007). By the nineteenth century, spirituality was loosening its institutional ties and becoming portable.

Isaac Newton offers a useful illustration of this transitional moment. Although deeply theistic, Newton’s spiritual life was largely solitary, inward, and interpretive rather than ecclesial. He spent years studying biblical prophecy and the hidden order of creation, convinced that nature itself was a kind of text to be read with reverence and patience. His sense of spiritual meaning did not come from ritual or church authority so much as from sustained contemplation of cosmic order, mathematical harmony, and the intelligibility of the universe. For Newton, uncovering the laws of motion was not merely scientific labor; it was a form of devotion, a way of standing in quiet awe before a reality that felt lawful, vast, and ultimately meaningful, even when it offered no personal reassurance (Westfall, Never at Rest, 1980).

By the late twentieth century, it had gone fully freelance. Sociologists began to describe a shift from religion as authority to spirituality as experience, summarized neatly in the phrase “believing without belonging” (Davie, Religion in Britain Since 1945, 1994).

Carl Sagan provides a late‑twentieth‑century example of spirituality untethered from religion but not from awe. Publicly skeptical of gods and dogma, Sagan nonetheless spoke with unmistakable reverence about the universe and humanity’s place within it. His reflections on the “Pale Blue Dot,” prompted by a photograph of Earth taken from the edge of the solar system, are often described as spiritual despite their explicitly naturalistic framing. The experience he invited readers into was not one of divine encounter, but of perspective: humility in the face of cosmic scale, connection through shared fragility, and moral seriousness grounded in the fact that this small world is all we have. Meaning arose not from transcendence beyond nature, but from attention to it (Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994).

At no point in this history did spirituality require consensus. What changed was who got to define it.

Theistic Spirituality

In theistic spirituality, spiritual experiences are interpreted as encounters with a personal god or gods. Awe becomes worship. Meaning becomes purpose bestowed from beyond. Connection is vertical as much as horizontal.

This framework gives spiritual experiences narrative coherence. Suffering fits into a larger plan. Moral urgency gains cosmic backing. Many people find this interpretation stabilizing, especially when experiences feel overwhelming or ethically demanding (James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902).

Martin Luther King Jr. offers a clear example of theistic spirituality functioning as moral ballast rather than private consolation. King repeatedly framed suffering, personal risk, and social resistance within a Christian narrative that rendered them meaningful rather than merely tragic. Jail, threats, and eventual martyrdom were interpreted not as signs of failure, but as participation in a morally ordered struggle guided by divine justice. His “Letter from Birmingham Jail” reads less like political argument than spiritual reasoning: a claim that moral obligation is grounded in a cosmic order that transcends unjust laws and immediate consequences. For King, spiritual experience did not soften ethical demand; it intensified it, anchoring action in a story where sacrifice had purpose and history bent, however slowly, toward justice (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963; Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963).

But theistic spirituality also introduces interpretive pressure. Experiences must be sorted into categories of divine intent, temptation, grace, or error. The same feeling of awe that inspires generosity in one context can justify exclusion or certainty in another. The experience itself does not determine the moral outcome. The interpretation does.

Deistic Spirituality

Deistic spirituality occupies a quieter middle ground. Here, spiritual experiences are understood as encounters with an impersonal order, a creative principle, or a distant intelligence that does not intervene. Nature is often the favored medium. Mountains teach without speaking. The universe inspires without instructing.

This approach has a long pedigree, especially among Enlightenment thinkers who rejected revealed religion while retaining reverence for cosmic order (Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, 1734). Today it shows up in language about “the universe,” “energy,” or “something larger,” usually delivered with a shrug that signals openness without obligation.

Thomas Jefferson is often cited as a canonical example of this posture. Publicly skeptical of miracles and revealed theology, Jefferson nevertheless spoke with admiration about the moral beauty and rational elegance he found in the natural order. His famously edited Jefferson Bible, which removed miracles and divine claims while preserving ethical teachings, reflects a deistic spirituality that prized coherence over mystery and reverence over worship. For Jefferson, meaning resided not in divine interruption but in the steady intelligibility of the world and humanity’s capacity to reason within it. God, if present at all, was a distant architect rather than a conversational partner, leaving awe intact but obligation firmly human (Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, 1804; Ellis, American Sphinx, 1997).

