Religiosity vs. Spirituality vs. Faith: What's the Difference?

Julie Holly: Have you ever wondered why doing all the right faith things, the reading, the church attendance, the devotionals, the routine, can still leave you feeling flat? Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe you feel something real, something you can't quite name or defend, and you wonder if that even counts as faith.

Julie Holly: Today we're starting something I've actually been hesitant to create for a really long time. I'd planned to save this topic for the very end of season five, partly because I wasn't sure if I was ready. then I invited you to choose the topics that you were most interested in and when the survey came back on what to cover this season, this topic, faith and spirituality, Came up as the number one pick by a wide margin. Almost 80% of you said, "This is a topic. Let's cover it first." Woo, so I moved it up. And I want to explain why I've been timid about this because I think that's really important also, and I think that may be resonant with you as well.

Julie Holly: I've literally been on a lifelong recalibration with this exact topic. And every time I've sat down to create content on it, I have felt this hesitation, a fear that I'm going to upset people that share my faith, that someone's going to tell me I'm wrong or that I've gone woo, or that I'm new age, or You hear a lot. And a lot of that stems from the environment I was raised in. That environment valued theology. It valued an intellectual knowing of God and with that, feeling or sensing God wasn't something that came with the same level of respect.

Julie Holly: If I'm honest with myself, I believe it was actually discouraged or even doubted. Even with my family's move to North Idaho a decade ago, I was hesitant to tell people, " God told us to."

Julie Holly: I even had one family member say, "You just say that so that you can do what you want."

Julie Holly: I pause it's so gross and, ah, it, and it takes my breath away. , I can't imagine putting words into God's mouth or saying this is what God said and acting on it

Julie Holly: because I do know theology and I do know my Bible, and I am definitely not going to say something that is untrue about God.

Julie Holly: , And so with that, feelings and- or sensing intuitively just being deeply connected with God in a way that is not theological and intellectualized or knowledge base is often fully and completely dismissed as something that is used to manipulate

Julie Holly: So what do you do when God gives you tremendous faith? When you can sense his presence, feel it, and you're told sometimes right out loud, and sometimes just underneath everything, "Don't trust that. It's just a feeling." The renewal of the mind was idolized in the world I came from, and the transformation of the heart wasn't valued nearly as much. Nobody would say that, but that was what was communicated.

Julie Holly: I'm sharing this with you because I think a lot of you have lived some version of that too.

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Julie Holly: so what's the difference between faith, religiosity, and spirituality? This is not according to AI or Google search or Merriam-Webster or some type of fixed piece like that. Um, these are my own perspectives and, and these are tender topics. So I wanna honor that you may choose to add, edit, or delete from how I am describing this.

Julie Holly: And I genuinely love to hear what's rising up for you with this content.

Julie Holly: Religiosity says if you do the things, read the verse, do the devotional, go to church you'll be connected. But the truth is, is that you can recite the same prayer a thousand times and never once feel your heart in the room

Julie Holly: Doing the practice was never the same as being in the relationship.

Julie Holly: And then there's spirituality. spirituality, if we're honest about it, has its own version of the same problem. It's a real feeling, connection, energy, something more without anything fixed underneath it to actually hold onto

Julie Holly: and it builds its own checklists too. It just doesn't always look religious. If I meditate enough, if I have the right crystals, if I say the right affirmation, manifest the right energy. Same reaching, different vocabulary. Nobody talks about that one very honestly because it sounds spiritually generous to just leave it undefined.

Julie Holly: But it's the same shape. We're just triangulating by feeling instead of by rule keeping.

Julie Holly: Both are two practices and actually the same ache. one of them overcompensates on the doing, and one of them overcompensates on the feeling, Both of these are reaching for something real. and neither of them is wrong to be reaching.

Julie Holly: And then there's faith. Faith is neither of those,

Julie Holly: And I think that's the piece that gets lost when people only have two categories to sort this into. Faith isn't the doing and it isn't the feeling. Faith is trust in a person. That's it. That's the whole thing religiosity was trying to prove and spirituality was trying to feel its way toward, and neither one of them can actually get you there because trust isn't something you perform

Julie Holly: And it isn't something you manufacture a sensation of. It's something you place in someone.

Julie Holly: I often refer to living from trust as vertical alignment. Orienting your identity towards a fixed point instead of constantly negotiating on a horizontal plane. Horizontal plane meaning the things that are just at eye level, the things that we can see

Julie Holly: and for me, The Next Six Episodes has a very clear fixed point. That's Jesus. I'm not going to dance around that because it matters that you know exactly whose faith perspective you're hearing from.

Julie Holly: And if you've been listening to the recalibration, you already know that, and you already know that I'm not antagonistic toward other beliefs.

Julie Holly: So if you're listening and you don't share my faith, but you're curious about exploring the role of faith and spirituality, I hope you stay. I listen to a lot of content outside my faith, and I find beautiful gems that help me grow. In this series, I am not here trying to convince you of what to believe or condemn you for what you choose to believe.

Julie Holly: I'm going to speak from my own personal experience, and with all of it, invite you into your own recalibration on this topic of faith, spirituality, and religiosity.

Julie Holly: So for the next six weeks, I wanna actually walk you through the identity-level recalibration pathway Using the tension between religiosity and spirituality as the terrain,

Julie Holly: none of this as a concept that I'm going to explain to you. This is going to be something you get to experience right alongside me while I share with you the , truest version of my own story with it.

Julie Holly: For context, The five stages of recalibration are recognition, release, reclamation, reinforcement, and renewed momentum. You're going to hear all five today by name because this episode is setting the shape for the next six episodes. And at each one, I'm going to ask you something.

Julie Holly: You don't have to answer it out loud. You can if you want to. You don't have to answer at all if you don't want to. Just let the question land

Julie Holly: Let's begin with recognition, awareness, because we cannot heal what we cannot see.

Julie Holly: When I made an actual decision as a four-year-old child to love God with everything I had. Nobody made me, and I wasn't scared of hell. Okay, everybody is a little bit, right? But I just, I felt this pull, and it was so pure, and it was mine. And I said yes to that And all of that beauty of that moment,

Julie Holly: Decades later, I value the precious purity of that moment so much. That what I experienced was so real. , And what I built on top of it over the years is a different story. Because somewhere along the way, , loving God turned into proving I loved God. Read your Bible, go to church, spend time with Him.

Julie Holly: And let me be clear, I still believe all three of those things matter. They are not the problem.

Julie Holly: But I started to believe that doing them was the same thing as being connected to Him, and it isn't. I got rigid.

Julie Holly: I just remember feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders if I said something like, "Get your butt over here," that was not acceptable. And in my formative years, I internalized that that is making me a worse Christian. I wouldn't cuss, and I want you to bookmark that because that has tremendous significance decades later.

Julie Holly: What's interesting is that I held so much judgment for people who weren't doing it right. And at the exact time, I also had this tenderness in me for people living in the margins, people the church had written off. of those were true in me at the same time. The pure joy from that kitchen table and a kind of self-righteous condemnation running alongside it

Julie Holly: And just sharing that clearly like this, both sides of it, that's recognition doing its job. No shame, no condemnation, no judgment, just seeing it for what it is. And spoiler, what I've learned is that Jesus isn't condemning me. People might, but Jesus isn't condemning me. So let me ask you this.

Julie Holly: Where have you been doing the practice without being in the relationship? Or where have you been floating in a feeling with nothing underneath it to actually hold you? You You don't have to answer me. Just let yourself notice

Julie Holly: When we're aware, when we recognize without shame, judgment, criticism, all of that, we transition into release.

Julie Holly: Release. What you've been carrying longer than necessary can be set down with honor, not shame. We can let go of roles not as abandonment, but as alignment

Julie Holly: I could have stayed in that religiosity for a lifetime. But fortunately, when I was 18, I was given the gift of being hit head-on by a drunk driver.

Julie Holly: It was an extremely traumatic and formative event. I've gone into the details in other episodes, so I'm not gonna go into them here.

Julie Holly: But that was something that shook things up for me. It startled the religiosity. I realized the brevity of life as I was being wheeled in a gurney, there was my mom walking briskly beside the gurney telling me that my great aunt had just died

Julie Holly: So there I was feeling renewed and fresh. I walked into the college campus, and I felt reconnected with God. I felt like, wow, um, I want this relationship.

Julie Holly: And so I started experiencing that proximity, those feelings of proximity to God again. Yes, it was a feeling. I remember walking on campus in the fall and just feeling this connection and having conversation with God, just that feeling of here are my thoughts floating up towards you, Lord, and just receiving back even from creation around me, just the awe, the wonder, the splendor, the presence of God.

Julie Holly: It was so beautiful. And I continued to make some choices of reading my Bible, of going to church, of not being involved in certain activities or using cuss words and such. I was part of a rock climbing community at that time, and I would train in this indoor gym.

Julie Holly: Those were, like, brand new. This is before the sport actually took off. it was so fun because I showed care and kindness towards my friends, and they showed care and kindness towards me, and that demonstrated I didn't judge them or criticize them or condemn them.

Julie Holly: And yet they knew my convictions, and they respected , my beliefs and my convictions without me having to defend them.

Julie Holly: It's funny because sometimes they would be talking about something, maybe a movie or something that was going on, and they'd just be like, "Oh, this isn't for you, Julie." And they weren't saying it in a ostracizing way. They were actually really showing like, love and kindness. It wasn't, "Get away.

Julie Holly: You're gonna jud-" It was just like, "Oh, we know you, and we wanna take care of you." True growth friends without knowing that's what a growth friend does. I had faith, and I had real friendships both at the same time.

Julie Holly: And it was there at that climbing gym where I met my first husband.

Julie Holly: He wasn't someone who went to church, but he ended up coming to church and choosing to come to church and sharing a faith journey with me.

Julie Holly: And maybe all of that was simply because it was important to me. It's not for me to, to say or to decide.

Julie Holly: And then things very quickly went off the rails, completely off the rails in that marriage. I was living through abuse, betrayal, and never saw any of

Julie Holly: that coming but there was one thing that I was certain of. I had done everything right. I had checked every box. I didn't do anything I shouldn't do before you're married.

Julie Holly: I didn't do all the... I could check every single box. And in that moment, I was like, God left me high and dry And that's how you know it's religiosity. when you believe it's transactional. If I do X, then God owes me Y and Z. I had done the deal, and I believed he had broken it

Julie Holly: I hit rock bottom. And actually part of the reason I hit rock bottom was for two years I was forbidden to have any interaction with my family. And I had some twisted beliefs in my mind that I had to air, I'm putting air quotes, um, obey my husband and that I needed to, I had to do these things because that's what he said.

Julie Holly: And that meant enduring abuse and isolation. What I've come to learn is the power of being in proximity within community, within people who are supporting you and elevating you, raising you up and encouraging you on the path that you are on

Julie Holly: At that rock bottom moment, it was literally a dark, stormy night, and I'm hauling down Highway 99, if you know California, in the rain, windshield wipers going, and tears blurring everything. My cheeks just hot. The anger, the betrayal, the frustration, the everything I felt. I had been betrayed by, by this man I had married.

Julie Holly: I had been betrayed by God, and I did not want to live anymore. And in that moment, out of the heart, scripture says, uh, "The heart is a wellspring of life," and our words come from our hearts And remember I said earlier, like I was a, I was a good girl. I was a good Christian girl. I didn't cuss. I didn't do all that stuff.

Julie Holly: Yeah. I ended up finding out what was really in my heart. And what was really in my heart was anger and contempt and bitterness and rage. And I cussed God out. Words that I didn't even know I could use were just spilling out of my mouth

Julie Holly: Telling him about the deal I thought we had had and I wanna be honest with you about that because I think a lot of people get to that exact place,

Julie Holly: And they think it means their faith failed. It didn't. It meant the religiosity failed because religiosity never holds things,

Julie Holly: So let's shift the tables for a moment. What's the deal you've made? Where have you been telling yourself, "If I do enough, if I'm just good enough, God owes me something specific universe owes me because , I have meditated, and I have held energy, and I am in alignment

Julie Holly: this is your opportunity to release that

Julie Holly: After release comes reclamation. Clarity returns not as something new, but as recognition of what was always true That bottom, cussing God out, that's when I realigned and reconnected with God in such a powerful, significant way. And not because I did a bunch of stuff to earn my way back through performance.

Julie Holly: I haven't done anything to deserve anything

Julie Holly: I was as undone as I'd ever been, and God met me there anyway

Julie Holly: What's interesting is what I reclaimed wasn't a new belief. It was the same relationship from that four-year-old little girl, such purity, such love and delight of God, minus the checklist I'd put on top of it over I wasn't cleaned up when I met God for real. In fact, I was worse off because I was there cussing God out, and that's the whole point. reclamation wasn't only something I understood, it was something I felt. As I started picking up the pieces of my life, I remember the actual sensation of his peace, this settling in my chest that I hadn't felt in years. Not relief because the circumstances had changed. They hadn't.

Julie Holly: In fact, it was really hard,

Julie Holly: An entire year of really hard choices and decisions, but I had peace in my body while everything around me was still a mess And I'm wondering for you, where might peace already be closer than you think? Not as a resolved theology and intellectual knowledge of God, not in having everything figured out, just a moment where something in you softened.

Julie Holly: Let yourself feel it

Julie Holly: We move to reinforcement. Reinforcement is the understanding that alignment doesn't hold in theory. It has to be practiced , in the ordinary moments of real life

Julie Holly: And here's the thing I really want you to hear today, maybe more than anything else. We walk the identity-level recalibration pathway without self-condemnation, without judgment, without a timeline for how it's supposed to go.

Julie Holly: Your presence, your willingness to walk in awareness, to release, to reclaim, that is all that's being asked of you. The willingness is what reinforcement actually is. It's not a finish line. It's not proof that you've arrived. It's just showing up again, unconditioned, the way you did the very first time

Julie Holly: And I wanna be honest with you about this. This wasn't a finished process, not even after I thought I'd done the real work

Julie Holly: and, I can assure you reinforcement is a real thing, right? We follow this timeline, and you have a timeline, and I hope you take time to be very curious about what your experience has been with religiosity and spirituality and what faith is, just looking at what that single experience has been in your lifetime.

Julie Holly: Because you've heard that pure heart at four years old that got covered, and I still loved God. It doesn't mean I didn't still love God or anything, but, like, it got covered and buried under religiosity. And then there's a drunk driver that just, like, rattles and shakes me up and, and things are fine.

Julie Holly: And then there's this abusive marriage and betrayal that led to divorce that shook me up further. There's so much more that that removed from my life. And so I really truly believed that I had done all this work and that I was free of that, and then guess what? I had kids. And in the early years of raising my own kids, I found myself doing a copy/paste of the exact belief system I'd been raised in, copy/paste right onto them.

Julie Holly: That same drive for external validation, That the state of your heart could be proven by whether you were taking the right actions. I was inflicting the very thing that wounded me. That took another recalibration to see it.

Julie Holly: God moved our family out to 10 acres in far north Idaho, and it was there that where I stepped away from raising what I call religious robots. I bring this up because recalibration isn't something you do once and shelf. Letting yourself recognize what's happening without shame, without criticism, without judgment, is what lets you see the next thing you couldn't see before.

Julie Holly: I've been married 20 years now, 25 years in this relationship, to a man who is a wonderful husband and father to my kids. And the faith I live from today isn't a

Julie Holly: transaction. It's the ordinary daily practice of a relationship I'm not negotiating anymore

Julie Holly: So what about you? Where do you catch yourself expecting reinforcement to mean that you've arrived, that you should be finished by now? What would it look like to just show up again today exactly as you are without grading and judging it?

Julie Holly: The fifth phase of the recalibration is renewed momentum. The part nobody is selling you because it cannot be sold, it can only be lived. Years later, when other hard things came, and they did come, pregnancy losses, multiples, unexpected death of my dad, a marriage that hit hard times, I knew who God was.

Julie Holly: That's the proof the recalibration held. It's not a claim I'm making to you today. It's something that's been tested repeatedly through reinforcement.

Julie Holly: The difference in the other challenges isn't that life got easier. It's that I wasn't negotiating with God anymore

Julie Holly: So for you, I'm wondering, where is proof already quietly building in your own life, even if you haven't stopped to name it yet? You don't have to know the whole shape of your orbit today. Just notice that you're still moving.

Julie Holly: And I wanna leave you with one more thought before we close because it might be the most important thing I say all season. Some recalibrations are a single conversation. Others take place over decades. What stays fixed is the center, who you were created to be, and the truth of your own story.

Julie Holly: The orbit around that center, how long it takes for you to come back into alignment, is different for every person and different for every part of your life. Mine with faith took from four years old to nearly 50.

Julie Holly: And over those decades, I didn't walk away from my faith. I didn't walk away from my belief. I stayed in orbit. So if your own recalibration feels like it's taking too long or like it's not going in a straight line, here's the honest answer.

Julie Holly: Pace was never the point. What's fixed is who you were created to be. The orbit is just the path back to it, and different orbits take different amounts of time

Julie Holly: So if you're still mid-orbit right now, I want you to know you're not behind. You are exactly where you need to be

Julie Holly: As we wrap this conversation up, I want you to know that you don't have to pick a side to belong in this conversation over the next six weeks. If you've been performing or if you've been floating in those beautiful feelings, the air quote, "fix" isn't a better performance and it isn't a bigger feeling.

Julie Holly: It's a fixed point. For me, that's Jesus. And that fixed point isn't a performance to maintain or a feeling that needs to be experienced every single moment.

Julie Holly: If this episode is resonating with you, you don't have to sit alone with this for the next six weeks. That's why I built the Recalibration Collective. It's a place where we can keep processing this with other people walking the recalibration pathway.

Julie Holly: In this community, I provide , two monthly trainings, one on recalibrating our relationships, the other recalibrating our career and our calling. Because we can become lopsided by feeding our career and our calling, or by only focusing on relationships, and taking time to intentionally train those two areas just creates a beautiful harmony.

Julie Holly: But the cool thing , is that this is an entirely new space. I'm in there creating content. I posted a video in there this morning just recognizing, "Hey, you guys aren't here yet, but that's okay. I'm here and I'm preparing the scene for you and setting a rhythm and intention for myself."

Julie Holly: I'm excited. One of the first trainings is taking place this Thursday for that community. It is on, , career and calling, and it will be focused and intentional. maybe I will be doing that training for a party of one. Maybe I will have others in there. Not sure how that's going to go.

Julie Holly: But I, I'm holding this with open hands,

Julie Holly: If you're interested in learning more about the community, there's a link in the show notes, and really, most importantly, I'd love for you to just reach out to me.

Julie Holly: Schedule an insight alignment call. If there's any of this that's resonating, if you are processing through spiritual abuse or you're processing through, spirituality and religiosity, if you're, if you're processing through any of this in your life, like, please schedule an in- insight and alignment call.

Julie Holly: So we can connect , on what's taking place in your life

Julie Holly: Remember, this is a daily journey, and you're exactly where you need to be today