On the Politics of Self-spirituality

Abstract

In the last quarter century, a steadily increasing number of North Americans, when asked their religious affiliation, have self-identified as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). Charles Taylor argues that the popularity of “spirituality” is the result of the “massive subjective turn of modern culture”; while Paul Heelas has deemed this new religious form, “self-spirituality.” Many scholars have taken a critical stance toward this recent cultural development, positing that self-spirituality is a byproduct of the self-obsessed and individualistic culture which saturates the West, or that spirituality, at its worst, is simply a rebranding of religion in order to support consumer culture and the ideology of late capitalism. In this article, I seek to problematize these accounts. Drawing from qualitative data collected from semi-structured interviews with Canadian millennials who self-identify as SBNR, I will argue that self-spirituality is less individualistic and narcissistic than these scholars assert, its relationship to late capitalism is better understood as ambivalent, rather than congenial, and due to their methodological prejudices these critiques of self-spirituality are inadequate to analyse and understand the politics of self-spirituality.