4. The global cafeteria

Go to a conservative Baptist or Catholic church and you will be told: This is the truth. Here is the checklist of the ten things that you must believe and the ten things you must do to placate God. But go to the “Mind-Body-Spirit” convention, held every year in London, and you will be confronted by an enormous array of belief systems, therapies and tech­niques for attaining enlightenment.

A good illustration of the range on offer is provided by the publisher Element, which offers a popular series of books: The Elements of.... In the series are: The Elements of — Alchemy, Astronomy, Buddhism, Christian Symbolism, Creation Myth, Crystal Healing, Dreamwork, Earth Mysteries, Peng Shui, Herbalism, Human Potential, Meditation, Mysticism... and so on.

Nobody is pointing out that if you take Celtic Christianity seriously you cannot also believe in Buddhism. New Agers are relat­ivists. They no longer believe there is just one truth. Many apparently incompatible things can all be true at the same time.

(5) Therapy

Most versions of Christianity suppose that if you obey God you can hope for a happy and long life but that was never the main point and you could not take it for granted. You obeyed God because the alternative was eternal damnation. A good job, a happy marriage or an illness cured were accidental side-benefits. If God decided not to improve your life, so be it. In the New Age, self-improvement and self-gratification are not accidental by-products of glorifying and obeying God, they are the whole point. Most New Age rituals and ideas are deliber­ately therapeutic. They are intended to make you more successful, healthier and happier

 Task 6. Read the part “How New Age beliefs fit the wider society” to trace the reasons of the popularity of this religion in Great Britain. Try to discern direct sociological explanations to the key issues of New Age finishing these logical connections. Use the correct linking words to present your ideas:

• each person is a relativist -- …

• the concept of the truth -- …

• freedom to choose -- …

• the personal concept of self-improvement -- …

How New Age beliefs fit the wider society

Big cultural changes are usually not acci­dents. It is worth asking what the popularity of New Age spirituality tells us about the social world. I suggest that the New Age has become popular because in some ways it is very well suited to our circumstances.

• First, it solves the problem of cultural diversity. Traditionally, Christians have claimed that there is only one God and one truth. This is fine, so long as everyone accepts the same God. But we now live in a culturally diverse world. To continue to insist that only one religion is right and the rest are all wrong, generates endless argument and conflict. The solution is to become a relativist: if it works for you, then that is your truth, and if I believe different things, that's 'cool' too. There is no need to argue or fight. In that sense, relativism gives us an effective solution to the problem of diversity.

• Second, the New Age mirrors the modern stress on the rights of the individual to choose. Fifty years ago we left it to experts, who told us what was good art and good music. Now we accept the freedom of personal taste. The same applies to religion. We claim the right to decide what we will believe. It is worth noting that the same individualism now appears in the mainstream Christian churches. Regular churchgoers are selective about which of their church's doctrines they will follow. There is no longer the old acceptance that the priest or the minister knows best. Obvious evidence for this fact is the change in the size of the average Catholic family. Whatever the Church says about artificial contraception, it is obvious that very many Catholics choose to ignore the Pope's views on that matter.

• Third, the New Age empowers the con­sumer. Most New Agers do not become fol­lowers or members of anything. Some join mutual interest groups but many express interest by buying ideas and therapies. They pay for a residential week at Findhorn. They learn meditation by attending a few classes and buying a few books. Buying and selling spirituality does not offend New Agers; they like it because it establishes who is in charge. The purchaser decides what revelations to follow and what therapies to practise. This is the modern ethos. We decide what microwave to buy. We decide where to holiday. And, in the New Age, we decide how much time and effort we will commit to what sorts of beliefs and rituals.

• Finally, the New Age interest in personal therapy perfectly mirrors the modern obses­sion with self-improvement and pampering. The modern world does not encourage accept­ance and fate. We are obliged to improve ourselves. If you are fat, you diet and exer­cise. If you cannot do that, pay for liposuction and plastic surgery. If you do not like your personality, change it. Get counselling, get psychotherapy, join a self-help group, take assertiveness training.

 Task 7. Read the part “The impact of New Age spirituality” and find answers to the following questions:

1. Why cannot the author of the article call the New Age religion an alternative to traditional religion?

2. Do you support the author’s point of view that the impact of the New Age followers on the rest of the world is not tangible?

3. Do you consider the fact of being a powerful social movement a criterion for assigning the status of religion to a set of spiritual ideas?

4. What examples does the author provide the reader with to back the idea the New Age is becoming trivialised?

The impact of New Age spirituality

Although New Age spirituality is superficially popular, it makes little difference to the overall secularisation of the West. Most involvement is shallow. People buy a few books, listen to a lecture, perhaps think: "['hat's interesting' — and do nothing more.

The most popular parts of the New Age are not magic, the occult, divination tech­niques or Hindu and Buddhist philosophies; they are the relaxation techniques, medita­tion, yoga and massage. Much of the New Age is not an alternative to traditional reli­gion; it is an extension of the doctor's surgery, the beauty parlour and the gym.

Although New Agers often use words like 'radical' and 'alternative', the effect is anything but. The anxious, repressed merchant banker who learns to meditate and gets his regular shiatsu massage does not throw up banking and become a youth worker or an eco-warrior. I le just becomes a happier and more relaxed merchant banker.

But even if the merchant banker does decide to throw it all in, buy a farmhouse in Wales and start a pottery with a side-line in horoscopes, the impact on the rest of the world is minimal. In the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century British evangel­icals were responsible for a vast amount of social reform. They put a stop to child labour in factories and mines. They stopped young boy sweeps being forced to climb up the chimneys of Georgian houses. They restricted the length of the working day. They put an end to a system by which men were paid their wages in pubs. They ended slavery. They also founded schools, penny savings banks and public libraries. Because they were united by common convictions, these religious believ­ers formed a powerful social movement. New Agers cannot combine in that way because they are not united by a common creed and are too individualistic and consumerist.

