the nonformative elements of religious life

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DOI: 10.1177/0037768609103359 2009 56: 237Social Compass

Matthew WoodSpirituality'' Paradigm

The Nonformative Elements of Religious Life: Questioning the ''Sociology of

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Matthew WOOD

The Nonformative Elements of Religious Life: Questioning the Sociology of Spirituality

Paradigm

Sociological assertions of religious vitality in Euro-American societies have developed a paradigm of spirituality in which, following earlier studies of the New Age, a distinction is drawn between external authority and self-authority. Methodologically and theoretically problematic, this paradigm diverts attention from peoples social practices and interactions, especially in relation to multi-ple religious authorities. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork with an English religious network, and building upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the author considers situations in which multiple authorities tend to relativize each other. Conceptualizing this in terms of nonformativenessthe lack of authorities ability formatively to shape religious identity, habitus, and competition over religious capitalallows a new understanding of individual secularization to emerge that questions assertions of vitality.

Key words: authority Bourdieu New Age secularization social practice spirituality

Les thses sociologiques de la vitalit religieuse dans les socits euro pennes et amricaines ont fait appel un paradigme de la spiritualit qui, dans la conti-nuit des premires tudes sur le New Age, tablit une distinction entre autorit externe et auto-dtermination (self-authority). Problmatique tant dun point de vue mthodologique que thorique, ce paradigme dtourne lattention des pra-tiques et interactions sociales des individus, en particulier lorsquil sagit de leur rapport avec des autorits religieuses multiples. Sappuyant sur des don-nes issues dun terrain ethnographique dans un rseau religieux en Angleterre et sur les travaux de Pierre Bourdieu, lauteur se penche sur des cas o des autorits religieuses multiples tendent se relativiser mutuellement. Concep-tualisant cela en termes de non formativitlincapacit des autorits faon-ner de manire formelle lidentit et lhabitus religieux, ainsi que la comptition pour le capital religieuxpermet une nouvelle comprhension de la scularisa-tion individuelle qui remet en question les thses de la vitalit religieuse.

Mots-cls: autorit Bourdieu New Age pratiques sociales scularisation spiritualit


238 Social Compass 56(2)

1. Religion and spirituality

In recent years, sociologists have increasingly turned to the concept of spirituality in order to interpret religious changes in Euro-American societies. While some (such as Roof, 1999; Wuthnow, 1998) explore the rise of spirituality within reli-gious settings, and others (such as Furseth, 2005; Heelas and Woodhead, 2005) emphasise a split between religious and spiritual settings, all agree that these changes are underpinned by processes of subjectivization and detraditionaliza-tion. For them, spirituality is marked by the according of primary importance to individuals subjective experiences and uniqueness. However, the thesis devel-oped by these scholars does not merely claim that spirituality recognises and affirms subjectivity, but that it involves the enabling of individuals to conduct their lives on the basis of their subjective experiences. It asserts that through individuals exercise of self-reflexivity, their actions are made on the basis of their own authority (even if this occurs by drawing from available authorities and traditions): not only are discourses of self-authority prevalent, but self-authority is the basis of social practice. A sociological distinction between spirituality and (traditional) religion is therefore made on the basis of the relationship between the self and power: religion is characterized by the self being subordinated to external authorities, but in spirituality the self exercises its own authority. Nota-bly, this assertion has received little sociological attention, yet it underpins far-reaching claims about secularization.

To critically assess this paradigm and those claims, this paper draws out key themes from an ethnographic study (199296) of a network of groups and events in the English East Midlands, which included a meditation group, a monthly fair (in which healers, spiritualists, diviners and others ran stalls, gave talks and held workshops), and various channelling and healing workshops. This network, which the majority of sociologists of religion would classify as an example of the New Age or of spirituality characterized by self-authority (Heelas, 1996), I arbitrarily call the Nottinghamshire network, although it had no clear boundaries. Research was also conducted with three groups partially intersect-ing with this network in terms of participants, practices and beliefs: a spiritualist healing circle, an occult study group, and an Anthroposophical group. Attention was therefore intensively focused upon a relatively small number of people in a specific geographical location, in order to enable an understanding of their religious practices and beliefs as these were socially contextualized within their everyday lives. Whilst there is not room in this paper to draw extensively upon this research (for a detailed discussion, see Wood, 2007), its themes will be rep-resented through consideration of one informant typical in terms of his biogra-phy and relationship with authorities.

