ABSTRACT
In popular commentary it is not hard to find claims that there is a “growing division between organized religion and spirituality”, but the evidence is often ambiguous at best. Sociological attention to the study of “spirituality” increased significantly with the cultural shifts of the 1960s. Studies of seekers and the “spiritual marketplace” have provided valuable analyses of a growing religious sector that includes broad new religious possibilities. In Europe and in the United States, both scholarly and popular perceptions seem to tell a story of declining “religion” and growing “spirituality”—a zero-sum movement from one to the other. Far from standing in opposition to religious understandings of the world, gods and goddesses, introduced in the lore of religious traditions, define this spiritual genre. The places where the “spiritual-not-religious” discursive boundary is drawn are, then, not necessarily the same places occupied by actual spiritually attuned, but not organizationally involved people.
