Popular and lived religions - sagepub.net Popular and lived religions ... (1996), is that of the Orisha reli- ... the Ewe and the Ashanti) culture was transplanted from Africa.Published

Sociopedia.isa© 2014 The Author(s)

© 2014 ISA (Editorial Arrangement of Sociopedia.isa)Adam Possamai, 2014, ‘Popular and lived religions’, Sociopedia.isa, DOI: 10.1177/205684601422

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Introduction

In its worst possible interpretation, popular religioncan make reference to the ‘vulgar’, the ‘superstitious’,the ‘hopelessly irrational’, the ‘socially retrograde’ andthe ‘idiotic’ (Berlinerblau, 2001). Popular religionoften reflects the lived and unstructured religion ofsubordinated groups and is a term which has devel-oped mainly in contrast to institutionalized, estab-lished and/or official religion which has a rationalized,codified and written-down theology. It also refers tothe religion of the people when they subvert the cod-ified official religion of the elite group by, for example,changing the official liturgy of the established religionto their own liking, bringing eclectic elements into asyncretic set of beliefs from other religions that are notofficially recognized, or simply by following a previ-ous religion in opposition to a new official one. InParker’s (1998: 205) view, ‘[u]nlike the [official] reli-gion of reason characteristic of the intellectual elitesand clergy, popular religion is a religion of rites andmyths, of dreams and emotions, of body and the questfor this-worldly well-being’.

Importantly from a sociological point of view isthat what is meant by popular religion is context-dependent. For example, in a location where there is asharp contrast between an urban and rural setting, theofficial religion is often dominant in cities whereas

popular religion (e.g. syncretic aspects of Catholicismwith nature religion or animism) tends to be morepractised in villages and among illiterate peoples.However, this does not stop urbanites from tappinginto popular religion and seeking the help of, forexample, a spiritual healer who will perform alterna-tive rituals to the ones performed within institutional-ized religion. Another context is that of a colonizedcountry in which the official religion is the onebrought by the new dominant ethnic group, and pop-ular religion is the one practised by the dominatedethnic group (see below). Although popular religioncomprises a multitude of unorganized elements, oftenin contradiction, some theorists define popular reli-gion not in terms of a urban/rural divide or a colonialcontext but specifically with regard to class divide; theupper class belonging to the official religion and thelower to the popular religion. These theorists, follow-ing the legacy of Gramsci, sometimes see popular reli-gion as a form of contestation against dominantculture.

This article will first use the theories of Gramsci ina western setting as a point of entry to the debate onhow to theorize popular religion. It will then unpackthe limitations of this approach and discuss howrecent sociocultural changes make it harder to

abstract This article discusses the sociological understanding of popular religion by first exploring thetheories of Gramsci. It then critiques this approach by arguing that the social construction of popular reli-gion in contrast to institutionalized religion is not as clear cut in our late modern, multi-faith and globalworld as it was in the early modern period. Through the use of new internet methodologies (e.g. NgramViewer), it is argued that if spirituality reflects the democratization process of mysticism, popular religion,on the contrary, represents its gentrification.

keywords hyper-real religions ◆ lived religion ◆ mysticism ◆ popular religions ◆ spirituality

Popular and lived religions Adam Possamai University of Western Sydney, Australia

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Possamai Popular and lived religions

maintain the boundaries between official and popu-lar religions. The discussion on the gentrificationprocess of popular religion into spirituality and thedemocratization of mysticism into spirituality at theend of the article will give further evidence of the dif-ficulty of keeping this dichotomy as pristine as it wasin the heyday of modernity.

Gramsci and popular religion

Gramsci wrote about this issue in Italy before theSecond World War and at a time period in which hiscountry was moving from an agricultural society toan industrial one. According to this Marxist philoso-pher, the Church is an institution that managed overthe years to keep popular religion in check:

The strength of religions, and of the Catholic churchin particular, has lain, and still lies, in the fact thatthey feel very strongly the need for the doctrinalunity of the whole mass of the faithful and strive toensure that the higher intellectual stratum does notget separated from the lower. The Roman church hasalways been the most vigorous in the struggle to pre-vent the ‘official’ formation of two religions, one forthe ‘intellectuals’ and the other for the ‘simple souls’.(Gramsci, 1991: 328)

Gramsci sees the subaltern culture as different and inopposition to the Church’s official values; howeverthis opposition is not always conscious or explicit(Nesti, 1975). Popular religion comprises a multi-tude of unorganized elements often in contradiction.Gramsci argues that some of the elements have apotential to lead to novelty and to a contestationagainst the state. These elements could be framed tobuild a collective consciousness within the popularmass and lead to an organized opposition againsthegemonic power.

