We often call someone spiritual because they spend a great deal of time in prayer. But if that person treats other people with contempt, should the description still stand?
“Spirituality” is a familiar word in churches, yet it can be surprisingly difficult to explain. Does it mean praying often, knowing the Bible well, or attending worship faithfully?
Spirituality is difficult to separate from character. Character here means more than a pleasant temperament or good manners. It includes how we form relationships, exercise power within institutions, judge events, handle money and possessions, and take responsibility for the natural world. Spirituality becomes visible in the thoughts, attitudes, and actions through which a person meets the world.
Prayer, Scripture, worship, and profound religious experiences can all belong to that life. We still need to ask how they connect with everything else.
Can spirituality and character really be separated?
If someone prays for hours each day and reads through the Bible several times a year but humiliates people with less power, do those religious accomplishments establish spiritual maturity? If someone professes love for God but refuses to hear anyone who thinks differently, how does that love feel to the neighbor on the receiving end?
Prayer, Bible reading, worship, service, and giving are meaningful Christian practices. Trouble begins when they become a performance record used to measure spirituality. More time in prayer does not necessarily produce greater maturity. Extensive biblical knowledge does not guarantee gentleness or humility.
Without self-examination, religious discipline can reinforce our prejudices. We become skilled at noticing what we dislike about other people while growing less willing to hear that we are hurting someone ourselves.
Connecting spirituality with character does not reduce faith to being agreeable or well liked. Avoiding conflict is not always a sign of maturity. Refusing an unjust demand, standing beside someone who has been harmed, or questioning a familiar arrangement can be an act of love. The question is how our decisions and conduct honor other people's dignity, even when approval is unlikely.
Making God an accomplice
Something more dangerous happens when we attach God's name to our own judgments.
“I dislike that person” and “God disapproves of that person” are very different statements. The second adds divine authority to a human feeling or prejudice. Someone who disagrees with us becomes someone who has offended God.
When we call our anger righteous and give our dislikes the label of faith, love of neighbor has less room to breathe. We begin questioning another person's faith before considering whether we might be wrong. God becomes an accomplice in our effort to justify ourselves.
Naming wrongdoing and holding people accountable remain necessary. Explaining a harmful action with evidence, however, is different from invoking God to pass judgment on someone's whole character or faith.
The same restraint applies to those who criticize religious hypocrisy. Recognizing someone's arrogance does not give us permission to humiliate them. A willingness to distinguish our judgments from God's may itself be an essential spiritual discipline.
Spirituality becomes visible in relationships
First John 4:20 exposes the contradiction of claiming to love the unseen God while failing to love a brother or sister we can see. Our relationship with God cannot be sealed off from our relationships with people.
The fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23 includes love, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control. The inner transformation Christianity speaks of has consequences for the way we live with others.
This concern runs deep in the Christian tradition. John Chrysostom challenged worshippers who honored Christ lavishly inside the church while ignoring people outside who were cold and hungry. John Wesley described love of God and neighbor through patience, kindness in speech and action, and restraint in judging others.[1][2]
Henri Nouwen's life and writing offer another perspective. He wrote openly about anxiety and vulnerability and lived as a pastor at L'Arche Daybreak, a community with people with intellectual disabilities. Vulnerability became an important setting for his reflections on God's love and care.[3] His example challenges the assumption that spirituality is a credential awarded to the faultless.
Growing spiritually need not mean becoming someone who never fails. It can mean acknowledging our limits, accepting help, and making room for others to do the same.
These questions also apply to churches. In a question-and-answer exchange about the church's future, John Shelby Spong described the church he had known as dying while a new community was being born. He called this community “Ekklesia” and envisioned people moving beyond tribal loyalties, prejudice, gender hierarchies, and even religious boundaries. His hope lay in a new Christian future rather than simply preserving yesterday's institution.[4]
That need not be read as a declaration that all communities of faith are unnecessary. It invites a distinction between familiar church structures and the life Christians are called to lead.
We can take the question a step further. Are preserving a Christian institution and following the life Jesus showed us always the same undertaking? Asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus spoke of wholehearted love for God and love of neighbor as oneself (Matthew 22:37–40). The work of building and sustaining churches must also answer to that love.
If today's familiar forms of church were someday to disappear, could we still recognize something of Jesus' way in people who love their neighbors and care for those with less power? A desire for the church to endure should include an honest question about what it exists to do.
Responsibility remains when things go wrong
Outcomes alone cannot measure spirituality. A relationship may remain broken despite patient efforts to repair it. Loving care may not lead to the ending we hoped for. Another person's choices and circumstances outside our control cannot simply be charged against someone's faith or character.
Yet limited control does not remove our responsibility to consider what happened. If well-intended words hurt someone, “I meant well” cannot close the conversation. We need to listen, acknowledge our part, apologize when appropriate, and change our conduct.
Institutions face the same test. Do they dismiss a complaint as disloyalty, or hear its substance even when it is uncomfortable? Our treatment of possessions and the natural world raises related questions: how readily do we leave other people and future generations to bear the costs of our convenience?
Spirituality is visible in more than successful outcomes. What we learn and how we take responsibility after disappointment also reveal how we meet the world.
Salt and light in the world
Jesus calls his disciples the salt of the earth and the light of the world. He tells them to let others see their good works and give glory to God (Matthew 5:13–16). The world is where that calling must be lived. A church that treats the world only as something to fear or condemn can lose sight of its responsibility to love and serve within it.
Prayer and Scripture matter. That is precisely why their purpose deserves scrutiny. If prayer leaves us more arrogant, biblical knowledge makes us quicker to condemn, and years of worship leave us indifferent to our neighbors' pain, we need to ask what our devotion has been serving.
When prayer helps us examine our desires, reading Scripture unsettles a prejudice, and worship opens our ears to a neighbor's suffering, those practices take root in daily life.
Faith does not immediately produce a perfect character. We fall back into habits, hurt those closest to us, and fail to live by what we know. We need questions we can turn upon ourselves: Are we listening more carefully? Can we recognize a mistake and apologize?
A faith that claims increasing closeness to God while becoming more distant from people needs to examine what that closeness means. Spirituality cannot be a special status that exempts us from the responsibilities of character and conduct.
Spirituality may appear in remarkably ordinary ways.
Treating people with care. Admitting we may be wrong. Exercising restraint when we have power. Refusing to look away from suffering. Resisting the urge to condemn someone in the name of our beliefs.
And taking greater responsibility for the people, institutions, society, and natural world we encounter.
There is nothing spectacular about it. But why would such a life be any less spiritual?
Spirituality may be revealed more clearly in how people who profess faith in God treat the world and their neighbors than in how much they have to say about God.
Sources and notes
- John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Homily 50, sections 4–5. The discussion above summarizes his argument rather than quoting it.
- John Wesley, Sermon 139, “On Love,” section II. Summary, not a direct quotation.
- Henri Nouwen Society, About Henri Nouwen. Biographical context; this essay does not attribute its definition of spirituality to Nouwen.
- John Shelby Spong, question-and-answer exchange reproduced by Frank D. Myers in “Ekklesia …,” The Lucas Countyan, February 21, 2019. The repost identifies the exchange as an older Spong contribution circulated by Progressing Spirit and dates the original to October 15, 2003. This essay relies on that reproduction, not on an independently verified original edition or a quotation from a particular book. The questions following the summary are this essay's own reflections.