From “Religion” to “Spirituality”

Abstract

This chapter opens with three character portraits, each of which exhibits a different, though common, way of talking about “spirituality.” Next, the dominant sociological frameworks both within, and beyond, the sociology of religion are interrogated, in order to illuminate their limitations as regards the study of spirituality. It is argued that while the secularization paradigm remains tremendously insightful, secularization theorists’ preoccupation with charting the decline of church religion has stifled our ability to grasp the substantive character of what goes by “spirituality” today. Similarly, cultural approaches within the sociology of religion have tended to obscure the underlying unity of the spiritual turn. It is for this reason that the study of spirituality has taken place across a host of subfields and disciplines, each of which has contributed much to our understanding of the shift from “religion” to “spirituality,” but whose theoretical and empirical insights have yet to be comprehensively compared or synthesized. The chapter concludes by laying out the foundations of the distinctly cultural sociological approach to the study of religion which is used to synthesize the existing scholarship on “spirituality,” and chart the cultural connections underlying the three biographical accounts that opened the chapter.