Beyond the spiritual supermarket : the social and public significance of New Age spirituality

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that New Age spirituality is substantially less unambiguously individualistic and more socially and publicly significant than today's sociological consensus acknowledges, and propose a radical socologisation of New Age research to document how the doctrinal ideal of self-spirituality is socially constructed, transmitted, and reinforced and critically to deconstruct rather than re...

Abstract: This article argues that New Age spirituality is substantially less unambiguously individualistic and more socially and publicly significant than today's sociological consensus acknowledges. Firstly, an uncontested doctrine of self-spirituality, characterised by sacralisation of the self and demonisation of social institutions, provides the spiritual milieu with ideological coherence and paradoxically accounts for its overwhelming diversity. Secondly, participants undergo a process of socialisation, gradually adopting this doctrine of self-spirituality and eventually reinforcing it by means of standardised legitimations. Thirdly, spirituality has entered the public sphere of work, aiming at a reduction of employees’ alienation to increase both their happiness and organisational effectiveness. A radical ‘sociologisation’ of New Age research is called for to document how the doctrinal ideal of self-spirituality is socially constructed, transmitted, and reinforced and critically to deconstruct rather than re...

Summary

1. Introduction

• In most of the social-scientific literature, New Age -or 'spirituality,' as increasingly seems the preferred term -is used to refer to an apparently incoherent collection of spiritual ideas and practices.
• The authors summarise their findings and briefly elaborate on their theoretical significance in the final section.
• The second sample consists of trainers at Dutch New Age centres that specialise in spiritual courses for business life.
• Apart from this theoretically imposed restriction, the sampling procedure was identical to the one just described.

2. The Ethic of Self-Spirituality

• Diffuse religion cannot sustain a distinctive way of life (Bruce 94) .
• I am dealing with almost every world religion (…).
• And these assumptions of Self-spirituality ensure that the New Age Movement is far from being a mish-mash, significantly eclectic, or fundamentally incoherent (emphasis in original).
• If you don't have pleasure in your work, then you start to think about yourself negatively and that's a bad thing.
• It is this doctrine that paradoxically accounts for the staggering diversity at the surface of the spiritual milieuan inevitable outcome when people feel that they need to follow their personal paths and explore what works for them personally -and simultaneously provides it with ideological unity and coherence at a deeper level.

3. The Social Construction of Self-Spirituality

• As the authors have seen, the spiritual milieu is in fact more doctrinally coherent and hence less diffuse than typically assumed.
• To study this, the authors analyse the biographies of the spiritual trainers of their second sample.
• They have been strategically selected because they specialise in spiritual courses for business life and in fact all prove to have started their own careers there.

Alienation as the key: Who am I, really?

• In obvious contrast to the way Christian identities are typically adopted, only one of those nine respondents developed an affinity with spirituality due to parental socialisation during his formative period.
• Like most others, she points out that her identity crisis began with an "intruding conversation" with a consultant: I was working at MCR, a computer company, and I was the commercial director.
• The more they become involved in 'soul searching,' the more they alienate from their working environments.
• It was just not accepted that such a thing as intuition existed.
• It is indeed quite telling that it typically became manifest only after a conversation with a consultant or coach.

Spiritual careers: Knowledge and experience shifting in tandem

• Initially, the process of soul searching has a secular character.
• In the words of Luhrmann: "Intellectual and experiential changes shift in tandem, a ragged co-evolution of intellectual habits and phenomenological involvement" (315).
• Chantal began to delve deeper in the matter of healing and increasingly felt streams of energy around people.
• On the one hand, a new image of the self in the present emerges: undefined emotions and experiences are now understood in spiritual terms and the new identity is understood as profoundly spiritual.
• As with classical conversions, they follow the logic of 'Then I thought…, but now I know.'.

Legitimations

• Having left their regular jobs and having started new careers as trainers and teachers in the spiritual milieu, it is hardly surprising that their respondents regularly encounter resistance and critique.
• Following the doctrine of self-spirituality, resistance, critique and moral opposition are taken as symptoms of a deeply felt anxiety that cannot (yet) be directly experienced.
• 'It is useless debating with you!', also known as Then they say.
• This process of socialisation into a spiritual discourse about the self reveals that participants in the spiritual milieu are less authentic than they typically believe they are.

