Methods for Exploring Primordial Elements of Youth Spirituality

A paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, San Francisco, California, August 14, 2004.

by Michael Mason, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

Acknowledgements

This paper has been developed within the context of a continuing research project: 

‘The Spirit of Generation Y’ – The Spirituality of Australian Youth and Young People aged 13-29

Research Team

Dr Michael Mason 
(Australian Catholic University, 115 Victoria Pde, Fitzroy, VIC 3065 Australia m.mason@patrick.acu.edu.au  Ph: +61 (3) 9817-9758  Fx: +61 (3) 9816-9805)

Associate Professor Ruth Webber (Australian Catholic University)

Dr Andrew Singleton (Monash University)

Dr Philip Hughes (Christian Research Association)

I wish to thank the other members of the research team for the many fruitful discussions which enrich my understanding of spirituality among youth, and for their human qualities which make working together such a delight.

I also express my gratitude to the informants who willingly gave up their time for the interviews, and to those who provided access to prospective interviewees in schools and youth organisations.

Thanks to Sharon Bond, Philip Hughes and Peter Bentley for conducting the interviews.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the following project sponsors:

Catholic Education Commission of Queensland, Catholic Education Commission of Victoria, 
Catholic Education Commission of Tasmania, Catholic Education Commission of Canberra-Goulburn, Catholic Education Office of Sydney, Catholic Education Office of Parramatta, Broken Bay Diocesan Catholic Schools Office, Catholic Education South Australia, Catholic Education Office of Lismore, Salesians of St John Bosco, Council for Christian Education in Schools, Lutheran Schools Australia, Lutheran Church National Office,  Salvation Army (Southern Territory), Seventh-day Adventist Church (Australia), Victorian Council for Christian Education,  Uniting Education, YMCA.  

© M. Mason 2004

1. Background to the study of primordial spiritual experience 

This paper contends that ‘primordial’ experiences play an important, and often overlooked, part in the spirituality of youth, and describes both a method for uncovering them and some preliminary findings from an ongoing research project on the spirituality of youth.  

By ‘primordial’ we mean ‘basic, original or fundamental’; our special sense of the term is defined in more detail at the beginning of section 3 below, in which this aspect of the method and some preliminary findings of our project will be presented.

But first, to provide the context necessary for the understanding of primordial spirituality, we discuss in section 1 a) our multidisciplinary approach, b) the history of the idea of spirituality and c) the way in which we have defined it.  Next we provide d) a brief overview of religion and spirituality among youth in Australia, and e) of the theoretical orientations and previous research which the project takes into account, before concluding with f) an outline of the scope of the project, and of the sample for the first phase of interviewing.

In the following section 2, the analytical framework developed for application to the interview data is outlined.

a) A multidisciplinary approach

Although the perspective of this paper is predominantly sociological, we contend that spirituality, like religion, can only be studied adequately – even by sociology – by utilising a multidisciplinary approach.  Failure to do so is a large part of the reason why much sociological research on religion peters out at ‘dead ends’.  The following disciplines, which are listed in approximate order of their accessibility to sociologists, make valuable contributions to such a study:

-sociology of knowledge and sociology of religion,

-anthropology (especially linguistics and ritual studies),

-psychology (especially cognitive psychology, social psychology and psychology of religion).  In this discipline, a single work of one individual: Varieties of Religious Experience by American philosopher / psychologist William James, a most gifted and persuasive writer, has had a prodigious, and in some ways limiting, influence on defining the paradigm of religious experience, shaping the conception of religion and the future study of religious experience;

-history of religions (especially the phenomenology of religion tradition),

-philosophy (especially epistemology and aesthetics),

-theology (especially fundamental theology, ecclesiology, theology of liturgy, pastoral theology).

Phenomenology, not so much a discipline as a method which has influenced history of religions, philosophy and the social sciences, is a particularly valuable tool, and one variety of ‘phenomenological sociology’, that of Husserl’s disciple Alfred Schutz, is utilised in our approach.

