A Spiritual Revolution in Denmark?

ABSTRACT

Based on data from the Danish part of the European Values Study 1981–2008, this article explores the validity of the claim for a spiritual revolution as proposed by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead. The article suggests an operationalisation of spirituality. The results of the analyses are that religious values—Christian faith as well as spirituality—tend to be stable over an individual’s life course. This suggests that, if there is a spiritual revolution, it must be the product of cohort replacement. If a spiritual revolution is taking place, Christian faith would be expected to decline in younger cohorts while spirituality would increase, but an analysis of cohort support for Christian faith and spirituality from 1981 to 2008 shows that both were constant across cohorts. Thus Danish data contain no indication that a spiritual revolution is taking place or will take place. Finally, we show that, contrary to theoretical expectations, spirituality and Christian faith are strongly correlated. A closer analysis reveals an indirect and more complicated support for parts of the theory since the two variables are explained by different factors and it shows that Christian faith, but not spirituality, is correlated with morality.

Notes

1. The advantage of the graphical model technique is that there are no statistical requirements for the character and distributions of the variables. A particular important advantage for our analysis is that the model may include two dependent variables at the same time. Also, the analysis can include ordinal as well as nominal variables and all variables can be included in the model from the beginning of the analysis. The significance of test results is evaluated by Monte Carlo tests. The statistical analyses were conducted with the DIGRAM computer programme (Kreiner, User).