4. Self-Spirituality's Public Significance: Bringing 'Soul' Back to Work

• "Sociologists rarely study spirituality in the workplace," Grant et al. (267) observe.
• Heelas; Mitroff and Denton (a); Nadesan; Roberts; Goldschmidt Salamon), 5 this blind spot is probably due to the received wisdom that spirituality lacks public significance, remaining confined to "the life-space that is not directly touched by institutional control" (Luckmann 73(b) ) and failing to "generate powerful social innovations and experimental social institutions" (Bruce 97(a) ).
• But obviously, the very rarity of studies of spirituality in the workplace precludes any premature conclusions to the effect that spirituality fails to affect their 'primary institutions,' modern work organisations.
• "(I)f it appears to sociologists that spirituality cannot take root within secular bureaucracies, it may be because their theories have not yet allowed it," as Grant et al. (281) rightly note.
• And indeed, notwithstanding common claims to the contrary, it is difficult to deny that spirituality has in fact entered the public domain of work organisations.

New Age incorporated

• In the 1980s, business organisations became interested in the worldviews and practices of the New Age and, vice versa, New Age began to turn towards business life (Heelas; Nadesan) .
• Most of the spiritual ideas, initiatives and practices that are applied in business life can be labelled as self-spirituality: "The inner-individual orientation is what most people, including the majority of their respondents, mean by spirituality" (Mitroff and Denton (a) 26).
• Since the 1990s, the shift of New Age towards business life has become clearly visible in the Netherlands, too (see Aupers (b) for more details about the history of New Age in the Netherlands).
• Metavisie, probably one of the largest players in this field, claims to have offered in-company trainings to seventy-five of the one hundred most renowned companies in the Netherlands.
• It is their experience that vital and soulful organisations, where employees recognise their personal goals in the goals of the organisation, operate powerfully on the economic market (www.firmamentbv.com).

Self-spirituality in action: 'Grow or I'll shoot!'

• This case is not typical of contemporary business life, but is theoretically instructive.
• As such, this case study enables us to further illustrate the claims made above about the existence and nature of a coherent spiritual doctrine of being and wellbeing and about the dynamics of socialisation into such a spiritual discourse about the self.
• It aims to transform the public realm of the organisation into a private sphere where employees can express themselves fully because "authenticity is the most important thing in the world.".
• By doing so, Morca expects its employees to be more happy and, hence, more effective, so as to increase productivity and profits.
• Having learned that people cannot be forced into a spiritual lifestyle he now argues (like his coach): "Pulling the grass will not make it grow faster.".

Participants: 'It takes guts!'

• All of the interviewed who have participated in the trainings are people in mid-to top-level management positions.
• In compliance with the analysis in the previous section, they now label these forms of scepticism as "psychological resistance" or "fear of growth.".
• If you don't have those, well, then it gets tough.
• In short, the stories of these employees exemplify the breakdown of the modern separation between private and public life produced by the shift towards self-spirituality in the organisation.
• This in turn, they argue, stimulates a sense of fellowship and community: "We have become much more open towards one another.the authors.the authors.

5. Conclusion and discussion

• In his defence of secularisation theory, Steve Bruce criticises authors such as Rodney Stark (see also Stark and Bainbridge) and Grace Davie, who argue that secularisation is by definition accompanied by religious innovation.
• Perhaps surprisingly, it equally applies to the work of those who are highly critical of it (see Woodhead for examples).
• Because of his own tendency to criticise other people's ideas about spirituality as 'nonsociological' (104(a)) or 'bad sociology' (b), Bruce himself perhaps provides the best example.
• Those interviews have been conducted by Inge Van der Tak, their research assistant at the time (2002) , carefully supervised by ourselves, of course.