Deistic spirituality avoids institutional conflict, but it often struggles to say what, if anything, follows from spiritual insight. Awe remains powerful, but ethics are imported from elsewhere.

Atheist Spirituality

Atheist spirituality interprets the same kinds of experiences without invoking gods, intentions, or non‑material realms. Awe is a response to scale, complexity, or beauty. Meaning arises from relationships, projects, and shared vulnerability. Moral depth emerges from empathy and consequence rather than command.

This is not a new development. Thinkers from Spinoza to Einstein described profound reverence without supernatural belief (Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 1999). Contemporary neuroscience and psychology have only sharpened the picture, showing how experiences of transcendence correlate with attention, emotion, and social cognition (Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 2012).

A contemporary example of this naturalized spirituality comes from Taylor Lee, known online as The Antibot. In describing herself as a “spiritual atheist,” Lee is careful to separate belief from practice. What she means by spirituality is not commitment to unseen forces, but a methodology for navigating life after religion: ritual without metaphysics, symbolism without literalism, and meaning built through intentional practice rather than doctrine. Her use of ritual, meditation, and even symbolic Satanic imagery is explicitly psychological and grounding, a way of focusing attention, processing emotion, and reinforcing values she has chosen consciously. The experience retains depth and resonance, but its source is fully human. Nothing listens. Nothing intervenes. The practice works because humans work on themselves through it, not because the universe responds in kind (Melone, The Alt-Right Pipeline, 2026).

Not long after encountering accounts like that, I found myself standing on a fogged overlook above Puget Sound, watching ferries slide silently through the gray. The feeling that settled in was familiar and difficult to overstate: smallness paired with an improbable sense of belonging. No explanation arrived with it. None was required. The moment did not ask for belief or interpretation. It asked only for attention.

That distinction matters.

Spirituality Is Optional

An often overlooked point in these discussions is that deism, theism, and atheism all exist quite comfortably without spirituality.

Plenty of theists relate to their god primarily through doctrine, duty, or tradition rather than felt experience. Plenty of atheists navigate life through ethics, curiosity, or habit without ever using the word spiritual. Deists can be thoroughly uninterested in awe altogether.

Spirituality is not a prerequisite for belief or disbelief. It is an interpretive layer some people find useful and others do not.

This matters because it keeps spirituality from being mistaken for moral seriousness or existential depth. One can have those with or without it.

Why the Word Persists

If spirituality is optional, why does the word keep coming back?

Because experiences of awe, connection, and moral salience are stubborn. They show up whether invited or not. Language eventually follows experience. Spirituality persists not because it explains something supernatural, but because it names something felt.

The disagreements begin when naming becomes claiming.

Is that feeling evidence of God, the universe, or human neurobiology doing what it does best? The experience underdetermines the answer. History suggests we choose interpretations that fit our broader commitments, then mistake the fit for proof.

A Question Worth Asking

Instead of asking whether spirituality is true, a more revealing question might be this: what work is your version of spirituality doing for you?

Does it clarify responsibility or soften it? Does it expand concern or narrow it? Does it invite humility or certainty?

People occupy every point on the spectrum, from no spirituality at all, through deistic reverence, to fully theistic interpretation, to atheist spirituality grounded entirely in human experience. None of these positions are incoherent. All of them are choices.

The invitation, then, is not to adopt a label, but to examine how meaning shows up in your life and what story you tell about it afterward.

That conversation is usually more interesting than the argument about whose explanation wins.

References

• Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963.
• Davie, Grace. Religion in Britain Since 1945. 1994.
• Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
• Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind. 2012.
• James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1902.
• Jefferson, Thomas. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. 1804. Reprinted in The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, edited by Dickinson W. Adams. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983.
• King, Martin Luther Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” April 16, 1963. Reprinted in Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Signet Classics, 1964.
• McGinn, Bernard. The Foundations of Mysticism. 1991.
• Melone, Kayse. The Alt-Right Pipeline, Christian Influencers, and Satanism – w/The Antibot. 2026.
• Nadler, Steven. Spinoza: A Life. 1999.
• Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Random House, 1994.
• Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. 2007.
• Voltaire. Philosophical Letters. 1734.
• Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.