Occupying the number one spot in the Amazon Religion and Spirituality list for the last few weeks has been a book about the power of positive thinking. Having worked as a school teacher for many years, I know that believing you can achieve something is half the battle of achieving it. So I have no problem with that kind of positive thinking; but this is not a book about achieving anything, it's about 'ordering' whatever you fancy from your personal wish list: a job, money, a house and so on. Think positively about having these things, says the book, and the universe, yes the universe, will deliver them. The author tells of how she placed a trial order for the perfect man to be delivered in three months time on a specific date. Would you believe it (and here I quote) "Wowww!" he turned up on schedule.
Now what is astonishing is not only that this book sells but that a major bookseller considers it to be one that belongs in the Religion and Spirituality section. This book classification reflects the way people today understand the spiritual dimension of life; 'spirituality' is everywhere. Adverts claim that a certain therapy is spiritual and new age practises claim spiritual credentials. Crowning it all is the statement: 'I'm not religious but I am spiritual'. This now seems to be a normative self-description for most people in Britain. Yet this very explicit self-categorisation is rarely subjected to critical analysis. The growth of spirituality is simply acclaimed as a self-evident good without any effort to define the word spiritual.We badly need a better understanding of the rise of spirituality detached from religion and as a contribution to that understanding I offer some observations. My first observation is the commercialisation of this part of life. Where religion used to hold sway as a public service, now there is a retail industry filling the religion gap in people's lives. Where once Billy Graham filled Wembley stadium and invited you to give your life to Jesus, since 1977 the Mind Body Spirit Fair has been filling Olympia and other exhibition halls, with suppliers offering a range of saleable products from tarot to Hopi ear candles to eastern wisdom. The free market has overrun the last bastion; religion as a public service has nearly disappeared and its spiritual assets have been acquired by private companies. In their book 'Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion' Jeremy Carrette and Richard King analyse the history of this process from a Marxist perspective. They conclude that if Marx were alive today he would say: 'spirituality is the opium of the people' and, surprisingly, they add that 'religious traditions provide the richest intellectual examples we have of humanity's collective effort to make sense of life, community and ethics.' The commercial exploitation of spirituality is now so bad that even the Marxists are defending the old religious traditions.
This commercially driven spiritual market place has been responding to a spontaneous turn to spirituality during the twentieth century. As more and more people in developed countries have their basic material needs satisfied, they want increasingly to develop the non-material side of their lives. This is often expressed as the desire for peace of mind which in turn leads to the quest for meaning. Moments of peace and insight are sought-after features of life and it is these that the new spirituality movements seek to offer.
