Popular Spirituality

Abstract

The last decades witnessed the rise of a new form of religiosity that is often referred to as spirituality. Whereas in scholarly research the idea dominated that spirituality poses an 'alternative' to religion, I want to argue that spirituality must not be necessarily conceived of in opposition to religion but rather transgressing the boundaries of the religious. By reason of this transgression spirituality becomes 'popular'. On the basis of a sociological definition of the spiritual that includes, among others, a decisive stress on the experience of great transcendencies, I want to back this view with empirical data. Since there is already a large amount of qualitative data, I am drawing here on large-scale quantitative data from a recent multinational survey. The data proves that huge numbers of people in various societies and religious cultures claim to have had experiences of great transcendencies. Thus the number of people who had such an experience indicates the quantitative aspect of what I call the popularity of spirituality.