Michael was a white man in his early 40s who had set up the fair after becoming involved with crystal healing. During one workshop, in which he instructed six women and me in the use of crystals for healing, Michael said that he uses crystals simply because it works. Since he did not know why crystals healed or where their power came from, he said he found it difficult to teach people when and how to use crystals, and that his aim was to show people how to become more intuitive in their own use of crystals. Part of the workshop involved a visualization exercise by which Michael led us to a box in an attic,


Wood: The Nonformative Elements of Religious Life 239

in which we were told we would find an object that could develop our sense of ourselves. His instructions during this workshop were complemented by his behaviour: seated on the floor while the rest of us sat around him on chairs, he slowed his breathing and speech, and told us much about the properties of particular crystals as he handled them. The workshop participants questioned Michael on their specific properties and uses, to which he responded willingly and in detail.

Michael also reported learning to use crystal energy from a spirit guide with whom he had made contact at a spiritualist training circle attended some years previously. Around that time, he had also been irregularly involved with shamanic workshops led by a master shaman, learning techniques of medi-tation and spirit channelling. Through these practices he had become increas-ingly involved in the Nottinghamshire network by attending channelling events, and creating and maintaining contact with spiritualists and healers. In interview, Michael said that although he no longer attended the spiritualist circle and openly expressed wariness of teachers (especially those who were not humble), he had founded the religious fair in order to provide a space where people could make contact with healers and teachers. Indeed, the fair provided him with such opportunities, leading him to learn the practise of Reiki, which he was now inte-grating with his crystal healing.

This short ethnographic example is suggestive for showing that, interwoven with Michaels discourses concerning detachment from authorities and the valu-ing of subjective experiences, were others about reliance upon, and submission to, various social and supernatural authorities. Two points follow from this: it is misleading to isolate certain words or phrases from respondents discourses, and equally misleading to isolate discourses in general from the social practices and interactions in which they occur. It is certainly true that discourses about spiritu-ality and self-authority are prevalent in certain sections of contemporary Euro-American society, but it is incumbent upon sociologists to study the production, contestation and multiple meanings of these discourses in the context of peoples practices and interactions, rather than simply noting their existence and accept-ing them as an objective description of social reality. This social contextualiza-tion is noticeably lacking in studies of spirituality and the New Age.

For example, the qualitative component of Heelas and Woodheads influ-ential Kendal Project receives little mention in their argument about the nature and growth of spirituality: most qualitative data about the holistic milieu are confined to a mere four pages (2005: 269) of phrases from practitioners (or their advertising leaflets), with no information about the wider lives and biog-raphies of these people or the interactions in their groups. The fact that many of these practitioners statements are didacticsuch as a yoga practitioners view that what Im aiming for really is a union between body, mind and spirit; to make people feel more integrated, and an astrologers view that If youve got a sense of all the bits of you and how they can be integrated together, you can actually move through and grow (2005: 26; emphases added)elicits no com-ment from Heelas and Woodhead. Instead, they are only interested in identifying discourses concerning the valuing of subjectivity, and then assuming this entails that individuals act on the basis of their subjective experiences: It is a turn away from life lived in terms of external or objective roles, duties and obligations,



and a turn towards life lived by reference to ones subjective experiences . . . if I decide to heed those subjective states, to listen to what they are telling me, and to act on their prompting . . . then I am turning away from life lived according to external expectations, to life lived according to my own inner experience (2005: 23; emphases added). In line with their wider argument, this statement belies their claim that what they are interested in is merely a shift to subjectivity as a cultural value (2005: 81). Whilst American studies of spirituality are more concerned to explore peoples lives and biographies, even these tend to remain focused at the level of discourses/speech, rather than interactions with others in religious practices, as in the epistemological emphases on narrative and meaning by Roof (1999) and Besecke (2005).

