Introduction

Spiritual complexity in Australia: Wellbeing and risks

“…Our findings about Australia concur with and also extend Fedele and Knibbe’s (2020) arguments in several ways, discussed in detail below. We also stress the need for more research to better understand what we call – drawing on Inger Furseth’s (2018) theory of religious complexity – a spiritual complexity within contemporary societies in and beyond Australia, which has personal, social, and planetary dimensions and is ambivalently associated with wellbeing and risks (Halafoff et al, 2022b).…”

“…The perception of spirituality as benign has also been eroded in recent years, with rising concerns regarding issues of racial, gender, and sexual inequality and sexual abuse in spiritual communities, cultural appropriation, and the use of spiritual and pagan symbols in Far-Right and nationalist doctrines of racial purity (Black, 2020a(Black, , 2020bFedele andKnibbe, 2012, 2020;Godrej, 2017;Jain, 2020;Newcombe and O'Brien-Kop, 2021). Moreover, the intensification of 'conspirituality' (Ward and Voas, 2011) -the nexus between spiritual beliefs and conspiracy theories -during the COVID-19 crisis and the rise of dis/ misinformation, vaccine refusal, and radicalisation in spiritual communities are challenging spirituality's 'peace, love and mung beans' stereotype and further highlighting risks within contemporary spiritual movements (Halafoff et al, 2020c(Halafoff et al, , 2022bYunkaporta, 2022).…”

“…This process has accelerated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the acute climate change crisis (Halafoff, 2021; Halafoff et al, 2020a; Palmisano and Pannofino, 2021). Among these scholars, Anna Fedele and Kim E. Knibbe (2020) argue that research on spirituality has been taken less seriously in scholarly and political spheres than studies of religious diversity and non-religion. They call for contemporary studies of religion to move beyond a binary focus on religion and the secular, towards a triangular focus on religion, the secular/non-religion, 1 and spirituality, and to take spirituality more seriously.…”

“…We have also observed that spirituality receives less attention in scholarship and in policy and curricula than religion does in Australia, and we are currently addressing this lacuna. This article examines the current contours of spirituality in Australia, heeding Fedele and Knibbe’s (2020) call to present complex and nuanced assessments of spirituality in local, diverse contexts. Stefania Palmisano and Nicola Pannofino (2021: 4, 157) similarly argue that while there are common traits, lexicons, and practices within contemporary global spirituality, there are ‘multiple spiritualities’ that are shaped by local particularities and notably the religious culture of diverse societies.…”

“…Furthermore, spirituality, like religion, is a contested term. Fedele and Knibbe (2020: 6) define ‘holistic spirituality’ – equated with alternative New Age spirituality and the ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR) – as being distinct from ‘institutionalized religion’. They differentiate this holistic spirituality from a broader ‘contemporary spirituality’, which also encompasses religious forms, and is thereby not simply a sub-category of non-religion.…”