On Firing the Middleman Without Firing God.
“I am not religious. I am spiritual.”
He said it the way people say it now, half confession, half credential. He was not the first, and he will not be the last. The line cuts across race. What it does not cut across is class. This is not a movement of paupers or serfs. You need your Maslow basics met, and then some, before you have the surplus attention to go looking for meaning above and beyond survival. Spirituality, in its modern, self-authored form, is the privilege of the well fed, up there with veganism. The well educated, the well fed, and the well travelled are the ones developing the allergy to religious institutions, some of them drifting further, into atheism, tired of an Omnipresent, Omnipotent, Omniscient God who leaves too many questions unanswered.
This piece is not about them – the atheists. I am not in the business of defending God’s existence. I act as if God exists, which is a different claim entirely, it means I treat my actions as carrying transcendent weight, and I focus on behaviour over theological certainty. I am not planning to die for God. He does not need another martyr; Jesus was more than enough, and he had the added advantage of waking back up afterwards. I am not confident I would manage that part, not unless I show up as one of those pastors in an expensive suit, sharp bhoboza shoes, and a private jet, in which case resurrection might be a formality.
This is not an argument against atheism either. It is about a specific, sizeable group: people who still believe there is a Higher Power, God, YHWH, Allah, Qamata, Modimo, Thixo, and the rest of the ninety-nine names,.but who have lost trust in the institution built to house that belief, the same way they have lost trust in government and in media. They dropped religion. They kept God.
The Roots of Disenchantment
These are not people who arrived at unbelief through neglect. Most of them grew up in religious homes, tucked into bed by religious parents, carried on the prayers of grandparents who meant every word. At some point they believed those prayers were working. They wore the label proudly, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Traditionalist, the way you wear a family name. Today they do not claim the label. The exit was rarely a single event. It was erosion: scandal after scandal, dogma that refused to update itself against a world that had clearly moved, politics laundered through the pulpit. For many, leaving the institution was the only way left to protect the relationship with the divine.
Why the shift happens?
Personal autonomy: the desire to choose belief rather than inherit it.
Rejection of institutional corruption: scandal, money greed, Doom sprays, hypocrisy, and political meddling pushing believers out the door.
Inclusivity over exclusivity: a preference for universal love over doctrines that draw hard lines around who is saved and who is a heathen.
Experience over ritual: meditation and felt, internal states prioritised over repeated external forms.
Alignment with science: spirituality flexes to absorb new evidence; rigid text sometimes cannot.
The spiritual buffet effect: globalisation lets people mix yoga, mindfulness, and indigenous wisdom into a practice of their own design.
Healing from religious trauma: an exit from guilt-based teaching, forced to pray LGBTQAI+ away, judgment, and what some call spiritual abuse.
Two Different Operating Systems
Spirituality and religion are not the same software running on different hardware. They are different operating systems entirely, one compiled by the individual, one compiled by an institution.
From within the individual
Personal discovery and felt truth.
Inner peace and curiosity.
The self is the final judge.
Solitary or informal networks.
From an external institution
Structured rituals and laws
Shared dogma, scripture, creed
Communal, formal membership
Authority. Clergy, text, and institution hold power
Motivation
Duty, tradition, devotion
AN AFRICAN COMPLICATION
The West likes this binary, religious institution on one side, private spiritual self on the other, because Western religion arrived as an institution: a building, a clergy, a creed you signed. But amaXhosa, amaZulu, and most indigenous African systems never separated the two in the first place. Ancestral veneration, ubungoma, the consultation of izinyanga and amagqirha, these were always both personal and communal, both felt experience and inherited structure, at once. There was no pew to leave, because the practice already lived in the homestead, in the abattoir at a ceremony, in the way you addressed your elders. When a Black South African today says “I am spiritual, not religious,” they are sometimes doing something more specific than the global trend suggests: not inventing a private cosmology from scratch, but returning to a framework that predates the church their grandparents converted into. That is not the same migration as a well-fed executive in Sandton trading Sunday mass for a meditation app, even if the sentence out of both mouths sounds identical.
The Case for Remaining Religious & Spiritual.
The critique of institutions is often earned. But the case for staying inside a religious framework is stronger than the deconstruction crowd tends to credit. Spirituality provides the wind. Religion provides the sail.
1. The power of covenant community
Spirituality, practised alone, can be lonely. Religion binds people by design. A congregation shows up for the births, the weddings, the illnesses, the funerals, the full arc of a life, in a way a solitary practice rarely does on its own. It is also one of the last remaining spaces where children, parents, and elders regularly occupy the same room, passing down what a private journey has no mechanism to transmit.
2. The anchor of tradition and ritual
Humans are wired for ritual. Personal spiritual practice is fluid by design, which is its appeal and its weakness. Religious ritual has survived centuries of stress-testing. Liturgy, holy days, fasting, communal prayer, these give a rhythm to hold onto when personal emotion is too unreliable to hold onto anything. To keep a religious practice is to link your life to everyone who prayed the same words before you, in the same order, for the same reasons.
3. Accountability and moral friction
When you are spiritual but not religious, you are the sole author of your moral code, liberating, and dangerous. There is no ancient text pushing back on your modern biases, no elder correcting your convenient reading of your own values. Institutions also organise charity at a scale no individual can match: hospitals, soup kitchens, disaster relief. They force adherents out of comfort in a way private conviction rarely does on its own.
The Tension of Modern Faith
The exodus from institution to private practice is, at bottom, a demand for authenticity, for a faith built on questioning rather than obedience. That demand is legitimate. But the modern seeker stepping away from the pew should be careful not to throw out the structure along with the corruption. The task in front of us is not really a choice between spiritual and religious. It is to reform the institutions until they are worthy of the trust they are asking for again, or to build new communities that carry the freedom of spirituality inside the grounding architecture of ancient religion. Remaining religious, done honestly, still offers something the private journey struggles to replicate: a covenant community, a psychology anchored in ritual, and a moral accountability that does not let you mark your own homework.
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Dr. Mzamo Masito
Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings
Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.
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