Gramsci does not make reference to popular reli-gion as a whole when it comes to reaching this revo-lutionary strength. As he clearly points out, someelements of this subaltern culture cannot be of helpas they are remnants of past historical periods andnot in line with, for instance, the development of theItaly of his time as an industrial society. Indeed, hestates that there is a need to combat ‘the residues ofthe pre-capitalist world that still exist among thepopular masses, especially in the field of religion’(Gramsci, 1991: 392). These popular religiousmovements, for Gramsci, can be both progressiveand regressive, and only their progressive attributeshave the potential to be counter-hegemonic.Gramsci is here explaining how some progressivemovements within popular religion have already

attempted revolt, but have been at a later stageabsorbed by the Church, counteracting their revolu-tionary power:

Many heretical movements were manifestations ofpopular forces aiming to reform the Church andbring it closer to the people by exalting them. Thereaction of the Church was often very violent: it hascreated the Society of Jesus; it has clothed itself inthe protective armour of the Council of Trent;although it has organized a marvellous mechanism of‘democratic’ selection of its intellectuals, they havebeen selected as single individuals and not as the rep-resentative expression of popular groups. (Gramsci,1991: 397)

Gramsci (1991: 331–2) also makes reference to otherexamples such as the creation of strong popular massmovements centred on personalities such as StDominic and St Francis. Instead of allowing suchdivision, the Church again managed to absorb theircharisma by creating new religious orders, and thuscounteract counter-hegemonic processes. ForGramsci, at the time of his writing, the Society ofJesus was the last of the great religious orders as itsorigins were reactionary.

It should be noted that this hegemonic power wasnot always omnipotent. As McGuire (2008: 63)points out, popular religion in the Middle Ages wasalso a medium for expressing a critique (rather thana revolt) towards the powerful. Indeed, some ritualswere aimed at mocking or subverting the powerful.In these, and for a moment only, the official ordercould then be altered and wealth redistributed.

Popular religion: from Gramsci tocolonialism and globalization

The power relationship between the official andpopular religion can also be due to ethnic factors. Ina setting different from the Italy of Gramsci, and insome multi-ethnic countries, the religion of thedominant ethnic group can be seen/imposed as theofficial one and that of the dominated ethnic groupis relegated to the realm of irrelevance to mainstreampublic interest as popular religion. In many ‘colo-nized’ countries, the official religion became that ofthe ‘white’ settler/invader removing earlier religion(s)such as those of the aborigines to the backstage of itssociety. These popular religions tend to be indige-nous and are typical of Afro-American and Oceanic‘tribal’ cultures when they met with Christianism. AsParker (1996: 6) puts it, ‘sociologically, when a con-quest occurs, the gods of the conquered survive butare regarded as idols or magic for the conquerors’.

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This form of popular religion thus becomes a sort ofdepositary of myths and rituals from indigenous cul-tures and provides a space where indigenous peoplecan cope with the deculturation process inherentwithin the Christian and colonialist process.

For example, in Latin America, Blancarte (2000:600) makes reference to this process as such:

The Indians, like the Africans, used every meansavailable, including religious, to survive under thecolonial regimen as well as in the modern-liberal one.The Indian and popular masses do not generate adiverse religious practice, completely autonomousfrom ecclesiastical institutions; instead, they partici-pate in a complex relationship within a dominantsystem of beliefs. Popular religion has been in thisway a resistance mechanism for some, and for others,a mechanism of integration to a dominant cultureand religion.

This difference between ethnic groups does noteventuate only when a more powerful religion landsin a country, it also happens when a non-dominantmigrant group moves to another country and bringswith it its own religion. An example, and here I aminspired by Houk (1996), is that of the Orisha reli-gion which was established in Trinidad around 1840when the Yoruba’s (as well as that of the Kongolese,the Ewe and the Ashanti) culture was transplantedfrom Africa. During the second half of the 19th cen-tury, Orisha worshipers began syncretizing their owndeities from their home land with Catholic saints.Some commentators view this as a camouflage undertheir imported religion of that of the dominant one(e.g. hiding the representation of Ogun, a sword-brandishing warrior, under the disguise of StMichael), others claim that these African migrantswillingly syncretized the two belief systems to enrichtheir own one. Around 1915, when the ‘protes-tantized’ Spiritual Baptist religion became moremainstream, and around 1950 when East Indiansbrought Hinduism with them, the Orisha religionopened itself to these new faiths and syncretized itsbelief system even more. Although there has been arecent push towards the Africanization of the Orishareligion and its institutionalization by some sub-groups, this popular religion, like other Africanmigrant religious groups to the new world, is charac-terized by decentralization, oral liturgies and syn-cretism. Another example is that of Candombléwhich went also through a syncretization process ofAfrican religious traditions with Christianity whenslaves were brought to Brazil (Cohen, 2007). It isworth pointing out that this type of syncretism canalso happen in Africa (Groop, 2010). In northernNamibia, for example, Lutheran Christianity wasbrought by Finnish missionaries in the 19th century

and the Owambo have as well been observed to dis-play certain forms of hybridity between the two reli-gions that have not been institutionalized orofficialized.

