Spiritual but not religious respondents in contemporary studies

Abstract

Since early 1990s sociologists of religion have been noticing in the USA and Europe an appearance of a group, self-identifying as spiritual, but not religious. The word spirituality has been gaining popularity on political, media, and scientifi c levels. Alongside this tendency the number of «spiritual but not religious» grows. First, this group was discovered among baby-boomers with higher level of individualism, aversion of religious institutes, reaching out for personal experience. Now these groups are discovered in different countries, Russia included. This paper reviews several surveys conveyed in the US, Great Britain, Austria. Surveys show that the group of spiritual but not religious is usually heterogeneous, with unifying feature for them would be not common notion of spirituality, but mostly general distrust of religion. But only a part of them can be called active «bricoleurs», that is, constructs own worldview, using elements of both Eastern and Western religions, as well as New Age and secular sources.

Keywords

• spirituality
• religiosity
• sociology of religion
• psychology of religion