The besetting of the sociology of spirituality by these methodological and epistemological problems is linked to its suffering from the theoretical presup-position that a distinction can be drawn between external authority and self-authority. Significantly, the paradigm operates largely within a Durkheimian framework, usually mediated by Bellahs (Bellah et al., 1996) and Giddens (1991) detraditionalization theses. Durkheims (1984 [1893]) view of humans as composed of both individual and social elements points to his theoretical difficulty in appreciating how each is fully constituted through the other.1 As Lukes (1982) points out, this leads to a situation in which society and the individual are reified, and in which the focus of attention upon the relationship between them leads to the neglect of power-relationships between social groups and between individuals. This is reflected in the sociology of spiritualitys reduc-tionist view that traditions oppose self-authority and dampen subjectivization, such that in order to draw from them without compromising their authority or uniqueness, individuals must maintain reflexive distance.

Consequently, in their analyses sociologists of spirituality have tended to focus upon abstracted individuals and their discourses, and failed to explore how subjective experiences arise through social practices and interactions rather than pre-exist in a pristine state. In contrast to this perspective, longstanding social scientific theories (including those of Mead, Foucault and Bourdieu) have dis-cussed how subjectivity and self-conceptions are constituted through a complex inter-relationship between individuals and their social milieu, which cannot be reduced to either element, or to any clear distinction between them (see Adams, 2007; Wood, 2007: 4165).2

In sum, the sociology of spirituality paradigm simply assumes the analytical value of concepts such as self and tradition, rather than critically question-ing these. This is a curious situation given the widespread sociological attention given to, and raging debates surrounding, interpretations of power and selfhood. A key theorist here is Pierre Bourdieu, whose work moves beyond the conception of power as either something that is held over and exercised against subjects, or something which subjects discover within themselves and attempt to express. Bourdieu (1990) focuses on strategies, rather than choices, which subjects develop in relation to their social contexts, conceptualizing these in terms of fields or are-nas of competition over specific forms of capital. Subjects exist in these fields in specific locations related to the classed nature of their social constitutionthat is, in terms of their bodily and mental dispositions, or habitus. It is from this perspective that the concept of nonformativeness can be developed.



2. Nonformative elements of the religious field

Bourdieus perspective encourages the contextualization of authorities and prac-tices in the field in which they occur: to return to the Nottinghamshire network, for a number of reasons its participants could be seen as acting within the wider religious field. Firstly, they typically presented their life histories in terms of a church upbringing being replaced by involvement in their current activities. So, Michael had been brought up in the Church of England before becoming involved with Transcendental Meditation and spiritualism, and then, after a period of depression, leaving those groups and starting to practise various heal-ing therapies, including crystals and Reiki, and founding the fair. Secondly, they recognized that their practices and beliefs related in part to specific religious tra-ditions or organizations. As already noted, the network partially overlapped with spiritualist, pagan and Anthroposophical groups, but there was also awareness of the negative views of their activities held by many Christians. The couple in whose house the meditation group was held were initially wary in case I was a Christian come to expose the group. Thirdly, in common with the wider field, participants in the network shared an assumption that was a pre-condition for activity in this field, namely the existence and efficacy of supernatural entities and powers (Bourdieu, 1991). For these reasons, it is crucial that practices in the Nottinghamshire network are conceptually located within, not separated from, the religious field.