When the focus is narrowed to the investigation of ‘primordial’ spiritual experiences, resources from some of these disciplines, and especially from phenomenological method, are not merely valuable, but simply indispensable.

b) ‘Spirituality’ – a ‘master idea’ in Western culture

Researching the history of ideas on the development of the concepts of ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality’ and its diverse uses in different fields of knowledge and different languages results in the discovery that most treatments are too narrowly religious – usually Christian.

At its most general, spirituality denotes immateriality, and connotes capacities which were thought to arise from ‘going beyond’ the material realm: particularly the human capacity for self-transcendence.

In their long history, the words ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality’ have had a variety of more specific meanings; sometimes largely overlapping with ‘religion’, but sometimes quite distinct from it.

It may be helpful to distinguish three principal threads of meaning which contribute to ‘spirit’ / ‘spirituality’: the philosophical, the ethical and the religious.  They are very long threads – each two and a half to three thousand years old.  They emerge at the dawn of recorded history, and there are indications of much older pre-historic origins.  They seem to have their roots in very similar reflections on basic human phenomena, but soon begin to develop somewhat independently of each other; they intertwine; sometimes influence each other, but remain distinct.  They parallel each other in many different cultures e.g. Israelite, Greek, Indian, Egyptian.

1) ‘Spirit /spiritual /spirituality’ in the Western philosophical tradition

The Western intellectual tradition is greatly influenced by the ancient Greek development of the  conceptions of soul or spirit (Gk: psyche, Latin: anima) – notably by Plato and Aristotle. 

The Greek philosophers, like thinkers in many cultures throughout the first millennium BCE, conceived of all living things as possessing spirit (pneuma– the breath of life), and as having a soul, or life-principle (psyche) departing at death; intangible; invisible; somehow independent of the materiality of the body.  And being immaterial, hence it was also immortal, surviving the dissolution of the body in death. 

The distinctive characteristic of Greek philosophy was to develop this line of reflection into the discovery of mind. In humans, soul’s independence of matter enabled it to reach beyond (transcend) the material body to grasp reality in the form of ideas – to possess consciousness; and even to see itself, to reflect, to be self-conscious – soul showed itself as mind (nous).  Spirituality in this sense was the basis of the distinctively human attributes: language, laughter, abstract thought, reasoning – all of those characteristics which were thought to elevate human life above that of lower primates. 

For Aristotle, the single word which says all of this best is rational – rationality defined humanity (homo est animal rationale).  Spirituality and rationality henceforth mean the same thing for a very long period in philosophy.

These Greek conceptions spread throughout the Hellenistic world.  When Western civilisation collapsed under the impact of the barbarian invasions, parts of the Greek philosophical heritage survived in the Platonic and Neo-Platonic writings of the Christian Fathers.  The distinctive contribution of Aristotle was lost to sight for some centuries, but rediscovered in the High Middle Ages in Arabic translations from the original Greek, in the work of Islamic philosophers Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi, Abu 'Ali al-Husayn Ibn Sina and Abu al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd, who were well known in the universities of medieval Europe under the Latinised forms of their names, Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes.  The rediscovery of Greek philosophy and art climaxed in the Renaissance.

The eighteenth century Enlightenment was later to reshape the ideal of Reason much more narrowly into the mould of abstract conceptuality and discursive reasoning; in reaction, the Romantic Revolution in philosophy, literature and art attempted to regain something of the breadth of the Renaissance vision of the human, integrating reason with affect and imagination.  ‘Spirituality’ takes on a special meaning from this period, which in English, still has echoes today: spirituality is often used of a person’s sensitivity to beauty, to the aesthetic dimension; similarly, one can speak of the spirituality of a work of art. 

The period from Kant to Hegel in German philosophy represents the apogee of the philosophy of Spirit; but the idea lives on in phenomenology and other variants of the enduring idealist tradition. 

2) The development of the ethical ideal in Western and Eastern civilisations

About 2500 years ago, during the first millennium BCE, human cultural evolution seems to have entered a new phase, marked by a radical change which spread through, or developed independently in, most ancient civilisations.  It is often referred to as ‘ethical monotheism’, since a strong advance in the development of the ethical sense of life was coupled, in many cases, with a development from polytheism to monotheism.  Although spirituality has later come to mean more than the reflective life, or the ethical life, the development of ethics marks an important stage on the path: it posits an interior dimension to human life, one in which the individual is confronted by standards for living which are ‘transcendent’ – which come from sources above and beyond the individual human level, and which are capable of making unconditional demands on the person.

