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Religious. Spiritual. None.
People describe themselves with these every day, and mean strikingly different things by them.
Nothing here says which is right or better. It describes what the words are used to mean and what surveys find.
That is a smaller job than it sounds, and nobody usually does it.
Usually means belonging: a tradition, a community, shared practices, and often a text and a place.
The emphasis is on something held in common with others.
Usually means a personal sense of something beyond the everyday, without a tradition organising it.
Many people describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, and mean exactly this.
A survey category, not a belief. It covers people who tick nothing when asked about religion.
It is a large and very mixed group.
If someone answers none on a religion survey, what does that tell you about their beliefs?
Atheist is a claim about belief in God. Agnostic is a claim about what can be known.
Both are more specific than none, which is why they get counted separately.
What is each word mainly about?
Tap an item, then a bucket
Pew put 32 factual questions about religion to a large US sample in 2019 — the Bible, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, atheism, and the size of religious groups.
Out of 32, what did the average person get right?
Jewish respondents averaged 18.7, self-described atheists 17.9, agnostics 17.0.
Two of those three groups do not practise a religion at all.
Knowing about religion and being religious are not the same thing.
Mainline Protestants, Catholics and Mormons scored close to the general public.
A rule about treating others as you would want to be treated appears in some form across the major traditions, and in secular ethics too.
It is one of the few places they visibly converge.
Most people live among others whose words for this differ from their own. Knowing what the labels do and do not mean is the difference between a conversation and an assumption.
Religious is mostly about belonging, spiritual about a personal sense of something more, and none is a survey box holding many different people.
And almost nobody, of any label, knows much about the others.