Do ‘spiritual’ self-identifications signify affinity with New Age religion? Survey evidence from the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

This article examines nationally representative survey data from the Netherlands, collected in 2015 (N = 2,197) to study whether the ‘spiritual but not religious’ embrace New Age spirituality and reject traditional Christian religion, whereas the ‘both religious and spiritual’ adhere to traditional Christian religion and understand spirituality in a non-New Age fashion (spirituality in a Christian sense). Yet, we find just as much affinity with New Age spirituality among the ‘both religious and spiritual’ as among the ‘spiritual but not religious’. This is because the more liberal and progressive Christians in the former category embrace New Age spirituality, too, while their more conservative and traditional Christian counterparts in the ‘both religious and spiritual’ category rather dismiss it. Thus, both within Christian religion and beyond it, self-identification of ‘being spiritual’ has become a reliable shortcut to identify sympathy with what used to be called ‘New Age’ in the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Spiritual but not religious
• SBNR
• religious and spiritual
• traditional Christian religion
• New Age spirituality
• religious change

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Galen Watts, Peter Achterberg, Bart Meuleman, Rudi Laermans, and Staf Hellemans for their helpful remarks on early drafts of this article. We would like to thank Anneke Pons-De Wit and Francesco Cerchiaro for their critical questions after a presentation of findings in this article at the 4th Annual Conference of the European Academy of Religion in Münster, Germany, 30 August–2 September 2021. We are grateful to Joris Kregting for sharing the God in the Netherlands data from 2015. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion for their helpful suggestions and critical questions. Incorporating their feedback definitely strengthened and improved the quality of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Dutch version of the survey is available at https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-x9s-wc6h (accessed 1 February 2024).

2 PCA without rotation. All items load high and positive on the first component, with factor loadings ranging from 0.54 to 0.75. This component has an Eigenvalue of 3.199, explaining 46% of the variance.

3 PCA without rotation, extracting only one component with an Eigenvalue greater than 1 (λ=3.407), explaining 57% of the variance. Factor loadings range from 0.59 to 0.86.

4 The six items have relatively low proportions of missing values, ranging from 5.3% to 8.3%.

5 PCA without rotation, extracting only one component with an Eigenvalue greater than 1 (λ=4.258), explaining 71% of the variance. Factor loadings range from 0.81 to 0.86.

6 PCA without rotation, extracting only one component with an Eigenvalue greater than 1 (λ=2.775), explaining 69% of the variance. Factor loadings range from 0.80 to 0.89.

7 Although the slope of the ‘spiritual but not religious’ appears to be positive in Figure 1, it does, however, not differ significantly from zero (b = 0.18, p = 0.54).

8 Unlike the positive slope of the ‘spiritual but not religious’, the negative slope of the ‘religious but not spiritual’ differs significantly from zero (b = -0.17, p < 0.05). The same holds for the ‘both religious and spiritual’ (b = -0.57, p < 0.001).

9 Our findings do not in themselves challenge the process of religious decline that has been ongoing in the Netherlands since the 1960s (see e.g. Kregting et al. 2018, 58).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by KU Leuven (grant number 3H160220) as part of the first author’s PhD project on religious decline and religious change in Western-Europe.

Notes on contributors

Paul Tromp

Paul Tromp is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Sociological Research at KU Leuven, Belgium, and has been, since January 2022, a lecturer in methodology and statistics at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. This article is part of his PhD thesis, titled “In the Shadow of Secularization Theory: Neglected Issues in the Social Scientific Study of Spirituality”. He is the co-author of two articles on religious decline and religious change in Western-Europe, both published in the Review of Religious Research (Tromp, Pless, and Houtman 2020, 2021), and co-author of a book chapter in Assessing Spirituality in a Diverse World (Houtman and Tromp 2021).

CORRESPONDENCE: Paul Tromp, Centre for Sociological Research, KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.

Anna Pless

Anna Pless was, until 2023, a PhD candidate in the Centre for Sociological Research at KU Leuven, Belgium, working on her thesis “A Secularization of Cultural Politics? Changing Patterns of Cultural-political Polarization and Voting Behavior in Western Europe, 1981–2008”, and is now a postdoctoral researcher for the Chair of Sociology specializing in Quantitative Analyses of Social Change at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is a political sociologist specializing in the quantitative analysis of values, voting behavior, and ideological polarization in Europe. She is the co-author of an article in International Political Science Review (Pless, Tromp, and Houtman 2021) and articles in Politics and Religion (Pless, Tromp, and Houtman 2020, 2023) and Review of Religious Research (Tromp, Pless, and Houtman 2020, 2021).

Dick Houtman

Dick Houtman is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Religion in the Centre for Sociological Research at KU Leuven, Belgium. His principal research interest is cultural change in the West since the 1960s, especially the question how the process has transformed the realms of politics, religion, consumption, and social science itself. He has published extensively on religion and spirituality in, for example, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Social Compass, and Journal of Contemporary Religion. He is the co-editor (with Galen Watts) of The Public Significance of the Spiritual Turn (forthcoming).