In ancient Israel during this period, a radical monotheism begins to take shape, in marked contrast to the polytheistic fertility cults of neighbouring peoples.  And in this context, the author of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Torah, proclaims that it is the duty of Israel to love the Lord their God, and their neighbours as themselves; that this is more important than sacrifices offered at the altar.  In succeeding centuries the major and minor ‘ethical prophets’ of Israel preached increasingly strict and explicit standards of justice by which all were bound.

Socrates (d. 399 BCE), in Plato’s account, believed that reflecting on life so as to pursue goodness was a command of God, and at his trial, declared that he could never desist from ‘examining’ his own and others’ lives, since ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ (Plato 1961 pp. 71-2).[1]  His courageous insistence on this dimension of ethical reflection and questioning in a society whose religion was still at a more primitive, amoral stage, was so unwelcome as to cost him his life – not an uncommon fate of ‘ethical prophets’.

In India, the Upanishads (e.g. the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad c. 650 BCE) showed a developing ethical consciousness; the Hindu sages taught that atman (the human spirit) is identified with Brahman (God) ‘tat tvam asi’ [2] (Beck n.d.).

The teachings of Gautama Siddhartha (Buddha 563-483 B.C.E.) draw sharply away from the worldliness of the Vedas; fulfilment of the ethical demands of the Noble Eightfold Path is the sole way of escape from the wheel of death and rebirth, fuelled by desire, which is the cause of all human suffering.  Although Buddhism was later to become extinct in the native land of the Buddha, his teachings remain to this day extremely influential in China and South-East Asia.

Later developments in Hinduism – for example, the Yoga Sutras of Pathanjali (oral traditions written down between 200 BCE and 50 CE) – show a similar ethical emphasis; the first requirement on the path of Yoga is Yama—moral duty, right acting (Roszak 1975, p. 219) . 

Islam, the most uncompromising of all the monotheistic religions, appears on the world scene only centuries later (Muhammad 570-632 CE).  It draws partly on Biblical sources, and presents in the Koran and the prescriptions of shariat (religious civil law in the Islamic theocracy) a complete ethical program for both the individual and society. 

3) ‘Spirit / spiritual /spirituality’ acquires an even more transcendent meaning in Israel and Christianity

The philosophical sense of pneuma takes on a properly religious dimension of meaning, even more transcendent than ethical reflection, in the New Testament, in Neo-Platonic philosophy, in subsequent Christian patristic writing and in Christian and Gnostic theologies. 

(a) Scriptural roots of ‘spirit /spiritual’

--OT: Heb. ruah ; shows a breadth of meaning parallel to that of Gk. pneuma.  Initially breath, wind; breath of the mouth; breath of life; spirit, animation, agitation, temper, disposition, vivacity, vigour, courage; spirit of the living being in men and animals; departing at death; spirit of God as inspiring ecstatic state of prophecy, imparting energy, resting on the Messianic king;

ruah elohim (the spirit of the Lord); God’s creative power – hovering over the waters in Gn.1.[3]  

--NT: especially in the epistles of the apostle Paul: Gk. pneuma spirit, and a new word which Paul coins:  pneumatikos – spiritual, referring to the person under the influence of the divine Spirit (also applied to charisms, blessings, hymns, conduct).  ‘Spiritual’ in this sense is contrasted by Paul with two other modes of being: psychikos, pertaining to the human soul, indicating what belongs to the merely natural level of human being, to an earthly, ‘secular’ world (1 Cor 2:14-15) and, at the opposite extreme from the Spiritual, sarx , sarkikos: the flesh, the fleshly person (‘flesh’ here denoting not the body, but the principle of finitude, limitation, sinfulness, opposition to God).[4] 

(b) ‘Spirituality’

(1) Earliest uses in English: a) ‘the spirituality’ vs. ‘the temporality’ – the clergy; the body of spiritual / ecclesiastical persons (1441 Pol Poems, Songs); also, ecclesiastical property or revenue held in return for spiritual services; b) the quality or condition of being spiritual; attachment to things of the spirit as opposed to material / worldly things (1500 Dunbar).[5]

(2) Despite the Reformation’s rejection of monasticism, the teaching of the Reformers paid great attention to piety, to the manner of living the gospel, and movements like Pietism and Methodism have at their core highly developed ‘spiritualities’.

