Those who rejected institutional religion while maintaining a vivid inner life found the archive an unusually hospitable place.
Of the 2,080 accounts in the Hardy Archive, 239 come from people who would likely identify today as spiritual but not religious, people who reported vivid, often profound inner experiences while explicitly rejecting institutional religious affiliation. This group is particularly interesting to researchers because it refutes a common assumption: that religious institutions are necessary for religious experience. These accounts show the opposite. The experience arrives intact, often with striking depth and clarity, without any institutional scaffolding to receive it.
If this describes you, it may be worth knowing that researchers studying the Hardy data have noted that this group shows particularly high rates of what are technically called noetic quality and ineffability, the sense that the experience carried real knowledge and resisted ordinary language. The absence of a ready-made framework does not appear to reduce the intensity or significance of the experience. If anything, some accounts suggest that the experience arrives with greater phenomenological freshness when there is no tradition to immediately name and therefore contain it.
What this group's accounts share is not a common positive framework but a common approach: the experience is taken seriously on its own terms, without subordination to institutional authority or doctrinal content. Many describe sustained inner lives — practices of attention, periods of solitude, deep engagement with nature, without any formal religious context for those practices. The archive treats these accounts with the same seriousness as the most traditionally framed ones, because the data gives no reason to do otherwise.
The category spiritual-but-not-religious, a phrase that was just beginning to emerge as a self-descriptor in the later decades of the archive's collection period, captures respondents who have a strong and often intensely cultivated inner spiritual life but who do not identify with or participate in any institutional religious body. This group ranges from people who explicitly left Christianity after the experience they describe (sometimes because the experience was more vivid than anything the church had offered them) to people who never had an institutional religious context to leave, who developed their spiritual understanding independently through reading, private practice, and reflection. What unites them is the combination of experiential richness and institutional detachment.
The phenomenological content of spiritual-not-religious accounts does not differ dramatically from that of Christian accounts in its core features: the same qualities appear, the same triggers operate. What differs is the interpretive framework applied to the experience. Where a Christian respondent may move quickly to theistic personal language, a spiritual-not-religious respondent tends to linger longer in phenomenological description before committing to any interpretation, or may explicitly disclaim any settled interpretation while still insisting on the reality and importance of what happened. This interpretive caution tends to produce accounts that are, in certain respects, phenomenologically richer, precisely because the writer is not translating into a pre-existing vocabulary but trying to describe from scratch.
Spiritual-not-religious accounts are recognizable by an absence as much as a presence: the absence of institutional markers, scriptural reference, denominational language, and theistic personal pronouns. What appears in their place is often a more personal vocabulary, sometimes assembled from philosophical, literary, and psychological sources. Writers in this category are more likely to use abstract nouns, 'consciousness,' 'the universal,' 'something greater than myself', than personal divine names, and more likely to include expressions of uncertainty about interpretation alongside certainty about the experience itself. A common structure is the explicit disclaimer of religious identity followed by the experience that the disclaimer is meant to contextualize: 'I am not religious in any conventional sense, but I want to describe what happened to me.'
Spiritual-not-religious accounts represent 11.6% of the tradition-identified archive, the third largest group. These accounts show particularly high rates of noetic quality and ineffability, suggesting that the absence of a readymade interpretive framework intensifies both the cognitive significance of the experience and the difficulty of describing it. They also show comparatively high rates of faith-transformed as a lasting effect, possibly because those without prior strong institutional faith are more likely to describe a post-experience shift as transformative rather than merely confirmatory.
This is not the same as secular agnosticism.
People who identify as spiritual but not religious are sometimes grouped with the secular and agnostic on the assumption that both groups have simply left religion behind. But the archive suggests they are distinct. Spiritual-not-religious accounts describe active inner lives, sustained practices, and strong convictions about the reality of what was experienced. Secular agnosticism tends toward suspension of the question; this group tends toward a different kind of certainty — one that is independent of institutional sanction.
This is not a diluted form of religion.
The assumption that genuine religious experience requires institutional context, that a spiritual-not-religious account is a weakened or undisciplined version of what a committed practitioner would have, is not supported by the Hardy data. The accounts in this group are not characterized by less intensity, less specificity, or less transformative effect than the most traditionally framed accounts. They are simply differently housed.
This is not less rigorous.
Rejecting institutional authority over one's experience can be a sign of intellectual seriousness rather than casualness. Many accounts in this group describe people who had genuine engagements with religious traditions before leaving them, and whose departure was considered rather than incidental. The spiritual-not-religious stance in the archive is rarely lazy; it is often the result of careful attention to what the experience actually was, rather than what an institution said it should be.
Can I have religious experiences without believing in God?
Yes, and the archive demonstrates this clearly. The 239 accounts in the spiritual-not-religious category include many from people who explicitly stated they did not hold a belief in God, or who held agnostic positions, and who nevertheless described experiences with the full range of characteristics the archive documents, noetic quality, sense of presence, ineffability, lasting change. The experience does not appear to require belief as a precondition. Hardy himself considered this one of the more important findings of the archive.
Am I spiritual-not-religious or just non-religious?
The distinction is real and worth sitting with. The archive's spiritual-not-religious group is characterized by an ongoing inner life, practices of attention, deep experiences of nature, periods of contemplation, that the purely secular group generally does not report. If you have had experiences that seemed to carry more than personal emotional weight, that produced a sense of contact with something larger, and that you found yourself returning to as evidence of something real, then the spiritual-not-religious framing is probably closer to accurate. The non-religious category tends toward the view that nothing of this kind has happened, or that what happened was adequately explained by ordinary causes.
Should I join a tradition now?
Nothing in the archive suggests this is a necessary response to the experience. Many accounts in this group describe people who investigated traditions after their experiences and found that partial engagement, reading, occasional practice, attending events, was sufficient without formal membership. Others describe complete independence from any institution for decades afterward, without any sense that this was a lack. The question of whether a tradition can help you develop what the experience opened is worth asking; the assumption that you must join something to take it seriously is not supported by the data.
Does this experience mean I was wrong to leave religion?
The archive doesn't support this inference. The experience arrived after the institutional context was gone; this is a fact about timing, not a verdict about the decision to leave. What the experience might suggest is that whatever the institution was pointing at was real, but whether that requires a return to the institution, or a different relationship with that same reality outside one, is not determined by the data. Many accounts describe people who maintained their distance from organized religion while deepening their relationship with the experience itself.