As a pretty nonreligious individual,

I’m non-religious in terms of believing in magic and guys on the sky, but I understand what spirituality is and how it makes people different.

I also deeply respect a few writers whose works I’ve read and people I’ve met, influenced by it.

And I respect the fighting spirit. May not always have as much of it as I’d like.

I don’t have much connection to think of it as depressing.

It’s not about connection, it’s about in one case it being perceived as some emotion allowing you to come out against the whole world for what you consider good with your head up, and in another case it turning into some set of sophisticated mystical explanations why you are a slave, and the latter having somehow descended from the former.

I seem to recall there’s a term for the various sects that eschew a lot of the more complex doctrines in favor of a “return to basics” or individual style, Quakers being the one that comes to mind.

Protestant? Reformist?

that particular thread has always seemed to capture the core of it, or at least the “love and kindness” part that appeals to someone who doesn’t need it for a deeper life meaning or purpose.

Well, those include many branches which may not be always in that direction.

I don’t know.