Another process might be at hand in some set-tings. When migrants arrive in a new country, theymight be more inclined to adapt their institutionalreligion from their home country to a more popularformat in the host one. For example, Sinha (2013)studies folk Hinduism in Malaysia and Singapore,and observes that rituals of animal sacrifices, extremerituals, ecstatic ceremonies and ritualistic healingpractices endure among the lay Hindu populations.She discovers that these people are returning to their‘roots’ and these are meaningful to them. These ritu-als are not conducted by any religious specialists andare found to have been reconstructed and recreatedto the point that some organizations are trying toinstall awareness and educate Hindus about theirreligion. The aim is to counter the threat of folkHindus to convert to other religions, as the field ofpopular religion allows for fluidity across religions.

Popular religion: from Gramsci totoday

As already discussed, Enzo Pace (1979) notes that,for Italian scholars, popular religion tends to be aclass phenomenon. It is followed especially by thesubaltern classes, and most predominantly, but notexclusively, by the agricultural classes. Peasantry,Davidson (1991) reminds us, was the majority of thepopulation in Gramsci’s time. We can thus expectGramsci to have been inspired by the same under-standing of popular religion. However, popular reli-gion is not always the religion of theunderprivileged.

Making such a distinction solely between thelearned and the illiterate is not always fruitful. Overthe last centuries many of the elite have wanted togain knowledge from ‘popular religion’, have studiedit and have codified some aspects of it. One mightremember that during the Middle Ages and theRenaissance, popular magic moved from the inartic-ulate classes to the intellectual ones. For example,Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Paracelsus and JohnDee were learned men who delved into popular reli-gion and its magic to codify and rationalize it. Thismagic, also called esotericism, changed through themodern and late modern periods to influence NewAge spiritualities. Through the ages, this ‘magic’ hasbeen commodified and gentrified (Possamai, 2005).

Another case in point is the birth of neo-pagan-ism in the late 1940s, during which period GeraldGardner (1884–1964) published an ethnography of

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contemporary witches. For Gardner, witches hadancient knowledge and powers handed downthrough generations and he claimed to have beeninitiated into their nature religion. The allegedancient nature religion (previously seen as a folk andpopular religion) that Gardner codified in his writ-ing led to the birth of the current neo-pagan move-ment. By this example, it could be argued thatcontemporary neo-paganism is a reinterpretation ofthe popular religion of certain folk people. Today,many neo-pagans live in cities, are literate and tendto be from middle-class backgrounds.

Popular religion in the western world, it can beargued, has been gentrified. It is no longer the pre-rogative of the peasants and/or lower classes, but it isnow accessible, if not carried, by the middle classesas well.

One way to move beyond the restriction of thisclass, urban/rural and ethnic analysis to define pop-ular religion is to use a social constructionistapproach (see Beckford, 2003) – basically arguingthat understandings of popular religion are in ten-sion with official religion (Berlinerblau, 2001;Possamai, 2008). Popular religion exists because offi-cial religion desires to distance itself from more pop-ulist types of magical practices. However, popularreligion has become so complex in recent years in thewestern world that the dichotomy between these tworeligious sub-fields is not as clear-cut as it used to be.Over the years, we have seen more elitist forms ofreligiosity (e.g. Troeltsch’s [1950] mysticism, andColin Campbell’s [1978] secret religion of the edu-cated class) merging with forms of popular religion,and vice versa (see below). Enzo Pace (1987), byusing Niklas Luhmann’s theory on Complex Society,indeed confirms that mysticism (in Troeltsch’s sense)is becoming a form of religious neo-populism. Aspopular religion becomes a more complex synthesis,it might be better to understand it as a religion thattakes ‘account of subjective needs, of emotional com-munication, of face to face rapport, as opposed to allthe cold forms of functioning of the traditional reli-gious institution’ (Pace, 1987: 12–13).

Official religion reaching for the popular

The time that a church used to be the centre of acommunity and be centripetal to the local flock is atime gone. Some churches are reaching out to thepopulation by tapping into their own local culture.They are aiming at loosening their ties to the officialelitist tradition (e.g. to pews, to prayers books and toJacobean language – i.e. the language used in the

King James’ version of the Bible). To deal with thisnew and highly mobile society, to adapt to the newspirit of the times, these churches are attempting tomove people by narratives rather than apologeticarguments.