Full text

Beyond the Spiritual Supermarket
The Social and Public Significance of New Age Spirituality
*
[Forthcoming in: Journal of Contemporary Religion, volume 21, 2006)
Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman
Abstract
This paper argues that New Age is substantially less unambiguously individualistic and
more socially and publicly significant than today’s sociological consensus acknowledges.
First, an uncontested doctrine of self-spirituality, characterised by a sacralisation of the self
and a demonisation of social institutions, provides the spiritual milieu with ideological
coherence and paradoxically accounts for its overwhelming diversity. Second, participants
undergo a process of socialisation, gradually adopting this doctrine of self-spirituality and
eventually reinforcing it by means of standardised legitimations. Third, spirituality has
entered the public sphere of work, aiming at a reduction of employees’ alienation to
simultaneously increase their happiness and organisational effectiveness. A radical
sociologisation of New Age research is called for, documenting how this doctrine ideal of
self-spirituality is socially constructed, transmitted and reinforced, and critically
deconstructing rather than reproducing sociologically naive New Age rhetoric about the
primacy of personal authenticity.
Keywords
Spirituality, Thomas Luckmann, privatisation thesis, socialisation, New Age capitalism
Word count
Abstract: 141 words
Main text: 9,229 words (excluding references)
*
A previous version of this paper has been presented by the first author at the 28
th
ISSR/SISR Conference Challenging Boundaries: Religion and Society, Zagreb, July 18-
22, 2005. The authors thank Inge Van der Tak for conducting some of the interviews on
which it relies and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous
version. Please direct all correspondence to Stef Aupers, Department of Sociology, Faculty
of Social Sciences, Erasmus University, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The
Netherlands (Email: Aupers@fsw.eur.nl).
1

About the authors
Stef Aupers is a postdoc of sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
He participates in the research program Cyberspace Salvations: Computer Technology,
Simulation and Modern Gnosis, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific
Research (NWO). He has published widely on New Age and has in 2004 defended his
Ph.D. thesis In de ban van moderniteit: De sacralisering van het zelf en
computertechnologie [Under the Spell of Modernity: The Sacralisation of Self and
Computer Technology] (Amsterdam: Aksant).
Dick Houtman is an associate professor of sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the
Netherlands, and a member of the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research
(ASSR). His principal research interest is cultural change in late modernity, with a focus
on its political and religious ramifications. His latest book is Class and Politics in
Contemporary Social Science: ‘Marxism Lite’ and Its Blind Spot for Culture (New York:
Aldine de Gruyter, 2003) and he is currently preparing a book that is provisionally titled
Beyond Faith and Reason: New Age, Postmodernism and the Disenchantment of the
World.
2

Beyond the Spiritual Supermarket
The Social and Public Significance of New Age Spirituality
Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman
1. Introduction
In most of the social-scientific literature, New Age – or ‘spirituality,’ as increasingly seems
the preferred term – is used to refer to an apparently incoherent collection of spiritual ideas
and practices. Most participants in the spiritual milieu, it is generally argued, draw upon
multiple traditions, styles and ideas simultaneously, combining them into idiosyncratic
packages. New Age is thus referred to as “do-it-yourself-religion” (Baerveldt), “pick-and-
mix religion” (Hamilton), “religious consumption à la carte” (Possamai) or a “spiritual
supermarket” (Lyon). In their book Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality,
Sutcliffe and Bowman even go so far as to argue that “New Age turns out to be merely a
particular code word in a larger field of modern religious experimentation” (1), while
Possamai states that we are dealing with an “eclectic – if not kleptomaniac – process (…)
with no clear reference to an external or ‘deeper’ reality” (40).
This dominant discourse about New Age basically reiterates sociologist of religion
Thomas Luckmann’s influential analysis, published about forty years ago in The Invisible
Religion. Structural differentiation in modern society, or so Luckmann argues, results in
erosion of the Christian monopoly and the concomitant emergence of a ‘market of ultimate
significance.’ On such a market, religious consumers construct strictly personal packages
of meaning, based on individual tastes and preferences. Indeed, in a more recent
publication, Luckmann notes that New Age exemplifies this tendency of individual
‘bricolage’: “It collects abundant psychological, therapeutic, magic, marginally scientific,
and older esoteric material, repackages them, and offers them for individual consumption
and further private syncretism” (75(b)).
3