(3) Influenced by the ‘turn to the subject’ in philosophy’s modern period from the seventeenth century, spirituality became increasingly the interior dimension of religion’s public, external and visible world of doctrine, ethics, ritual and community.

(4) From the seventeenth century, especially in France, spiritualité /spirituality refers to a person’s manner of living the Christian life and seeking ‘Christian perfection’, and particularly to their mode of private prayer – to the intense cultivation of religious self-consciousness.  Particularly in the religious orders, there developed ‘styles’ or schools of spirituality: Benedictine, Ignatian, Carmelite, Alphonsian.  Each of these centred on a particular way of praying, but encompassed an entire spiritual lifestyle, applicable not only to the monks and nuns of the orders, but gradually, adopted also by small numbers of laity for whom piety was a primary concern.  Spirituality was their personal, affective style of living the Christian life[6].

(5) In the late twentieth century, from an almost exclusively Christian, (and mostly Catholic) usage, ‘spirituality’ expanded to embrace the world: of the twenty-five volumes of World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, (Cousins 1985) only three volumes were devoted to Christianity.

Nowadays, the term ‘spirituality’ is used by young people to refer to beliefs, practices or lifestyles drawing on exotic or ‘New Age’ sources (such as Asian martial arts, Goddess worship or neo-paganism).  Or spirituality may consist of a mix of themes from traditional and non-traditional sources.  Some who show no interest in traditional religion seem nonetheless to be considerably influenced by these alternative spiritualities; others interpret their lives in completely secular ways.

In summary: through the centuries of Christianity, ‘spirituality’ comes to imply much more than ‘humanity’ – it is the attraction to the things of the Spirit rather than to earthly things, and, by the 17^th century, has come to mean the conscious living of a Christian way of life – especially its personal, interior dimension, in contrast to public, external, visible religious rituals and institutions.  But now in late modernity, spirituality, while retaining the sense of a person’s interior life, begins to be understood as no longer necessarily linked to institutional religion; sometimes even standing in opposition to it.

Only against the background of the development of the main strands of meaning in the term ‘spirituality’ can we approach the task of defining what it is to mean in our research project.

c) Defining ‘spirituality’

(1) Ways of defining spirituality

The article ‘Preparing spirituality for citizenship’ by Jacqueline Watson (2003) illustrates a courageous but confused approach to definition.  She sets out to take Wittgenstein’s advice, and derive the meaning of spirituality from its use – in this case, in a quite small set of journal articles.  She does not recognise that even within this limited range, the word is used in some quite different and incompatible senses.  Watson tries nonetheless to arrive at a sort of general, all-embracing definition.              

As if we realised that from usage, ‘blue’ sometimes means a colour; sometimes ‘down or depressed’, sometimes ‘vulgar, rude, obscene’ as in ‘blue jokes’; and we ended up with a definition of ‘blue in general’ as ‘coloured depressed vulgarity’! 

Hay and Nye (1998), cited by Watson (2003 p.12), fall into this mistake when they locate spirituality as ‘delicacy of awareness’, ‘musical or poetic sensitivity’ at one end of the scale and spirituality as ‘mystical experience’ at the other.  They are quite correct in identifying both of these as among the shades of meaning attached to the word, but these two meanings are not variants of some basic form, but equivocal – quite different from each other, having arisen in different historical circumstances, in response to different developments, as our condensed history of the word shows.  Thus Hay and Nye force two different meanings of spirituality (the philosophical-aesthetic and the religious) on to the same scale.

