I have a ton of friends who call themselves spiritual but not religous. What they mean is that they take spiritual matters seriously, but belong to no organized religion; not Catholocism, not Unitarian, not Baptist, not Methodist, etc. This seems like a simple idea to get across, and the phrase seems a straight forward way to say it. I take it there is something in the semantics you object to. How would you like people to express this thought? To say, "I'm religous, but I belong to no religion" would be less clear, wouldn't it?
> means the speaker feels a disposition towards masochistic submission of
> the sort that used to find expression in systematic religious faith, but
Actually, it seems to me that a lot of my friends are in active rebellion against this idea of religion. The sense of submission is exactly what they don't feel, which is why they feel disconnected from most organized religions. To deny this form of expression as a valid type of spiritual expression is to deny a very large part of the current American religous scene. They also want their religion to be tailor made to fit themselves, so they can't easily fit themselves into any "systematic" religous faith.
Actually, this last point extends to my friends who call themselves Christian and go to church on Sundays. I have a friend who identifies herself as Christian, and believes that Christ died for her on the cross, and she will occasionally say things like, "My relationship to Jesus is important to me." She also, a few years ago, made a remark about one of her boyfriends, she said, "I think he must have a very old soul," to which I jokingly replied, "You're not allowed to believe in reincarnation. You're Catholic." To which she replied, "Oh, I just mix and match. Everyone does that." And I would say that is true of the American religous/spiritual scene today: except for the hardest of the hardcore Fundamentalists, everyone else just plays mix and match.