Somewhere in the past two decades, “spiritual but not religious” stopped being a punchline and became a serious sociological category. In the United States, the “nones” — people who identify with no religion — are now the largest single religious group, at around 28% of the adult population. Women make up a substantial proportion of this group. And yet study after study shows that women who identify as nones still report high levels of spiritual experience, spiritual seeking, and practices that look, from the outside, a great deal like religion.
What is happening? And does it matter for wellbeing?
The Data on Women and Non-Religious Spirituality
The Pew Research Center’s 2023 report on religiously unaffiliated Americans found that the majority of nones believe in some higher power or spiritual force. Among women who are nones, the proportion is even higher than among men. Many engage in practices that have traditionally been associated with religious life: meditation, prayer (though not always addressed to a personal God), rituals marking transitions, the observance of something like a Sabbath.
Sociologist Tanya Luhrmann, in her 2020 book How God Becomes Real, studied the mechanisms by which religious practice creates genuine psychological experience — the sense of presence, of being held, of encountering something beyond the self. Her argument is that these experiences are not simply the result of believing the right doctrine; they emerge from specific practices that train attention in particular ways. Her research has implications beyond formal religion: if the practices produce the experiences, then the experiences may be available through the practices, regardless of the institutional container.
This is consistent with what many women in the secular spiritual space are actually doing: taking practices — meditation, contemplation, ritual, community — from their traditional religious contexts and working with them outside those contexts.
What “Secular Spirituality” Actually Looks Like
The range of practice in this space is wide. At one end, there are women doing mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) — a secularized form of Buddhist meditation developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the late 1970s — whose relationship to its Buddhist origins they may barely register. At the other end, there are women doing elaborate ritual practices drawn from paganism, Wicca, astrology, tarot, and other systems that are explicitly spiritual if not traditionally religious.
In between are practices that are harder to categorize: women who have created personal rituals around the seasons or moon cycles; women who have developed contemplative practices based on their reading of mystical texts from traditions they do not formally belong to; women who observe something like Sabbath as a weekly technology of rest; women who have built communities organized around shared values and life-stage transitions in ways that are functionally similar to religious community without the doctrinal framework.
The rise of “wellness” culture has partly provided a container for some of this seeking — yoga, for example, is practiced as both exercise and spiritual practice simultaneously, and the ambiguity is often deliberate. The problem with the wellness frame is that it tends to individualize what is fundamentally a social and communal need: the wellness industry sells products to individuals, but what people are often looking for is belonging, meaning, and a framework for making sense of suffering.
The Ritual Hunger
The anthropologist of religion Catherine Bell noted that ritual serves functions that can be separated from the specific beliefs ritual is supposed to express. Ritual creates time that is different from ordinary time. It marks transitions in ways that allow them to be processed. It connects the individual body to a larger body — of community, of history, of meaning. It gives shape to experiences (grief, joy, fear, gratitude) that are otherwise overwhelming.
When women leave religious communities that provided this ritual structure, they often discover the structure’s importance only in its absence. The birth of a child, the death of a parent, the end of a marriage, the onset of illness — these are moments when humans instinctively reach for ritual, and finding nothing available in secular culture that fits, many create their own.
The ceremony and ritual gap is particularly acute for women because women’s lives contain transitions — menarche, pregnancy, birth, menopause, the initiation into elderhood — that have traditionally been marked by religious ritual and that secular culture has no adequate ceremony for. The awkwardness of the baby shower, the non-existence of any ceremony for menopause, the cultural poverty of how death is handled in most secular contexts — these point to needs that are not going away simply because institutional religion is.
The Research on Spirituality and Female Wellbeing
The connection between spirituality (broadly defined) and wellbeing is one of the more robust findings in positive psychology. Studies consistently find that people who report high levels of spiritual experience — regardless of whether they identify as religious — have lower rates of depression and anxiety, higher resilience, better social support, and greater sense of meaning.
Crystal Park’s work on meaning-making and religion has been influential here. Park distinguishes between global meaning (the overarching frameworks through which we understand our lives) and situational meaning (how we understand specific events). Religious and spiritual frameworks, she finds, are particularly powerful for restoring meaning when situational events (illness, loss, failure) disrupt global meaning. This is not a trivial function.
For women specifically, the social dimension of spiritual community appears to be particularly important. Studies of women’s wellbeing consistently find that quality of social connection is one of the strongest predictors of mental and physical health. Religious communities have historically provided this — and the research suggests that the wellbeing benefits of religious participation are partly, perhaps largely, mediated by social connection rather than doctrine per se.
This has implications for secular spirituality: practices that build genuine community and social connection may have similar benefits to traditional religious participation, while practices that remain individualistic (meditation apps, solo yoga practice, private astrology consumption) may not fully replicate them.
The Goddess Resurgence and Contemporary Paganism
One of the more striking developments in secular women’s spirituality has been the growth of goddess-centered practices, neo-paganism, and Wicca. Wicca, which emerged from the mid-20th century writings of Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente, is now estimated to have several hundred thousand practitioners in the United States and United Kingdom. Women constitute a substantial majority of practitioners.
What draws women to these traditions? Several things, by account of practitioners themselves: a cosmology in which the divine has female dimensions; practices centered on nature, the body, and cycles (including the lunar and the menstrual cycle); communities structured without hierarchy; and a sense of connection to a pre-Christian religious heritage, however reconstructed that heritage may be.
The historian of religion Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon (1999) did the difficult work of demythologizing the historical claims of Wicca — it is much more recent than its practitioners often believe, and much of the supposed ancient material is modern reconstruction. But Hutton’s argument is not that contemporary paganism is therefore invalid; it is that it should be understood as a modern spiritual creation, which is not a lesser thing.
The astrology revival that has swept social media since the mid-2010s belongs in this space. Whatever the truth-value of astrological claims (not high, by scientific consensus), what astrology provides is a framework for self-understanding, a vocabulary for discussing inner experience, and a sense of connection to cycles and forces larger than the individual. These are genuine human needs. The form they take is less important than whether they are being met.
What Works
The research suggests some provisional conclusions about what actually serves women’s spiritual wellbeing outside institutional religion:
Community is not optional. The individualistic turn in secular spirituality — the meditation app, the self-help book, the solo retreat — may address some needs but doesn’t replicate the social function of religious community. Women who build or find genuine communities around shared values and practices appear to do better than those whose spirituality remains private.
Embodied practice matters. The disconnection of mind from body that characterizes much of secular life — particularly digital life — seems to intensify spiritual hunger. Practices that bring attention back to the body, breath, and physical experience appear consistently in accounts of what helps.
Ritual needs to be deliberately constructed. When institutional religion is not providing it, the work of creating meaningful ritual for life’s transitions doesn’t disappear — it falls to individuals and communities to do consciously. Women who do this — who actively mark births, deaths, transitions, seasons — report significant wellbeing benefits.
Intellectual engagement counts. The great mystical traditions are not consumed — they are engaged with. Women who approach their spiritual practice with curiosity and intellectual seriousness, reading primary sources, exploring different traditions, sitting with difficult questions, appear to develop more resilient and nourishing spiritual lives than those who remain on the surface.
The secular women building new sacred practices are not improvising out of ignorance. They are doing what humans have always done with religion: taking what is available, adapting it to circumstances, and making it serve the deep human need for meaning, community, and encounter with what is larger than the self.
Related reading on Vanity-X: