Designer spirituality is en vogue these days. No longer must we be pigeon-holed by creeds or traditions. In our postmodern age, “spirituality” can mean just about anything we want. Case in point: “Spiritual” atheists. 
In USA Today’s Spirituality Can Bridge Science-Religion Divide, Chris Mooney author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, argues that “spirituality” — even atheist spirituality — can serve to bridge the gap between science and religion. He writes,
Spirituality is something everyone can have — even atheists. In its most expansive sense, it could simply be taken to refer to any individual’s particular quest to discover that which is held sacred.
That needn’t be a deity or supernatural entity. As the French sociologist Emile Durkheim noted in 1915: “By sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which are called Gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred.”
We can all find our own sacred things — and we can all have our own life-altering spiritual experiences. These are not necessarily tied to any creed, doctrine, or belief; they grip us on an emotional level, rather than a cognitive or rational one. That feeling of awe and wonder, that sense of a deep unity with the universe or cosmos — such intuitions might lead to a traditional religious outlook on the world, or they might not. (emphasis mine)
There was a time when the term “atheistic spirituality” would be considered an oxymoron. After all, if everything is part of a materialistic soup, spirituality is little more than mental gas. If our Universe is simply an accident, can anything really be called “sacred”?
Yet the “new spirituality” as defined by Mooney is a system where virtually “anything can be sacred.” Thus, the organs of obeisance are not those of the traditionalist. Who needs “faith” and “Scripture”? Nowadays, a “feeling of awe and wonder” or a “sense of a deep unity with the universe” qualifies one as “spiritual.” If “personal preference” is the most “sacred” thing, everyone’s a virtual saint. So it shouldn’t surprise us that even pure secularists are now seen as spiritual pilgrims.
For instance, in the above article, Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s leading atheists, describes his own form of, um, worship:
…Spirituality can mean something that I’m very sympathetic to, which is, a sort of sense of wonder at the beauty of the universe, the complexity of life, the magnitude of space, the magnitude of geological time. All those things create a sort of frisson in the breast, which you could call spirituality.
What Dawkins calls “a sort of sense of wonder” and “a sort of frisson in the breast” is what we have traditionally called worship. Sure, his emoting has more to do with neo-paganism or Native American animism. Nevertheless, the fact that the Universe can evoke such “reverence” — especially in someone dedicated to rational empiricism — is itself evidence of a polar shift.
Both atheism and spirituality are being redefined. The result: Neither of them retain their distinctiveness.
In The War Between Spirituality and Science is Over, Al Mohler acknowledges the problematic nature of Mooney’s efforts:
In its own way, Mooney’s column serves to illustrate the vacuity that marks modern spirituality. There is nothing to it — no beliefs, no God, no morality, no doctrine, no discipleship.
Spirituality in this sense is what is left when Christianity disappears and dissipates. It is the perfect religious mode for the postmodern mind. It requires nothing and promises nothing, but it serves as a substitute for authentic beliefs.
Only in this context — in the postmodern worldview — can spirituality and atheism coexist. Whereas relativism is typically used to deconstruct religion, in this case, it comes back to bite the hand that feeds it. For if postmodernism is free to eliminate the exclusivity claims of religion, then why not those of the atheist.
Either the “new spirituality” takes no prisoners, or it imprisons us all.
“Spirituality” as defined by the Bible is markedly different than that defined by personal preference. Yet when “personal preference” becomes the most “sacred” of all things, there is no limit to who or what we can consider “spiritual.” But if atheists can really be “spiritual,” then can anybody NOT?
