Spirituality: The Emergence of a New Cultural Category and its Challenge to the Religious and the Secular

Abstract

The present article examines spirituality as an emergent new cultural category that challenges the binary opposition of the religious and secular realms of life. The article probes the cultural significance of the popular phrase ‘spiritual, but not religious’ and examines the emergence of New Age spirituality within the framework of late capitalism and postmodern culture. It offers a new perspective on the debate of the secularization theory and re-examines the notions upon which this debate hinges. The article also examines the assessment of New Age spirituality as disguised neo-liberal ideology and proposes that the disparaging condemnations of contemporary spirituality can be seen as a response to its challenge to the entrenched notion that the religious and the secular are universal distinct categories.

Acknowledgments

Previous versions of this article were presented at the 6th Lexical Conference for Political Thought at Tel Aviv University in January 2011 and at the conference on “The Political, Social and Historical Aspects of the New Age” at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in May 2012. I am grateful to Teemu Taira, Nurit Zaidman, and the anonymous readers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. See http://www.facebook.com/SBNR.org (access date: 20 August 2012); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_but_not_religious (access date: 20 August 2012); Erlandson; Martin; Daniel.

2. Similar results are found in the study by Zinnbauer et al.

3. See also Zygmunt Bauman’s (70) criticism of the deployment of “the postmodern version of peak experience” as a driving force of intense consumerism.

4. See also Russell McCutcheon’s (Discipline 8–9, 233–40) critique of the notions of authentic religion and spirituality in Richard King’s Orientalism and Religion and Carrette’s Foucault and Religion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Boaz Huss

Boaz Huss is professor of Jewish thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests include the Zohar and it reception, the genealogies of Jewish Mysticism and the history of Kabbalah Studies, Kabbalah and the Theosophical Society, Contemporary Kabbalah and the New Age.