During modernity, and in the western world, the-ology had to follow the direction imposed by the Ageof Reason, and mystical expressions of religion werenot received positively (Bouma, 2006). However, weare witnessing today a reversing trend in this part ofthe world. The Catholic Church, for example, afterhaving attempted to denigrate aspects of popularreligion within its faith (e.g. eradication of some ofits processions, blessings and exorcist activities), isnow re-evaluating its cult of saint and of the Virginand is supporting it more strongly than duringmodernity, as seen in the interest that the late PopeJohn Paul II had in pilgrimages. The Vatican has alsorenewed an interest in exorcism and is catering forthe formation of new theologically trained experts(Baglio, 2009). Voyé (1998) writes about this changewithin Catholicism and underlines the helpfulnotion of the relegitimation of popular religion sincethe advent of late modernity.

Other Christian groups are part of this relegiti-mation process as well and some of them show greatinterest in mega-churches, also called full-servicechurches, seven-day-a-week churches, pastoralchurches, apostolic churches, ‘new tribe’ churches,new paradigm churches, seeker-sensitive churches,or shopping-mall churches. Under one roof, thesechurches offer pop-culture packaged worship stylesto boutique ministries. The latest generation hashuge auditoriums and balconied atriums, orchestrasand bands playing soft rock, some of them with evenfood courts, fountains and plenty of parking.

However, within this movement of the churchattempting to become more popular, some insiders,although agreeing on the necessary changes to adaptthemselves to late modern culture, see these mega-churches as offering uninventive pre-packaged wor-ship and theology (Drane, 2006). As a reaction tothis, emerging churches have recently started todevelop. They try to create the ambiance of the artgallery or the café rather than that of an arena or rockconcert found in mega-churches. For example, thecafé churches are organized to have people sitting attables and chairs, drinking and/or eating and chat-ting. Other examples are church in the pub, cyberchurch, 15-minute long commuter church designedfor workers on their way to work, and skate churchwith ramps inside the church hall where skating ismixed with Bible reading. By using a style of socia-tion more appropriate to our consumer society thanhaving people preached at from a pulpit, it is hoped

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to increase church attendance and to have the gospelreach a larger audience. This is reflected in theresearch that McGuire (2008) conducted amongevangelicals who enhanced their religious experi-ences through popular religious resources providedby the worship services. These were seen as encour-aging emotional and intense responses from the wor-shippers.

The Church did not wait for the advent of latemodern culture to attempt to become more popular.There are well-known cases in history (e.g. VaticanII) that prove the contrary. However, what makesthis process different nowadays is that official reli-gion aims to adapt to not only people’s local culturebut to their lifestyle as well. Indeed, the point is notto change the religion to adapt itself to a whole pop-ulation, but to tailor one of their ‘religious products’to a particular niche (e.g. skate church to a particu-lar sub-culture); a process which is called lifestyling.

In many parts of the world religion has re-enteredthe public sphere to such an extent that it has under-mined the ‘hard line’ secularization thesis – i.e. theassumption that religion would disappear in mod-ernized societies. Since this ‘hard line’ view is notmaterializing, views on secularization have had to berevised. Some (e.g. Bruce, 2006; Norris andInglehart, 2004) explain that secularization is stillhappening but in a much less extreme process thanfirst predicted; others (e.g. Casanova, 2006; Davie,2006; Martin, 2005) propose that there is a reverseprocess and that secularization is losing momentum.

But one should not forget that religion has defi-nitely lost its monopoly of culture and that it is nolonger an encompassing social force that links allsocial fields of a society. Bourdieu (1987) makes ref-erence to the term ‘dissolution’ to reflect that religionis now a sub-field in which clerics are no longer theexclusive religious specialists. As quoted and translat-ed by Rey (2007: 65) in Bourdieu (1987: 119):

Today we are moving in imperceptible stages fromancient clerics … to members of sects, to psychoana-lysts, to psychologists, to doctors, to sexologists, toexpression corporelle teachers, to Eastern martial arts,to life counsellors, to social workers. They all takepart in a new field of struggle over the symbolicmanipulation of the conduct of private life and theorientation of one’s vision of the world, and they alldevelop in their practice competing and antagonisticdefinitions of health, of healing, of the treatment ofbodies and of souls.

But what of popular religion? Steve Bruce (2011),who is a strong advocate of the secularization thesis,argues that popular religion is doubly vulnerable tothis process. As it lives within the Church, the

decline of the Church can only lead to a reduction inthe vitality of popular religion. His argument is thatpopular religion must be sustained by an institution-al core. While I agree with this statement, this refersto popular religion within a church (see differencebetween spirituality and unchurched spiritualitybelow). I would nevertheless like to point out thatpopular religion can also exist and develop outsideinstitutionalized walls and can thus develop. Theseforms of popular religion, as the next sectionexplores, cannot claim to reclaim the political andsocial strength of the Church of yesteryear, but nev-ertheless, they offer a type of revitalization of the reli-gious in people’s everyday lives.

New forms of popular religion ineveryday life?

