ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author choses Kendal not because it was unusual, but because it was a rather typical market town in England outside of the South East. The Kendal Project took two years, and three years after that it resulted in a book, The Spiritual Revolution. The book's subtitle – Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality – summed up the main findings: that organised religion as represented by the Christian churches and chapels of Kendal was declining and that new forms of holistic spirituality were growing. The original Kendal Project found 126 distinct holistic groups and one-to-one activities, and it had taken a full-time researcher well over a year to find them all. In Kendal, as in the rest of the country, the churches become more marginal to everyday life, ritual practice, and culture, whilst spirituality and 'no religion' have become more central. As well as revisiting the author’s data they can revisit the town in real life.
