Spirituality

Religion and Spirituality: Not Interchangeable?

Listen to Dr. Holt's discussion

Though the terms "religion" and "spirituality" are often used interchangeably, they have very different meanings to the researchers who study their effects on physical and mental health during the aging process.

"Our research generally treats religiosity as an organized system of principles, beliefs, and worship involving a higher power," says Dr. Cheryl Holt, an assistant professor of medicine with the UAB Center for Aging.

"Spirituality is a broader construct, involving anything that may give a person meaning in life, a search for purpose, transcendence. This may involve nature; it may or may not involve a higher power. We view it as a broader construct than religiosity. I view spirituality as the umbrella under which religion falls.

"So a person may be religious as well as spiritual. Many people are spiritual but not religious, per se. So admittedly there’s a lot of debate in the literature as to defining them. We’re a lot better at defining religiosity in terms of measuring it than we are spirituality. And I think that’s one of the main reasons that the research in religiosity and health, or aging, is probably further along than the research in spirituality and aging, just because we have a much harder time measuring spirituality."

A downloadable audio file of Dr. Holt's article is also available.