I have a bachelor's degree in Religious Studies. Quite literally in the first week they gave us a handbook with some 120 definitions of religion. It was quite a

I have a bachelor's degree in Religious Studies. Quite literally in the first week they gave us a handbook with some 120 definitions of religion. It was quite a sobering introduction to understand that the field I was going to invest 3 years in didn't have a consensus on what it is it's actually studying. Whilst I think it's fair to say that the general perception is that religion is something more formal and perhaps more organised than spirituality, no such strict distinction holds a broad consensus in academia. Perhaps relevant, is to consider that we even studied capitalism and communism. So not only is it unclear where religion ends and spirituality begins, but neither is it straightforward to isolate the boundary between religiousness and secularism. Personally I think "spiritual" is generally used as an implicit value judgement to distance something religious from "religion". It's that implied distancing which, to me, is the most relevant. Leonard Cohen's Zen teacher was involved in widely publicised sex scandals. Just because somebody leans more on the spiritual side of the spectrum doesn't automatically distance them from the more traditional trappings of religion. However, I would say that implicitly distancing yourself from something does tend to ironically bring you closer to it.