The confusion rampant in the Watson paper is a good argument for stipulative definitions over lexical definitions in research.  Lexical definitions classify usage; stipulative definitions declare that in using the term ‘spirituality’, the writer intends the meaning ‘X’ and not other usages such as ‘Y’ and ‘Z’.  It is sometimes said that definitions are ‘arbitrary’; this is true in the sense that one can draw definitional boundaries wherever one chooses, but not in the sense that there is no reasoned basis for the choice.  Including some meanings and excluding others must be supported by appropriate arguments.

A stipulative definition should have a strong connection with at least one family of meanings in usage; otherwise, we are inventing pure technical jargon, which people will find very difficult to interpret, because it strays far from common usage.

So we are not obliged to include in our definition everything that fits into the idea of ‘spirituality’ in its philosophical sense of ‘having a mind, a rational soul, a psyche, consciousness, capable of reflection on itself’, nor in the aesthetic sense of ‘delicacy of awareness, sensitive receptivity to art’.  These senses certainly occur in the history of the word’s usage, but we may wish legitimately to emphasise in our research some more specific, more closely defined meanings.

The other great weakness in the Hay and Nye approach (on which we comment because Watson seems so taken with it) is the idea that spirituality, ‘like all awareness,  is a biologically inbuilt constituent of what it is to be human’ (p. 14).  If ‘spiritual awareness’ were a feature of our biology, everyone would be spiritually aware all the time!  But ideas are not innate!  Awareness is an activity, not a biological structure.

We are not born with a set of visions / visual experiences, but with eyes, which have the capacity for sight.  If anything in the line of spirituality is ‘biologically inbuilt’, it can only be the organic basis of the capacity for awareness: e.g. the development of a brain and nervous system of a certain size and complexity of organisation, with certain capabilities.  The research tradition stemming from Alister Hardy sees spiritual awareness as probably universal in humans.  Such an idea presents no problem; but the zoologist in Hay leads him to postulate too hastily an organic basis for this universality.  The notion of awareness / consciousness as ‘biologically inbuilt’ makes no sense, but is not the only foundation for a universal experience.

Secondly, awareness, or consciousness, is always awareness of something (or as phenomenology says, consciousness is intentional).  For Hay, the aim of spiritual development is ‘to be aware of one’s awareness, and to reflect on this experience’.  This amounts to awareness of awareness of awareness, and Hay does not want to ‘emphasise the religious or cultural forms of spirituality’ (which is what people are spiritually aware of)!  Such a reflective process is possible, but it is the profoundest and most subtle of philosophical reflections – in its extreme abstractness,[7] it is light-years from the kind of spiritual awareness teachers strive to develop in children.

(2) Our definition of spirituality.

We are in no doubt as to our field of interest: when high proportions of the population were active in Christian religious institutions, spirituality was the personal dimension of religious faith which shaped people’s understanding and action.  Now that such active involvement has greatly declined, especially among young people, does religion continue to influence their spirituality?  Are there spiritualities of other kinds?  And if not, what has taken their place in providing life’s meaning and shaping the way it is lived?  Or in other words, what are the cultural resources utilised by Generation Y as interpretive structures for their life-journeys and life-stories?

For our purposes, we define spirituality as a conscious way of life based on a transcendent referent. Our definition is not ‘lexical’ – it does not claim to sum up the way everyone uses the word; nor is it essential – aiming to establish definitively what spirituality is. Rather, it is stipulative – it states what the term spirituality shall mean in our project.

As we use it,  ‘way of life’ means here a worldview, an ethos and a set of practices. 

My worldview is a way of understanding ‘my’ world and my place in that world, and provides a frame of reference within which I can assign meaning to my experiences.

Ethos is elegantly defined by Geertz as ‘the tone, character and quality of life; its moral and aesthetic style and mood’ (1973, p. 89). My ethos includes my feelings about myself, others, my world; it is the source of my values, practices and commitments.

A set of practices is also implied in the notion of a ‘way of life’: they are the means by which it is enacted, by which it influences or shapes the lived reality.  They may be ritual or non-ritual, collective or private; e.g. reading, reflection, meditation, prayer, music, dance, drama.  Most spiritualities give a prominent place to “doing forms”, as it is called in martial arts: repeating symbolic actions: as in Yoga, Tai Chi, the Japanese Tea Ceremony, and those forms of worship called ‘liturgical’.  Spiritual practices may extend to acts of altruism or benevolence towards others; our study pays particular attention to the ‘social consequences’ of spirituality: ways in which social interaction is shaped by spiritual beliefs – either consciously or without deliberation.