Finally, the impact of New Age spirituality is weakened as it gets sucked into the cultural mainstream. Consider the fate of yoga. It came to this country from India as a series of bodily disciplines intended to encourage spir­ituality, union with the Supreme Being. Now it is often just a style of exercise. My Aberdeenshire neighbour who goes to a yoga class has no idea that it has anything to do with Hinduism. The same thing is happening to feng shui. It used to be concerned with the location and flow of spiritual forces. Now, like Shaker furniture, it is just another decor­ating style. As the New Age has become popular, so it has become trivialised.

 Task 8. Read the last passage of the article and write your own variant of the conclusion. Express your understanding of the problem of the conventional religion decline in Great Britain and the future of the New Age and other alternative spiritual movements.

Conclusion

The societal influence of the New Age move­ment should not be exaggerated. In the context of secularisation, the numbers of those interested in New Age spirituality — however loosely defined — would come nowhere near compensating for the millions who have left the mainstream churches in the last 40 years.

Most interest in New Age spirituality is slight. Unlike previous religious innovations, such as Methodism in the early industrial age, the New Age affects only the lives of those involved and makes no difference at all to the rest of the world.

SUB-UNIT 2.2. The Secularisation Debate

WARMING-UP:

Task 1. Read the following statements and decide if they coincide with your own attitude to religion:

1. Conventional religions are in a state of decline.

2. People’s interest in religion is growing although it is not expressed through attendance at church services.

3. The fact that religious participation and the power of the religious institutions are in decline does not mean that personal religiosity is in decline also.

4. Regular church-goers are people from older age groups.

5. People might have given up on religious insti­tutions but they still believe in something or someone.

6. Church has lost its power in such spheres of social life as economy, social welfare, social control and health care.

 Task 2. Read the article where different approaches of three outstanding sociologists to the issue of “religion” in the contemporary society are presented. Decide which of the statements above reflect Bruce’s, Stark’s or Davie’s position. According to your answers, whose arguments are closer to yours?

The Secularisation Debate by John Walliss

For some sociologists religion is in ter­minal decline, seemingly eclipsed by science and rationality. In contrast, others argue that, whilst organised forms of religion may be in decline, there is a persistence of religion 'beyond the church and the chapel' in things like new religious movements or the New Age. Others argue that the growth of forms of fundamentalism, in Christianity and Islam, represents a resur­gence of religion in the contemporary world.

I am going to look at three positions within the secularisation debate:

• First, I will discuss the work of the pro-secular Steve Bruce, in which he argues that, before very long, Christianity in Britain will decline past the point of no return, and that many denominations will become extinct by 2030.

• Second, Rodney Stark (1999), a Bruce opponent, asserts that religion is not in decline quite simply because it was never that popular anyway. In contrast to the image we have of a highly religious past (which is central to Bruce's argument), Stark claims that in fact we are more reli­gious now than ever before.

• Finally, I will look at the 'believing with­out belonging' thesis developed over the last decade by Grace Davie, who argues that many of us may not belong to a reli­gion but may still cling to religious beliefs. We are 'believers' but not 'belongers'.

‘Christianity in Britain’

For Steve Bruce (2001), the prospects for religion in the modern world are not good at all. As he sees it, Christianity has been in a state of decline in the UK for at least the last 150 years and definitely over the course of the last century. During the twentieth century, church attendances dropped from almost 30% of the population to 10%. In the same period, the number of children attending Sunday schools fell from 55% of the population to just 4%. The number of full-time clergy dropped by 25% over the period: only 57 men were training for the priesthood in the UK in 1999 (a drop of 30% from 1979). Not only are those who attend religious services predominantly in older age groups but, perhaps more impor­tantly, there is little statistical evidence for any significant religiosity amongst the young who could one day replace them.

All this, Bruce claims, is a far cry from the fortunes of Christianity in former times. In the Middle Ages the church was the domi­nant social institution in Europe, having enormous social power. Popes could mobilise armies in several countries for the various Crusades and call monarchs to order. Monarchs, themselves, justified their status through reference to a 'great chain of being' that stretched down from God, through the Pope, through the monarch to the lowliest serf. Churches and cathedrals were built on a vast scale; monasteries became the only centres of learning; and Latin — the language of the Church — became the language of cosmopolitan intel­lectuals. The church touched the lives of everyone through its administration of rituals at the key stages of the life course: births, marriages and deaths.

Religion and social change

Bruce argues that the decline of Christianity in the modern world isn't a result of people becoming more rational and less supersti­tious. There is still far too much irrationality and superstition around for that to be the case. Rather, several features of the process of modernisation that began in the sixteenth century combined to undermine the place of religion in society.

■ The fragmentation of social life

The family used to be the primary source of education and socialisation, but now most children are educated in schools, colleges and universities by professional educators. Similarly, religious institutions have been pushed out of many spheres of social life, such as the economy, social welfare, social control and health care. Linked to these changes, the growth of a capitalist economy has seriously undermined a social system based on rank, in favour of one based on egalitarianism and acquired status.

• The disappearance of community

Modernisation is characterised by the shift of social organisation from the local to the national level. Community, in other words, is replaced by society, and Durkheim's 'collective conscience' is lost. Religion loses its 'taken-for-granted' nature and becomes a focus of choice rather than social obligation.