Popular religions do not have to be based within anestablished church, they can be lived outside them,while others can nevertheless remain in these struc-tures, often at the margins. Because of this impassewith regard to defining and pinpointing exactly whatpopular religion is, as explained above, some theo-rists moved away from this notion and started dis-cussing, for example, the term ‘lived religion’ instead(see below). This coincides with a shift of paradigmamong social scientists who became more concernedabout the study of the religious experience andbeliefs at the grassroots rather than conduct researchon dogmas and institutions (Prudhomme, 2010).This is expressed empirically in the research of, forexample, Parker (2002). In various surveys in LatinAmerica, Parker (2002) included in the list ofanswers to choose from the categories ‘Catholic inmy own way’ and ‘[Catholic] believer outside of thechurch’ alongside the more classic category:‘Catholic’. He discovered that out of all Catholics, asixth to a third would rather affiliate themselves withthese heterodox categories. Those people still callthemselves Catholics but want to distance them-selves from the dogmas and discipline imposed bythe ecclesiastic institution. This links with McGuire’sconcept of lived religion which points out that every-day life practices of religion do not follow the path aslined up by religious institutions.

McGuire (2008) refers to lived religions todescribe a type of revival of popular religions; theseare religions on the rise. The increase of con-sumerism and of means of communication, and theadvent of globalization, have created an open spacefor religions to be individualized and created in atype of free religious market in which people canpick and choose whatever they enjoy. McGuire

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(2008) moved away from studying religion at theinstitutional level and concentrated her research atthe individual level. She was concerned with anamalgam of beliefs that are often ever-changing,multifaceted and can be contradictory; that is anaspect of religion that religious institutions do notoften consider of importance. Lived religion reflectsnot only the fact that religions and the messagesfrom official spokespersons change but also moreimportantly what ordinary people understand thosechanges to be. She even wonders about the validityof the distinction between popular religion and insti-tutional or official religion as the matter seems to bemainly intellectually framed and only intellectualsappear to care about coherence in religious ways ofthinking.

However, this desire for this coherence in ways ofthinking is not the exclusive preserve of sociologists,it is also reflected in the work of some religious insti-tutions which, even if they want to reach out to thepopular, also want their theology to be pristine fromother spiritual importation. For example, in 2003,the Vatican issued a provisional report on the NewAge, titled Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life:A Christian Reflection on the ‘New Age’ (The Vatican,2003), which for the sake of this article, and as willbe explored below, New Age, or AlternativeSpiritualities, is seen here as a result of a gentrifica-tion process of popular religion. The first aim of theVatican is to inform those engaged in pastoral workon how the New Age movement differs from theChristian faith. Its second aim is to declare that theattractiveness of the New Age movement for someChristians may be due to a lack of knowledge of theirown Christian faith, which, it is highlighted, pro-vides the same answers as the New Age to currentsocial and spiritual ills. The report indicates thatideas from the New Age movement have infiltratedChristian faith and practice. For example, the docu-ment states that there have been too many caseswhere Catholic centres of spirituality were activelydiffusing New Age ideas in the Church instead of‘true’ Catholic spirituality and that even in a cultur-al environment marked by religious relativism, NewAge religiosity cannot be given the same status as theChristian faith. The late Pope John Paul II evenwarned about the ‘return of ancient Gnostic ideasunder the guise of the so-called New Age’.

Part of this query about the infiltration of NewAge practices into Catholicism is the fact that glob-alization has affected popular religions. Obadia(2010) argues that this process has allowed theseforms of religiosity to be less tied up with official reli-gions and not only can they now more adequatelyresist institutionalized religion, but, contrary to how

the Vatican sees it, they can also revitalize it. Theseglobal processes allow these flows of religious ideasand beliefs to be removed from their institution oforigin. Another such case is hyper-real religions.These refer to a simulacrum of a religion created outof, or in symbiosis with, commodified popular cul-ture which provides inspiration at a metaphoricallevel and/or is a source of beliefs for everyday life(Possamai, 2012). Baudrillard’s (1988) theory ofcommodity culture, which is the source behind thecoining of the term hyper-real religion, removes anydistinction between objects and representation. Intheir place, he pictures a social world constructed outof models or ‘simulacra’ which have no foundationin any reality except their own. In these religions,these ‘simulacra’ are constructed as a mix of religions,philosophies and commodified popular culture. ForBaudrillard, society is now structured by signs andsymbols in which it becomes difficult to distinguishthe real from the unreal: from this, hyper-reality –that is a situation in which reality has collapsed –takes over. This vision portrays contemporary west-ern society in which people seem to seek spectaclemore than meaning. In this hyper-real world, global-ized and commodified popular culture offer a libraryof narratives to be borrowed and used by anyoneready to consume them for their religious bricolage.A commonly known 21st-century example is Jediism(from the Star Wars films): a group mainly active onthe Internet that has created a popular religion out ofthe inspiration from the Star Wars narratives, espe-cially its Jedi Knights’ spirituality, and the syncreticassemblage between various religions and philoso-phies. However, this phenomenon is not limited tofull-blown cases such as Jediism and can also involvepeople being religiously inspired by popular culture,by, for example, watching the The Da Vinci Code orAvatars, playing a game such as World of Warcraft, orbeing influenced by conspiracy theories (Fatu-Tutoveanu and Pintilescu, 2012; Possamai, 2012).

