Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn’t necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept.

Armstrong frames “religion” less as assent to doctrines about a supernatural being and more as a disciplined human quest to go beyond the ego—toward depth, compassion, or ultimate meaning. She cautions that picturing transcendence as a distant, external deity can actually reduce spirituality to an objectified “thing” one believes in, rather than a transformative practice one lives. The remark aligns with her broader emphasis on apophatic (beyond-concepts) theology and on religion as ethical and contemplative formation. It also implicitly validates non-theistic or less-theistic traditions (e.g., some strands of Buddhism or mystical Judaism/Christianity/Islam) as genuinely “religious” insofar as they cultivate transcendence in experience and action.