As Wacquant (1992: 17) explains, a field is a patterned system of objec-tive forces (much in the manner of a magnetic field), a relational configuration endowed with a specific gravity which it imposes on all the objects and agents which enter it. It is here that the peculiarities of the Nottinghamshire network become apparent, for its participants could not be described as having a specific religious habitus or identity, a specific position upon the basis of which they competed with others. What was significant was not that they rejected exter-nal authorities in favour of their own authority, but that they developed rela-tionships with many authorities from a diversity of sources. It has been shown how Michael was involved, often simultaneously, with a variety of practices and groups, thus with teachers and leaders with backgrounds and training in differ-ent traditions. Yet this did not lead to any strong self-identification by him with any of these or with any amalgam of them, even if they helped to legitimize his healing or networking activities, nor to any assertion that his identity was uniquely himself. Sociologists of spirituality have repeatedly drawn attention to Bellah et al.s (1996: 221; emphasis added) report that one respondent in their 1985 study actually named her religion (she calls it her faith) after herself . . . Sheilaism, but they have failed to point out that this was her way of interpret-ing her belief in God: for her, Sheilaism meant just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think He would want us to take care of each other. This statement not only indicates the fallacy of theoretically isolating subjectivity, but also, given its Christian reso-nances, supports the position that such experiences must be situated within the wider religious field. For those in the Nottinghamshire network, networking was used as a strategy to continually bring them into contact with new authorities within the religious field, whilst maintaining longstanding relationships with



others. They were in fact characterized by the extent to which these authorities were unable to shape their habitus, identities or social organizations in a for-mative manner. This multiplicity of authorities and their sources meant that they tended to relativize each other, such that they tended to act in what may be termed a nonformative manner.

Resulting from this nonformativeness was the fact that those in the network were not involved in competing with each other, or with others in the wider field, for religious capital, such as for control over access to mastery in religious practices, or to supernatural entities or powers. This is not to say that teach-ers and practitioners did not disseminate their expertise, as in Michaels crystal healing workshops, but that claims of legitimacy did not involve competition and did not result in structured relationships with others. Peoples interactions with these authorities took place within a context of contemporaneous inter-action with other authorities from diverse sources, such that they did not result in the establishment of followers or disciples, or the establishment of a specific habitus or identity, even if the taught practices were pursued on a regular basis. Indeed, like Michael, such teachers and practitioners did not seek any such con-sequences, being largely uninterested in maintaining contact with those they had instructed.

Those social organizations that did exist in the network were marked by the proliferation and acceptance of authorities from diverse sources. Evidently so in the fair, in the meditation group this was demonstrated by the importance of a lengthy socializing period after the relatively short meditation ritual. Dur-ing this period, participants discussed other religious practices and groups with which they were involved, and openly voiced their own interpretations of, and disagreements with, that ritual, although these were not made on the basis of any underlying common positions and did not lead to calls for the ritual to be altered. This lack of competition in the network was particularly evidenced by a marked lack of rivalry and gossip. At first, I believed this was due to their covert nature, but as fieldwork progressed (and as comparisons were made with overlapping organizations) their absence became clearer.

This is not a situation for which Bourdieus understanding of fields is able to account. The idea that individuals and groups without a concomitant habitus may persist in a field full of authorities seems inimical to his understanding, yet this situation was found repeatedly amongst the groups and people in the net-work.3 Ironically, it is Bourdieus less sophisticated (Verter, 2003) early analysis of religion that perhaps comes closest to recognizing the possibility of such a situation, for he makes reference to magic or sorcery as a dominated position in the structure of relations of symbolic power, that is, in the system of relations between the systems of practices and beliefs belonging to a determined social formation (Bourdieu, 1991 [1971]: 12; emphases added). Contradictorily, how-ever, Bourdieu also asserts that sorcerers remain active participants in the strug-gles of the religious field, since they deliberately contest religious monopoly by juxtaposing the sacred and the profane, and this [c]ompetition converges with the demand of the inferior groups or classes . . . who provide the sorcerers clientele, so as to impose on the church the ritualization of religious practice and the canonization of popular beliefs (1991: 13, 30). Bourdieus theory of practice must therefore be amended, to allow for the possibility of people within



a field who do not play the game of that field in the sense of competing for capital on the basis of a specific location and its associated habitus.4

