On the Politics of Self-spirituality

Abstract

In the last quarter century, a steadily increasing number of North Americans, when asked their religious affiliation, have self-identified as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). Charles Taylor argues that the popularity of “spirituality” is the result of the “massive subjective turn of modern culture”; while Paul Heelas has deemed this new religious form, “self-spirituality.” Many scholars have taken a critical stance toward this recent cultural development, positing that self-spirituality is a byproduct of the self-obsessed and individualistic culture which saturates the West, or that spirituality, at its worst, is simply a rebranding of religion in order to support consumer culture and the ideology of late capitalism. In this article, I seek to problematize these accounts. Drawing from qualitative data collected from semi-structured interviews with Canadian millennials who self-identify as SBNR, I will argue that self-spirituality is less individualistic and narcissistic than these scholars assert, its relationship to late capitalism is better understood as ambivalent, rather than congenial, and due to their methodological prejudices these critiques of self-spirituality are inadequate to analyse and understand the politics of self-spirituality.

Religion, Science, and Disenchantment in Late Modernity

“…For this reason, I have argued that many sociologists of religion have missed the forest for the trees, that is, they have failed to account for the underlying similarities exhibited by SBNRs (Watts ). Accordingly, in an earlier publication, I called the shared discourse informing my SBNR interviewees’ accounts “self‐spirituality” (Watts , b), borrowing a term from Paul Heelas (, ), well known for his work in New Age studies. When writing that piece, I did not think to look beyond the SBNR camp for something like self‐spirituality.…”

“A Cult of Cookie Bakers”: The Spiritual Qualities of Youth Social Justice Organization Free the Children

“…Carrette and King, 2005;Lau, 2000;Martin, 2014) typically portray it. 2 In analyzing qualitative interview data from "spiritual but not religious" Canadian millennials, Watts (2018) concluded that individuals can and do take the language, structure, and motivation to work for social change from self-spirituality's combination of "perennialism (the notion that, at their core, all religions are the same), bricolage (the practice of drawing from multiple religious traditions in constructing one's spirituality), and . .…”

The incorporation of self-spirituality into Western organizations: A gender-based critique

“…This study explores the viability of a new culture, one that has evolved over the course of the last three decades across the Western world, for engendering change in organizations. Specifically, the study focuses on ideas and practices associated with the culture of self-spirituality and with the rise of ‘post-secularism’, a perspective that criticizes secularization’s fundamental claim that ‘modernity’ and ‘religion’ are fundamentally antagonistic concepts (Watts, 2018). According to Charles Taylor (2007), a cultural revolution has swept across the Western world over recent decades, which has ‘profoundly altered the conditions of belief in our societies’, and has begun to shape the contours of society as a whole (p. 473).…”

“…Despite disagreements between conceptualizers of this ‘Spiritual Revolution’ as to what ‘spirituality’ actually means, a number of scholars are anchored by the assumption that it is defined, as its most fundamental level, by the belief that the sacred resides within—rather than outside—the self (Watts, 2018: 345). As a culture, developments in self-spirituality influence, and influenced by, developments in ‘soft secularism’, traditional religions, and by the New Religious Movements (Barker, 2008).…”

“…As a culture, developments in self-spirituality influence, and influenced by, developments in ‘soft secularism’, traditional religions, and by the New Religious Movements (Barker, 2008). Scholars agree that many of the ideas which fall under the rubric of ‘spirituality’ in the West today were once classified under the term ‘New Age’, a movement, which came of age during the 1960s and 1970s counterculture (Heelas, 1996; Watts, 2018).…”