Although hyper-real religions have existed sinceat least the 1960s, the Internet has been instrumen-tal in the growth of this phenomenon. The Internetis now more than just a tool for work or research foracademics and the military. As regards religion, theInternet is no longer simply a cyber-billboard wherepeople post messages; through Web 2.0 the Internetis now a powerful social technology allowing peopleto interact at broadband speeds about issues rangingfrom personal to political and religious. A broadrange of groups adopted this new technology andsome of them established this symbiosis betweenreligion and popular culture which is observable incyberspace. Rather than standing up on a soap boxand speaking about the faith derived from Star Wars,

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or spending hours photocopying a Jediist manifestoand mailing it to a list of people (and paying forstamps), one can simply create a website that anyonein the world can access. Further, ‘preachers’ do nothave to reveal their identity. They can hide theiridentity behind a screen and even use pseudonymsand are thus protected from the threat of stigmatiza-tion in the offline world. This is likely to impact onthe growth and importance of popular religion in thenear future.

Popular religion, spirituality and mysticism

What is meant by being religious today is no longerwhat it once was. Religion is metamorphosing intonew, renewed and different forms at various levels(Lyon, 2000). Further, with globalization and migra-tion movements, we are living in a culture of plural-ism which redefines the role of religion (Giordan andPace, 2012). This proves to be a challenge for reli-gious institutions which used to have the monopolyof faith in mono-cultural societies. As a result of thecollapse of collective systems of codes and being, theresult is an increase of freedom in which individualsmakes their own sense of their lives and of the rapidchanges and the increase of pluralism specific to ourcurrent society. More people claim to have no reli-gious affiliations but they are not necessarily atheist;they believe without belonging and might see them-selves as more spiritual (and across various religions)than religious. In everyday life/language, religionappears to be connected with institutionalized/orga-nized forms whereas spirituality is viewed more as aself-authored search by individuals who are lookinginward. With secularization, the cultural presence oftraditional religious institutions has diminished, butthe search for a more personal connection to a reli-gion, that is, for spirituality, has increased. In varioussurveys (Hugues et al., 2004; Marler and Hadaway,2002), we see that the younger the generation themore spiritual (only) rather than religious it is.

Although the word ‘spirituality’ was first used inthe 17th century as a pejorative term to refer to eliteforms of individual religious practice (Cunninghamand Egan, 1996: 5), today the word has a differentmeaning. Not too long ago, sociologists even used tosuggested that ‘spirituality’ would replace ‘religion’,as the term seems more adequate to the current reli-gious quest in consumer culture (e.g. Roof, 1999).However, research (e.g. Hugues et al., 2004; Marlerand Hadaway, 2002) indicates that spirituality is notsimply replacing religion. Most people see them-selves as ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’ at the same time.

For example, Wuthnow (2001: 307) claims that‘many people who practice spirituality in their ownways still go to church or synagogue’. From aChristian perspective, Cunningham and Egan(1996) make reference to spirituality as the livedencounter with Jesus Christ in the Spirit. For them,spirituality cannot be limited to an exclusively indi-vidualistic ‘care of the soul’ and involves being partof the local and worldwide community. Going to‘church’ on Sunday allows this connection, and fur-thermore, by listening to the word of God,Christians can enter ‘into the story that tells us aboutJesus the Christ in the Spirit [i.e. being spiritual] andto respond to that story both as individuals and aspart of the local and worldwide community’(Cunningham and Egan, 1996: 33). Indeed, socialscientists find from various surveys that the largemajority of the people surveyed claim to be religiousand spiritual at the same time, whereas those whoclaim to be spiritual but not religious appear to beonly a small contingent of people, and spiritualitydoes not seem to replace religion at all. These spiri-tual (only) actors are not churchgoers and are morelikely to experiment with alternative spiritualitiesand/or Eastern practices.

To make sense of this, it is worth coming back tothe classics to put some light on this contemporaryphenomenon. Troeltsch’s work on mysticism hassome strange resemblances with the contemporaryspiritual trend.

Bruce Campbell (1978: 231) quotes Troeltsch’sdefinition of mysticism as:

… the insistence upon a direct inward and presentreligious experience. ... An individualized reactionagainst highly institutionalized religion, it ariseswhen ‘the world of ideas’ which makes up the reli-gious belief system has ‘hardened’ into formal wor-ship and doctrine. Under these circumstances,religion becomes for some people ‘transformed into apurely personal and inward experience’.

