Abstract

Today a growing percentage of Westerners are engaged in highly subjective, non-religiously affiliated forms of spiritual seeking. Since its early beginnings in the 1970s, New Age movement, non-institutionally mediated forms of spirituality, moved well beyond a restricted esoteric framework into the cultural mainstream. Here, they are more broadly supported and intensified by a robust cultural ethic of individualism and religious antiauthoritarianism. Despite clear indications that this type of spirituality is a religious adaptation or innovation to the ineluctable force of late modernity, many scholars and cultural observers continue to represent it as a weak, socially insignificant form of religious expression that is contributing to a crisis of civic engagement and community mindedness through its over-emphasis on the self and its experiences. Claims that non-institutional, non-dogmatic forms of religiosity promote narcissism and social alienation are scattered throughout the social scientific literature. Yet, little empirical data support these contentions. Building on studies that demonstrate a positive correlation between individualism and civic engagement, this article suggests that future research may well discover that religiously unaffiliated spirituality is in fact a socially engaged religious expression.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2007.00059.x