Since the earliest stages of human history, of course, there have been bazaars, rialtos and trading posts—all markets. But The Market was never God, because there were other centers of value and meaning, other “gods”. The Market operated within a plethora of other institutions that restrained it. As Karl Polanyi has demonstrated in his classic work The Great Transformation, only in the past two centuries has The Market risen above these demigods and chthonic spirits to become today’s First Cause.
It is in this particular market moment that we consider the meaning of the term spirituality. For historians, the term “spiritualité” seems to have first emerged in seventeenth century France (as did its close relation–“la mystique”) where it was associated with the devout or contemplative life in general and it is from this word that we derive the modern English term “spirituality.” By this time, the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis upon the individual’s unmediated relationship to God and the importance of an interior faith had created a climate within European Christianity which allowed the first steps towards the privatization of religion to occur. Thus, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, influenced by figures such as Madame Guyon (1648-1717), a new sensibility began to emerge which specifically associated spiritualité with the interior life of the individual soul.
The development of the modern notion of spirituality as an interiorized experience was inflected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the European colonial encounter with Asia and the growing influence of the science of psychology as an authoritative discourse of the human condition. There have been countervailing trends that associated “spirituality” with the struggle for social justice. Yet the predominant trend has been to see the “spiritual” as a discourse associated with the private, individual self.
By the second half of the twentieth-century, religion had entered the marketplace of human choice and experimentation, resulting of course in the development of that eclectic and amorphous phenomenon known today as ‘the New Age.” All of these factors have had a profound impact upon the reception of Asian religious traditions and philosophies in the western world where they have overwhelmingly been translated into introspective and otherworldly spiritualities concerned primarily with the achievement of individual enlightenment with little in the way of a social conscience or orientation to change the world in which that individual lives. Indeed, for someone like Paul Heelas, this individualistic focus means that the New Age movement can best be characterized as a loose network of “self-religions” or “spiritualities of the self.” We might call this process the individualization of religion.
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It is often recognized that, since the Enlightenment, organized religion has been subjected to an erosion of its social authority with the rise of scientific rationalism, humanism and modern, liberal democratic models of the nation-state (a process often called secularization). In modern western societies, to varying degrees, this has usually manifested itself as the relegation of “the religious” to the private sphere. What has not been sufficiently appreciated by contemporary social theorists however is that the later stages of this process have become intimately intertwined with the global spread of corporate capitalism. We can describe both of these trends as the privatization of religion, but in two distinct senses.
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