The author gives a summary of the characteristics ofTroeltsch’s mysticism as ‘an emphasis on direct, innerpersonal experience; loose and provisional forms;voluntary adherence, usually not formal; a spiritualconception of fellowship; inclusiveness in attitude;indifference toward the demands of society’ (BCampbell, 1978: 231). Troeltsch claimed that mysti-cism was at the beginning of the 20th century thesecret religion of the educated class, and predictedthat gradually, in the world of ‘mass’ educated peo-ple, this type of religiosity would be predominant.Colin Campbell (1978) saw this in the late 1960sand early 1970s with the development of new reli-gious movements as prescient. It is even more

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prescient today, at the beginning of the 21st century,in which spirituality has become so important and somainstream. In this sense, it can be argued that spir-ituality (a form of religiosity used by all classes) is thedemocratization of mysticism (a form of religiosityused by the elites).

But what about the relationship between spiritu-ality and popular religion? As seen above, popularreligion has been gentrified and has been used byvarious social classes as well. Further, in our con-sumer and media world, Knoblauch (2008) makesreference to the collapse of boundaries between insti-tutionalized religion and popular culture whichmakes of spirituality a popular religion. Hamberg(2009) notices as well some similarities betweenthese two concepts even if the field of research hasrecently been dominated by discussions of spirituali-ty rather than popular religion.

To help move the debate forward, this article nowturns to new data resources provided by Google and

more specifically Google’s Ngram, which intends todigitize every book ever printed. According to Alwin(2013), this site had at the time of his commentmore than 15 million scanned books which wouldrepresent 12% of books ever published. There are, ofcourse, certain issues to take into account whenusing these new Internet social research methods,but I invite the reader to access Groves (2011) andSavage (2013), for example, to explore this issue fur-ther.

Using the Ngram Viewer on Google books,which reports the proportion of references to a givenword or combination of words (Savage, 2013) andtyping the keywords ‘spirituality’ (top line on theleft), ‘mysticism’ (middle line on the left) and ‘popu-lar religion’ (bottom line), one can notice in Figure 1that from all the books held in Google Books thewords ‘spirituality’ and ‘mysticism’ are far more pop-ular than that of ‘popular religion’. In this graph, theuse of this latter word appears to have been used in a

Figure 1. Ngram Viewer of the words ‘spirituality’, ‘mysticism’ and ‘popular religion

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constant fashion from 1800 to 2000, and remains atthe bottom of the graph. However, if one types ‘pop-ular religion’ by itself in Ngram, we can notice inFigure 2 various trends with these ‘closer lenses’. Thehighest peak in the use of this term in Google Booksis in the 1880s, and two notable high peaks hap-pened around the 1850s and 1910s. It is worthnoticing that from the 1980s, the term has shown aslow comeback.

Among all the books contained in Google Books,we can observe that the use of the two other termshas changed over time. Around the 1880s the term‘mysticism’ was more used (in a print form at least)and peaked in the 1930s, and remained the mostused term among these three until the 1980s withthe development of globalization and late moderni-ty. Around that time period, the term ‘spirituality’became the buzz word for these non-institutionalreligions. Further, the use of the word ‘spirituality’reached quite a high peak in the 1990s. Much can besaid and critiqued about the methodology used, butas an instrument, it shows some interesting trends inneed of further research, and they neverthelessappear to give at least credence to the claim above ofthe popularity of the term ‘spirituality’ over ‘mysti-cism’.

Exploring the same terms on Google Trends (see

Figure 3), and acknowledging the limitations of thismethodology, one can notice that the use of the term‘spirituality’ (top line on the graph) from people whohave ‘Googled’ the term since 2004 is, as expected,far more used than that of ‘mysticism’ (middle lineon the graph) or ‘popular religion’ (bottom line).The peak was in 2004 and it has since decreased,however, this clearly demonstrates the current popu-larity of the term ‘spirituality’.

This is part of the emergence of the post-dogmat-ic religion as explored recently by Riis (2012). Asnew generations of believers have been taught toquestion religious authorities, more and more peopleattempt to establish their own beliefs rather thanaffiliate themselves with an established dogma. Thishas led to a growth of subjectivized forms of religionin the non-institutional field (Davidsen, 2012). Ifthis post-dogmatic and non-institutional trend wasreflected in the past among the elite through mysti-cism and among the working and dominated classesthrough popular religion, this late modern world haseradicated these class differences with regard to thisapproach to institutionalized religion.