‘Transcendent’ means here a reality (in the phenomenological, subjective sense) which is beyond the individual, either in the sense of something supernatural / religious / otherworldly, or in the sense of an ethical ideal towards which a person strives to shape their conduct – even when this ideal has no explicit religious foundation. At its simplest, it may be just the endeavour to live a decent life, or to emulate an admired person.  Even in the avowed secularist, who might well explicitly reject the commonsense notions of ‘spirit’, ‘spiritual’, ‘spirituality’, or even go further to reject the idea that conduct should be governed any ethical rule originating outside the individual, we postulate a ‘spirituality’ which contains an element of transcendence: everyone’s socialisation into the worldview of his or her culture represents an elementary transcending of their biological nature, giving them access to a standpoint beyond the self from which they acquire a scheme of reference for assigning meaning to individual experiences, and a sense of a continuous self with a past, present and future which can be integrated into the unity of a biography  (Luckmann 1967 pp.  43-49).[8]  In sum, a system of reference which locates the individual within a wider, more inclusive context involves transcendence, at least in an elementary sense.

Finally, in defining spirituality as a conscious way of life, we postulate, following Socrates, an element of  reflectiveness.  However the degree of reflectiveness varies greatly with age, or rather maturity, and should be seen as an important developmental aspect of spirituality.

Obviously, then, spirituality, in our definition, will include a way of life, and a way of making sense of life, which is based on a traditional world religion, or on an ‘alternative’ religion (whether ancient or new); it may also take the ‘post-traditional’ form (to be discussed in more detail below) – which does not draw on any one source, but eclectically blends traditional, alternative and secular elements.

Spirituality may also take the form of a way of life which seeks to follow an ideal which is not religious, supernatural or otherworldly – for example: to live a good life, or virtuous life. Or it may be a way of life modelled on that of an exemplary person, whether real or fictitious, perhaps simply a parent, relative or teacher. Even if they are not religious, ethical ideals are transcendent in the sense that they call on the individual to aspire to a manner of being and acting which is beyond or higher than his or her present level of existence.

In our proposed definition we do not intend to include every possible meaning of spirituality:

• spirituality does not include all human activity; this sets a boundary so broad as to be useless for circumscribing a research project; 

• spirituality does not include all ‘relational consciousness’ (as it does for Hay and Nye, 1998) even though this is a fundamental human phenomenon; 

• again, this includes too much; the definition does not focus our project on a manageable area; 

• aesthetic awareness is not sufficient to satisfy our definition; this is too narrow a focus; 

• spirituality does not include a mere idea with which a person may toy idly, without much understanding of it, without any specific associated practice, without any impact on the person’s worldview or lifestyle – e.g. someone says they believe in reincarnation, but knows only that it means being reborn on earth again after death, and this knowledge does not affect their actions or practices; in our definition, reincarnation would not be a part of that person’s spirituality. The same is true of mere opinions on religious issues.   

• according to many authors, the distinctive characteristic of the spirituality of the ‘post-traditional’ or ‘postmodern’ era is that it is a bricolage of many themes, not necessarily organised by any unifying principle.  Now, it is certainly the case that the ‘spiritual environment’ is highly pluralistic.  Every variety of ‘spirituality’ seems to be on display in the media, on the Internet.  This variety is in turn reflected in the perceptions of individuals as in a mirror.  Research which succeeded in harvesting only these superficial perceptions could perhaps mistake this pot-pourri for the subjects’ own spirituality, and conclude that its variety and disorganisation characterise the era -- an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.  Without claiming that this conception of ‘postmodern spirituality’ is purely a product of such a mistake, we should be slow to postulate it as general, until we have explored beyond surface reflections of the environment, perceived by the individual and reported to us, to the level of what is really owned and acted on by the individual.   

