Jane Goodall — "I believe in a spiritual power, but I don't necessarily identify with any partic…"
I believe in a spiritual power, but I don't necessarily identify with any particular religion.
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More from Jane Goodall
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About Jane Goodall (born 1934)
British primatologist who in 1960 began the longest-running wild primate study at Gombe Stream, transforming our understanding of chimpanzees. Closely associated with Dian Fossey (mountain-gorilla researcher) and Birutė Galdikas (orangutan researcher; together with Goodall and Fossey one of Louis Leakey's 'Trimates'). For an intellectual contrast, see Walter Palmer, American dentist who killed Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe in 2015 — Palmer represents the trophy-hunting tradition Goodall's life's work has been organized against — the colonial-era hunter-naturalist worldview that treated primates and big game as specimens or trophies, which Goodall's Roots & Shoots and Jane Goodall Institute exist specifically to displace.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The speaker holds a personal belief in something greater than the material world — a spiritual force or presence — without subscribing to the creeds, rituals, or institutions of organized religion. It separates faith from dogma: acknowledging transcendence and meaning while refusing to be confined by any single tradition's rules or labels. In modern terms, this is the 'spiritual but not religious' stance — open, individual, and unbounded by doctrine.
Relevance to Jane Goodall
Goodall spent decades living inside Gombe's forests, witnessing chimpanzees mourn, bond, and display what she described as near-human emotions. That intimacy with wild nature gave her a deep spiritual reverence for living things. Raised Anglican, she has described a transcendent moment under the Gombe forest canopy as a turning point — a felt sense of connection to something vast and unnameable that no single religious framework could fully contain.
The era
Goodall came of age during mid-20th century secularization, when Western religious attendance began its long decline and the 'spiritual but not religious' demographic grew steadily. Meanwhile, evolutionary biology and ethology — her own field — were in constant cultural friction with religious institutions over human uniqueness and animal consciousness. Her statement navigates that tension: honoring the spiritual impulse while remaining free of doctrines that often conflicted with scientific evidence about humanity's place in the animal world.
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