However, one should be aware of differenceswithin mysticism and spirituality. Bruce Campbell(1978: 231) found that Troeltsch writes about twoideal-types of mysticism; these are mysticism and

Figure 2. Ngram Viewer of the word ‘popular religion’

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technical mysticism. Mysticism occurs in establishedreligious traditions but its experience occurs outsidethe regular forms of worship and devotion to thesereligions. The experience of the mystics, from thisideal-type, is the means by which they realize andappropriate the tradition of the religious organiza-tion in which they belong. They even legitimize andsupport established ecclesiastical structures.Technical mysticism makes a break with traditionalreligion. Technical mystics contest the religion with-in which they have been socialized. They understandthemselves to be independent from religious princi-ple and of every religious institution. Technical mys-ticism sets up its own theory, which takes the placeof doctrine and dogma by undercutting the formand structure of the established religions. It discoverseverywhere, ‘beneath all the concrete forms of

religion, the same religious germ’ (Troeltsch, 1950:231).

The same distinction can be applied to spiritual-ity and like Troeltsch, we could distinguish spiritual-ity from technical spirituality (or what Hamberg[2009] calls unchurched spirituality). While we can-not fully equate spirituality and mysticism to popu-lar religion in late modernity, we can at least claimthat technical mysticism and technical/unchurchedspirituality are more likely to share similarities withtoday’s popular religion. In this sense, and from asociological outlook on these lived religions in latemodernity, it can be argued that spirituality reflectsthe gentrification process of popular religion and thedemocratization of mysticism.

Figure 3. Google Trends for the words ‘mysticism’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘popular religion’

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ConclusionThe term ‘popular religion’ has usually been used asa contrast to institutionalized and official religion.This article has argued that, especially, in a multi-faith, global and late modern setting, as institution-alized religions are reaching to the popular and aspopular religions are being gentrified, the dichotomybetween these expressions becomes blurred. Even ifpopular religion can still be described in some con-texts in terms of urban/rural, class and ethnic divi-sions, these demarcations are not as clear-cut as theyused to be in an early modern setting. Even if otherterms such a lived religion and hyper-real religionshave been proposed to cater to some aspects that theconcept popular religion does not perfectly address,this article nevertheless claims that it is still animportant facet of religion to study, especially withregard to spirituality. Indeed, as this article hasargued, and sociologically speaking, spirituality(technical or unchurched more specifically) in latemodernity could be understood as an outcome of thegentrification process of popular religion and of thedemocratization of mysticism.

Annotated further reading

Campion N (2012) Astrology and Popular Religion in theModern West: Prophecy, Cosmology and the New AgeMovement. Aldershot: Ashgate.A study of popular religion and contemporaryalternative spiritualities.

Hume L and McPhillips C (eds) (2006) PopularSpiritualities: The Politics of ContemporaryEnchantment. Aldershot: Ashgate.An edited collection on contemporary spiritualityand popular religion in western societies.

McGuire M (2008) Lived Religion: Faith and Practice inEveryday Life. New York: Oxford University Press. A key sociological text in the study of popular andlived religion.

Parker C (1996) Popular Religion and Modernization inLatin America. New York: Orbis Books. A classic study of popular religion in Latin America.

Vrijhof P and Vaardenburg JJ (1979) Official andPopular Religion: Analysis of a Theme for ReligiousStudies. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. A fundamental contribution to this field of study.

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Adam Possamai is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Religion and SocietyResearch Centre at the University of Western Sydney. He is the President of the RC22 on theSociology of Religion of the International Sociological Association. His latest books are ReligiousChange and Indigenous Peoples: The Making of Reigious Identities (with H Onnudottir and BTurner, Ashgate, 2013) and The Handbook of Hyper-Real Religions (as editor, Brill, 2012).[email: [email protected]]

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résumé Cet article d’encyclopédie discute de notre connaissance sociologique à propos de la religionpopulaire en explorant d’abord les théories de Gramsci. Ensuite, il critique cette approche enargumentant que la construction sociale de ce qu’est la religion populaire en contraste avec la religioninstitutionnalisée n’est plus aussi si claire dans notre monde global aux multiples croyances et à lamodernité tardive que lorsque l’on se trouvait au début de la modernité. A travers l’usage de nouvellesméthodologies sur Internet (par exemple Ngram Viewer), cet article propose que si la spiritualité reflèteun processus de démocratisation du mysticisme, la religion populaire, au contraire, représente celui d’unembourgeoisement.

mots-clés mysticisme ◆ religions hyper-réelles ◆ religions populaires ◆ religions vécues ◆ spiritualité

resumen Este artículo discute nuestro conocimiento sociológico sobre la religión popular, explorandoprimero las teorías de Gramsci. Luego, se critica este enfoque, argumentando que la construcción socialde la religión popular, en contraste con la religión institucionalizada, no está tan claro en nuestro mundoglobal con múltiples creencias y la modernidad tardía que cuando se encontraba al inicio de lamodernidad. A través del uso de nuevas metodologías en Internet (por ejemplo, Ngram Viewer), estedocumento propone que si la espiritualidad refleja un proceso de democratización del misticismo, lareligión popular, por el contrario, representa el del aburguesamiento.

palabras clave espiritualidad ◆ misticismo ◆ religiones hiper-reales ◆ religiones populares ◆ religiónvivida

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