There is a long tradition of wondering about the mental health implications of religious practice. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung famously claimed to have seen almost no practicing Catholics in decades of clinical practice. Others have failed to replicate this result, but the idea that religious practice has some meaningful impact on mental health persists.

For Jung, speaking in 1939, the world could be divided into two categories: those who practiced a religion (which for Europeans of Jung's era primarily included Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism) and those who did not. Any serious contemporary consideration of this question, however, would need to introduce a third category. Many people today reject "organized religion," but do not quite identify as secular either. They report having a spiritual life while disavowing any particular religious practice. They are, in a phrase, "spiritual but not religious."

This fact introduces a new question for psychology: What are the mental health benefits of this spiritual attitude? One might reasonably suppose that they are positive. After all, many people who take this attitude engage in practices that are widely held to be beneficial to mental health, such as meditation, even if they do not accept the background theology of Buddhism or other major religions that encourage meditative practices. This........

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