Luckmann emphasises that those personal meaning systems remain a strictly
private affair: by their very nature, and unlike traditional church-based Christian religion in
the past, they lack a wider social significance and play no public role whatsoever. Writing
thirty years ago, the late Bryan Wilson has made a similar claim about the post-Christian
cults, stating that those “represent, in the American phrase, ‘the religion of your choice,’
the highly privatized preference that reduces religion to the significance of pushpin, poetry,
or popcorns” (96). And more recently, Steve Bruce has characterised New Age as a
“diffuse religion,” noting “There is no (...) power in the cultic milieu to override individual
preferences” (99(a)).
Accounts such as those are found over and over again in the sociological literature,
as Besecke (186) rightly observes: “Luckmann’s characterization of contemporary religion
as privatized is pivotal in the sociology of religion; it has been picked up by just about
everyone and challenged by almost no one.” Work done in anthropology and the history of
religion nonetheless suggests that this orthodoxy is deeply problematic (Hammer (a, b),
Hanegraaff (a, b), Luhrmann). And indeed, from within sociology itself, Heelas has
demonstrated convincingly that New Age spirituality is remarkably less eclectic and
incoherent than typically assumed. Our aim in the current paper is to elaborate on those
dissenting voices and demonstrate that this sociological orthodoxy is not much more than
an institutionalised intellectual misconstruction. More specifically, we criticise three
related arguments that together constitute the privatisation thesis: 1) that New Age boils
down to mere individual ‘bricolage’ (section 2), 2) that it is socially insignificant, because
“the transmission of diffuse beliefs is unnecessary and it is impossible” (Bruce 99(a))
(section 3), and 3) that it does not play a role in the public domain (section 4). We
summarise our findings and briefly elaborate on their theoretical significance in the final
section.
We base ourselves on data from a variety of sources, collected during the first
author’s Ph.D. research in the period 1999-2003 (see Aupers (a)). Besides literature on
New Age and a variety of flyers and websites of Dutch New Age centres, we especially
draw on in-depth interviews with two samples of New Age teachers. Focusing on this
‘spiritual elite’ rather than on people who only vaguely identify with labels such as
4

‘spirituality’ or ‘New Age’ enables us to study the worldview of the spiritual milieu in its
most crystallised and ‘pure’ form. Besides, these are of course the very people who
communicate this worldview to those who participate in their courses, trainings and
workshops. The first sample consists of spiritual trainers who work for Dutch New Age
centres in the urbanised western part of the country.
1
The centres have been randomly
sampled from a national directory of nature-oriented medicine and consciousness-raising
CC
(Van Hoog) and the respondents have next been randomly sampled from those centres’
websites. Eleven of those initially contacted – a very large majority – agreed to be
interviewed.
2
The second sample consists of trainers at Dutch New Age centres that
specialise in spiritual courses for business life. Apart from this theoretically imposed
restriction, the sampling procedure was identical to the one just described. Nine in-depth
interviews were completed with, again, almost no refusals.
3
Finally, we rely on data from a
theoretically instructive case study of the Dutch company Morca that has embraced New
Age capitalism. Within the context of this case study, the first author has conducted in-
depth interviews with Morca’s president-director, his spiritual coach, four employees who
had participated in the company’s spiritual courses, and three employees who had not.
Unless indicated otherwise, we draw on data form the first sample of spiritual trainers in
section 2, on those from the second one in section 3, and on those from the case study in
section 4.
2. The Ethic of Self-Spirituality
Diffuse religion cannot sustain a distinctive way of life (Bruce 94).
As the sociological orthodoxy suggests, teachers of Dutch New Age centres indeed prove
to combine various traditions in their courses. One may use tarot cards in combination with
crystal-healing and Hindu ideas about chakras; another may combine traditional Chinese
medicine, western psychotherapy and Taoism into another idiosyncratic concoction. There
is, in short, no reason to deny the prominence of ‘bricolage’ in the spiritual milieu.
5