The argument that certain areas within the religious field are characterized by nonformativeness suggests that the rest of the field is characterized by formative-ness, in which authorities tend to shape peoples and organizations subjective iden-tities and habitus in a formative manner. Or, to avoid unwarranted objectifications, different areas of the religious field are relatively more formative or nonformative: these constitute one dimension of elements across the religious field. Relative formativeness was found within those groups that partially overlapped with the Nottinghamshire network in terms of events, ideas and practices. For example, in the occult study group authorities played three related roles. Firstly, authorities structured legitimation, providing common standards for practice, belief, dialogue and contestation. Participants tended to base many of their practices (and disagree-ments over these, unlike those in the meditation group) upon common positions such as belief in a god and goddess, and in secret knowledge that was seen as having been passed down through Western esoteric traditions. Secondly, authori-ties managed experiences, especially through what may be called control over the means of possession. Ritual celebrations and the passing on of esoteric knowl-edge took place in regularly meeting small groups in which one or two recognized leaders played relatively strong roles. Thirdly, authorities established careers of participation that enabled those involved to be classified, assessed and treated in appropriate ways. There was much talk in this group of certain people being experts or leaders and others being merely learners, leading to structured relationships that were absent within the Nottinghamshire network.

Thus, although there were different authorities in this local pagan scene, based upon various groups and sources of expertise, nevertheless there was amongst participants a relatively strong pagan identity, core beliefs, sense of boundaries, sense of how their practices and rituals should be conducted, and presence of gossip and rivalryas other ethnographic studies of paganism have demonstrated (for example, Magliocco, 2004), and in contrast to the classifica-tion of paganism in terms of self-authority (Heelas, 1996). The same point may be made in response to those sociologists of spirituality who assert that there has been a shift to self-authority amongst some Christians, since, like those who attend pagan groups, churchgoers are also characterized by formative relation-ships to (often multiple) religious authorities. For example, Yip (2002) selec-tively focuses on nonheterosexual Christians references to the self, not on their participation in a variety of Christian groups, but his own evidence on the latter shows that it is formative in producing a strong sense of Christian identity and ritual that provides common ground for contestations regarding sexuality.

This interpretation of the Nottinghamshire network may be defended against Aupers and Houtmans (2006) view of the New Age which argues, alongside Heelas (1996) and Hanegraaff (1996), that New Age spirituality has an ideo-logical coherence, but also, against most scholars of the New Age, that social authorities (such as teachers at New Age centres) play a formative role in socialising people into this ideology of self-spirituality. Whilst this focus is a marked improvement upon the lack of sociological awareness of the existence of social authorities in New Age studies, Aupers and Houtmans key claim that self-spirituality is socially transmitted and reinforced is undermined by the fact



that their research rests primarily upon interviews with such teachers, rather than those they teach. In fact, what evidence they do present about those taughtnamely, interviews with four employees who participated in a Dutch companys courses run by such teachers (in comparison with interviews with three who had not done so)merely indicates an increased awareness of emotions and the breakdown of the modern separation between private and public life, but hardly a shift towards self-spirituality (2006: 216).

Yet is it even the case that the teachers can be described as New Agers, with a relatively strong sense of identity and possession/competition over capi-tal? Firstly, the appellation New Age to these teachers and their centres seems to be primarily Aupers and Houtmans own, rather than an emic marker of identity (see Sutcliffe, 2003). Secondly, these teachers discourses in interview seem far too vague to constitute a specific, coherent religious ideology, instead revolving around ideas about spirituality, the god within, self-reliance and well-being. In the Nottinghamshire network, Michael was typical for his ambiva-lence regarding any identity, worldview or set of beliefs. Although elements of Aupers and Houtmans religious ideology surfaced in his and other participants discourses, there was also considerable recognition and valuing of religious tra-ditions, and of external beings of great authorityas in his spirit guide and channellers Ascended Masters, both of which Michael recognised might arise from a persons higher self, although this was not always the case (and he was not particularly interested in whether or not in fact it was the case). Despite their recognition of the importance of social authorities, Aupers and Houtman there-fore replicate the sociological naivety of which they accuse other scholars of the New Age, by failing to investigate social practices and interactions (and, impor-tantly, discourses as they arise and feature in these), instead basing their view of these social phenomena upon official discourses.

