From spirituality to spiritualities

Yoga, meditation, personal development movements, New Age esoteric practices, shamanic rituals, East or South Asian-based beliefs: Today, more and more activities are defined as “spiritual.” While most of these activities are inspired by specific cosmologies that have their own representations of the world, derived practices are usually highly customized and often private. They are typically based on personal beliefs borrowed from a wide range of sources, such as the belief in an interconnected world or in a form of life after death, mindfulness activities, meditations, etcetera. A good number of them sustain the well-being industry and offer tools for self-exploration and realization. The current enthusiasm for spirituality as a popular narrative is generally attributed to contemporary religious reconfigurations generated by secularization processes and a certain disenchantment with religions considered authoritarian or institutions. However, the distinction between religion and spirituality is not obvious, and it would be wrong to limit spirituality to personal development movements or the reappropriation of certain traditions from Asia (Buddhism, Hinduism) or Indigenous Peoples. In particular, the modernity and dissociation between the private and the public, the scientific and critical approach to religious dogma, and a greater tendency towards relativism have contributed to disassociating the spiritual and the religious as two spheres of religiosity (Carrette and King 2004; Huss 2014). And yet most people who attend religious institutions consider themselves “spiritual.” Implicitly or explicitly, spirituality was historically anchored in religious traditions such as transcendence practices and paths, sometimes ecstatic, whether Christian mysticism, the Islamic belief of Sufism, or Jewish Kabbalah (Obadia 2023). Interestingly, the term is less present in non-monotheist traditions, even though these traditions are not without rituals seeking to contact and interact with other levels of reality. If we take a detour via genealogy, we discover that the word “spirituality” stems from the Latin word spiritus, which, in turn, is from the Greek pneumatikos, which denotes “spirit” but also “the breath.” It thus defines the goods, charisms or realities of a world where value is distinctive because they are bathed in the breath of the spirit. In fact, the concept of spirituality is intimately connected to religion. The word “religion” stems from the Latin cultus, which defines a cultural system made up of beliefs, moral codes, rituals, and a specific organized group, whereas spirituality stems from the Latin pietas, which refers to a religion experienced as a personal devotion. In Antiquity, however, it was rare for a person to be spiritual (pietas) without belonging to an organized group and their social and ethical system (cultus). It was not until the twenty-second century that Christianity seized the term to associate it with the more subjective dimension of faith, a dimension that then replaced corporeality and the materiality of beliefs. The harsh criticism of the philosophers of the Enlightenment regarding dogmatic discourse and religion established the rupture and gives the church a new relationship regarding the autonomy of practice and a certain individual reflexivity which, as a result of Kant, distanced established theology (Nérisson 2021). While the term spirituality is not clearly stated, this is where a quest for truth takes root, one founded on experimentation and that developed in opposition to “religious obscurantism.” The German Romanticism of the twentieth century and Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the notion of sentiment rehabilitated personal emotion and experience in the relationship with religion. The thinker, Galen Watts, situates these developments in a cultural continuum that connects the philosophies of Romanticism with transcendentalist and theosophical movements, and the New Thought movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which thus intended to distinguish itself from …