The Emergent Tradition of the New Spirituality

The 1960s were a watershed in the history of contemporary Western religion, witnessing the birth and flourishing of new religious movements, cults and New Age, on the basis of which the paradigm that focussed on the idea of spirituality as a personal research and experimentation path outside the regulation of institutional churches steadily gained ground. This is still the theoretical framework of reference in sociological debate. The appearance of new forms of alternative spirituality coincides with criticism of, and distancing from, past authority and tradition. After a century this wave of spiritual renewal is being consolidated, generating in its turn a new legitimated tradition of its own which, albeit variegated and eclectic, can be seen as a specific, recognizable corpus of values, symbolisms and thematic references expressing specific Weltanschauung and typical cultural patterns. In this paper we aim to construct a profile of this emerging tradition: by defining how the “tradition” category is understood in the context of contemporary spirituality; by showing that this new tradition is really rooted in previous historical-cultural traditions whose repertory of meanings it transforms through a process of appropriation and re-invention; by analysing (based on empirical cases) how traditional religious institutions are culturally influential in new generations’ self-definition of their spiritual identity.