3. Partial individual secularization

A key argument in the sociology of spirituality paradigm is the contestation of the orthodox thesis of secularization: if there is a fundamental shift from religion to spirituality, then the decline of the former may not be applicable to the latter. Hence Heelas and Woodheads (2005: 149) tentative claim for a Euro- American spiritual revolution and Roofs (1999: 294314) assertions of spiritual revi-talization in American religion. Criticisms of this paradigm therefore bear upon debates about secularization; specifically, it is important to explore what is revealed about processes of secularization on the basis of the existence (and perhaps spread) of nonformative regions of the religious field.

In contrast to studies of secularization that tended to focus on the loss of religious institutions public significance, Dobbelaere (2002: 25) argues that attention should also be paid to individual secularization: the loss of religious values, beliefs and practices in individual behaviour. But to date, such attention has primarily focused on documenting these changes at a societal level, such as the decline in rates of individual churchgoing or belief in Christian tenets, rather than in terms of individuals biographical experiences of secularization. This is relevant since study of the Nottinghamshire network showed that the majority



of participants had similar religious biographies to Michaels: participation in Christian churches until early adulthood, sometimes followed by involvement with those religious traditions (such as spiritualism) which lay on the periphery of the network, and subsequent participation within the relatively nonformative network. This experience of individual secularization in terms of de-churching is surely an issue of crucial importance for understanding such peoples current practices, yet it is largely neglected by scholars.

For Heelas and Woodhead (2005: 88110) the key variables associated with participation in the holistic milieu are gender, education, occupation and age: they find that a typical participant is a well educated, middle-aged woman who works in a caring profession, for such people have been primed to the rela-tional subjectivism of the milieu by their gender role and their occupational contact with the wellbeing culture, as well as having the time to pursue such interests. The growth of spirituality is therefore seen as the result of a process of subjectivization rather than secularization. However, this assertion is made on the basis of assumptions about factors common to many in the milieu uncovered by the questionnaire surveys, rather than being demonstrated by investigating peoples lives in context. The only time such a life is presented in their book to demonstrate that involvement with the holistic milieu comes about as a result of these factors, it is a hypothetical example (2005: 103). However, information about the past religiosity of holistic milieu practitioners is available from the Kendal Project questionnaire dataset. This shows that (if non-responses are omit-ted) a significant majority, 74 per cent, used to attend church regularly but no longer do so.5 Previous regular churchgoing is therefore a more significant factor than those factors focused upon by Heelas and Woodhead. This is true even for gender: women constitute four-fifths of people in their milieu (2005: 945), this proportion therefore being drawn from about half of the general population; but the nearly-equally sized proportion (around three-quarters) of previous regular churchgoers in their milieu is drawn from a proportion of the general population far smaller than a half, probably around a third.6

In order to take this argument further, information is needed about the nature of peoples involvement with such practices as found in the Nottinghamshire network. As shown, this is largely absent in sociologies of spirituality due to their lack of contextualization of peoples attitudes and discourses. This paper has argued for an interpretation of peoples involvement in the Nottinghamshire network in terms of nonformativeness: in other words, that such peoples expe-riences of de-socialization from their church upbringing had not resulted in re-socialization into a new sense of spiritual identity or sense of belonging. These peoples experiences should therefore be interpreted as experiences of individual secularization rather than subjectivization. However, the fact that such people remained involved with authorities in the religious field, albeit in a nonformative manner, is significant: unlike the majority of those who become de-churched, their experience had not led to the loss of involvement in the religious field.7 Their process of individual secularization had therefore been curtailed but not reversed: as a result of partial individual secularization, they remained in the field but did not play the game of the field.

