The Secular Beats the Spiritual

If religion is changing rather than declining, the number involved in new expressions of religious and spiritual interest should come close to matching those lost to the churches, but the new religious movements of the late 1960s were numerically trivial and attempts to measure serious interest in spirituality have failed to show it is at all popular. While eastern religious themes have proved somewhat attractive, they have been changed in ways that look like capitulation to the West’s secular culture. The evaluative conclusion is that New Age ‘authenticity’ is socio-psychologically damaging, that New Age relativism threatens the knowledge base of modern societies, and that contemporary spirituality is unusually vulnerable to sexual exploitation. On the positive side, the individualism, toleration, and relativism of contemporary spirituality have helped make the modern world more civil.