The question is, will politicians study the category well enough to identify and appeal to broadly shared values and longings? Spiritual voters are a diverse cohort and do not come hand-delivered as a political bloc—but there are shared values and experiences that call out for political cultivation. Their support for progressive causes links up with a broader unease with religious, political, and financial institutions viewed as tainted by wrongheaded values and jaded self-interest.

But the other side of religious nonaffiliation, and what politicians often neglect, is that for spiritual voters the sacred strongly persists. Reading them narrowly as atheists or secularists misses out on the political rewards that come from constituents feeling seen and understood. This sacred is various, but it coheres for many in its resistance to religious enclosure and its support of certain progressive values. Politicians fire up religious blocs through careful attunement to religious values. Better attunement to spiritual values will help inspire spiritual voters.

Scholars may be of limited help with this effort, although we’re coming around. An influential tradition in sociology views religiously unaffiliated spirituality as flimsy egoism that turns away from community and nation, that is socially and politically corrosive. The late Robert Bellah, patron saint of this point of view, complained that his archetypal spiritual individualist “has made the inner trip and hasn’t come back out again.” Sociologists who study religion, with some notable exceptions, have commonly written off “spiritual but not religious” folks as lukewarm participants in political and civic life.

This is questionable for many reasons, not the least of which is that the religiously unaffiliated have been an important Democratic stronghold in recent decades. And while some research does indicate that spiritual people participate less than religious people in civic and political life, the reason may have less to do with a social defect of individualized spirituality than with politicians, scholars, and journalists mishandling the opportunity to connect.

But in the last several years, sociologists and other religion scholars have begun to take spirituality more seriously, and to think more expansively about its social and civic manifestations. Some of us are finding that “spiritual but not religious” people usually do care, and deeply, about community and civic participation. The difficult part for them is finding communities and ways of engaging civically that jibe with their spiritual approaches. This requires a careful jujitsu. They are often uncomfortable with narrow religious affiliation (Muslim, Christian, Jew) that would welcome them into traditional religious communities, and traditional religious communities have historically been major routes into civic participation. On the other hand, new “spiritual but not religious” communities are difficult to establish: What will hold parishioners together aside from what they are not? And if they find common ground and the community holds, do they not eventually become their own “religion”?