On the basis of this interpretation, the growth of contexts such as the Nottinghamshire network is precisely what might be expected to occur given



widespread individual secularization. Furthermore, if women are more likely than men to be involved in relatively nonformative religious contexts, this is best explained by the fact that they are much more likely than men to have been regular churchgoers, and thus to have experienced individual secularization, in the first place (Brown, 2001). With large numbers of individuals becoming de-churched and losing their religious sensibility, some will experience this process to a greater degree than others.8 Thus, it is likely that not only will some indi-viduals remain weakly attached to the church or Christian culture from which they are experiencing secularizationperhaps leading to the sorts of patterns identified by Hervieu-Lger (2000) and Davie (2000)but also that others will become involved with other authorities in the religious field. Both situations will tend to involve nonformative relations with religious authorities, result-ing in little sense of religious identity, belonging or competition over religious capital.

In so far as the above expectations are met, they indicate a stronger defence of the secularization thesis than has hitherto been made. Voas and Bruce (2007: 44) defend an orthodox thesis on the basis that only a minority of those involved with the holistic milieu truly regard such activities as sacred, the growth of this milieu therefore being a possible epiphenomenon of secularisation. But as this paper has argued, an adequate sociological account of such phenomena can only be made on the basis of empirical research into the nature of peoples prac-tices and interactions, especially with social authorities. This points towards a stronger defence of the orthodox thesis, because by demonstrating the relatively nonformative nature of practices and interactions in these regions, it indicates instead that they are a consequence of processes of individual secularization even for those who regard such activities as sacred. Whether small or large, the growth of relatively nonformative networks does not result from spiritual revitalization or subjectivization, but from secularization. Sociologists of reli-gion should therefore not only be wary of amending or rejecting the theory of secularization, but also pay greater attention to the variety of the effects of secu-larization on the religious field. Not only does it affect the scope and nature of religious organizations, but it plays a role in re-structuring the elements across that field: by encouraging the growth of nonformative elements, secularization becomes intrinsically combined with religiousness itself.

NOTES

1. The same is true of Simmels sociology, which represents a subsidiary theoretical underpinning of the sociology of spirituality (as in Flanagan, 2007; Varga, 2007): as Weber recognized, Simmel developed an essentialist conception of the self (Marshall, 1982: 36).

2. Guest moves close to this view by arguing that spirituality is not the preserve of autonomous individuals; it is subject to a broader social distribution of power (2007: 182), but (like Roof and Besecke) remains tied to a (weak) subjectivisation thesis in which individuals are seen as seeking their own meaning and indulging their subjective predilections through organizations and within external constraint[s], thus marking a shift from institutionalized religion to a detraditionalised context of spirituality (2007: 18990).



3. Theories of postmodernity have arisen in part due to recognition of the supposed loss of authority of orthodox traditions or sources of power but, like the sociology of spiritual-ity, tend to focus upon self-authority rather than multiple authorities (as in Lyon, 2000).

4. For a Bourdieuian analysis of another individual from this network, see Wood and Bunn, 2009.

5. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/projects/ieppp/kendal/methods.htm (accessed 4 April 2008): variable 379, 37 non-responses out of 237.

6. Given the aforementioned lack of sociological attention to individuals experiences of secularization, precise data are not readily available for this proportion, although the 2001 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey shows that the figure for Scotland was 38 per cent (Glendinning and Bruce, 2006: 402).

7. Such people are a minority compared to the numbers who have been de-churched in Britain since the 1950s (Voas and Bruce, 2007).

8. Why this should be the case is beyond the scope of this paper.

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Matthew WOOD is Lecturer in Sociology at Queens University Belfast and author of Possession, Power and the New Age: Ambiguities of Authority in Neoliberal Societies (2007, Ashgate). In addition to the topics discussed in this article, he has researched globalization and racialization in London Methodist congregations: see Breaching bleaching: integrating studies of race and ethnicity with the sociology of religion (2006, in James A. Beckford and John Walliss (eds) Theorising Religion: Classical and Contemporary Debates, pp. 23750, Ashgate). ADDRESS: School of Soci-ology, Social Policy and Social Work, Queens University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, United Kingdom. [email: [email protected]]


the nonformative elements of religious life

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