The ‘Spiritual’ and the ‘Religious’ in the Twittersphere: A Topic Model and Semantic Map

One of the principal challenges of religious studies is the lack of a widely accepted normative definition of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality.’ Responding to recent calls for methodological innovation in this field, in this paper we present a “bottom-up” approach to outlining these concepts based on an interdisciplinary, usage-based approach, which combines qualitative analysis with methods of distributional semantics. Based on the Firthian principle that a word may be known “by the company it keeps,” we used a convenience sample of 138,000 Tweets gathered between March and April 2021 to calculate seven clusters of terms related to ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion.’ Three authors then coded these clusters to propose a tentative name for each. An unsupervised sentiment analysis was conducted and presented on a concept map. We suggest that the Twitter (now ‘X’) data at hand echoes the popular perception of ‘spirituality’ as a positively connoted term, which contrasts with a negatively connoted ‘religion.’ However, the data may be interpreted to arrive at more nuanced and, at times, contradictory interpretations.