Between Religion and Spirituality: New Perspectives in the Italian Religious Landscape

The concept of “spirituality” that has been used to describe changing beliefs in an increasingly globalized and pluralistic world can be useful also in describing the Italian religious panorama. The peculiarity of the Italian case, characterized by a comparative monopoly on part of the Catholic religion and by a connotation of “cultural belonging” to Catholicism, highlights how the category of spirituality cannot be employed, as some authors do, in opposition to the concept of religion. Starting from research data on a sample of 2150 Italians, the article offers a typology describing the different relationships between the religious dimension and the spiritual dimension: beside the agnostic-atheists and cultural-ethnic religiosity, profiles of critical spirituality, “unbalanced” religiosity, and “integrated” religiosity are featured. The categories of religion and spirituality, therefore, do not annul each other, but each plays an important role in the definition of the Italian contemporary religious panorama in the various age, gender, cultural capital, and environmental contexts in which believers live.