d)  Religion and spirituality amongst young people in contemporary Australia

In contemporary Australia only a very small proportion of the youth population has anything to do with organised religion. There has been a growth of interest in alternative forms of spirituality, but the percentage of the population identifying with a major religion has fallen from 89 per cent in 1961 to 72 per cent in 2001.  The percentage of the Australian population attending religious services at least monthly almost halved from about 39 per cent in 1960 (Mol 1985, p. 58) to 20 per cent in 1998 (Bellamy et al. 2000, p. 5).  Only 14 per cent of all Australians in there twenties attend religious services at least once a month compared with 35 per cent of people seventy years of age or older.  Attendance has declined most sharply in the mainstream, previously well-subscribed Christian denominations.  While 27 per cent of those 70 years or older attend Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox or Uniting Churches, only 7 per cent of people in their twenties attend those denominations. 

Approximately the same number of people in their twenties attending Anglican, Uniting and Orthodox churches combined are attending Pentecostal churches.  While mainstream churches are attracting comparatively few younger people, several of the smaller denominations such as Pentecostals, have grown in numbers and are maintaining high attendance rates (Hughes 2001).

Despite their low level of involvement in organised religion, or perhaps because of it, many young people appear to take a positive view of ‘spirituality’.  Whereas the word used to refer to the cultivation of personal religiosity based on the religious tradition of a community (especially Christian), it seems possible that for many in contemporary society spirituality is not so often based in, or derived from, one particular tradition or source; rather the individual assembles items from a variety of sources available in the ‘spiritual marketplace’ (Roof 1999) into a loose collage (Bibby 1993; Hughes et al. 1995; Bruce 1999).  Instead of providing a spiritual ‘home’, locating one’s identity in a particular community, contemporary spirituality may be experienced as a journey - a ‘spiritual quest’ (Batson et al. 1993; Wuthnow 1998).

Giddens (1994) argues that since World War Two a ‘post-traditional social order’ has emerged in western societies, whereby tradition, including religious tradition, is increasingly open to ‘interrogation or discourse’.  No longer aligning themselves with any particular institution, tradition, or meaning-making system, individuals make meaning by drawing on an ever-increasing range of resources.  This has implications for both religion and spirituality.  As religious themes have begun to become available ‘unbundled’ from particular traditions and communities, ‘spirituality’ has come to be understood by many as more radically individual; self-constructed rather than accepted; free to borrow from various traditions, but separable from religion, and at times reacting against it – an alternative to religion (Marler & Hadaway 2002).

In our interviews, the term ‘spirituality’ is used by young people to refer to beliefs, practices or lifestyles drawing on exotic or ‘New Age’ sources (such as Asian martial arts, Goddess worship or neo-paganism).  Or spirituality may consist of a mix of themes from traditional and non-traditional sources.  Some who show no interest in traditional religion seem nonetheless to be considerably influenced by these alternative spiritualities; others interpret their lives in completely secular ways.

In summary: through the centuries of Christianity, ‘spirituality’ comes to imply much more than ‘humanity’ – it is the attraction to the things of the Spirit rather than to earthly things, and, by the 17^th century, has come to mean the conscious living of a Christian way of life – especially its personal, interior dimension, in contrast to public, external, visible religious rituals and institutions.  But now in late modernity, spirituality, while retaining the sense of a person’s interior life, begins to be understood as no longer necessarily linked to institutional religion; sometimes even standing in opposition to it.

e) Theory and Research on religion / spirituality

1) Theories of spirituality as a commodity chosen in an enlarged market:

In the well-known theories of Batson, Schoenrade & Ventis (1993), Wuthnow (1998, 1999), Roof (1999) and Davie (1994) youth spirituality is pictured as follows: in the ‘post-traditional’ situation, young people are on a Quest for meaning; their spirituality is one of ‘Journey, rather than Home’; they select from a ‘market-place’ of spiritualities and put together their own eclectic combination independent of institutions -- they ‘believe without belonging’.  But few of these theories take account of continental philosophies of post-modernism which argue that an even more radical change has taken place in the relation of the individual to society.

2) Theories that postulate a radically changed relationship between individual and society in the postmodern world, leading to a spirituality of alienation:

In traditional sociological theory, the individual is first initiated into the social world (‘primary socialisation’) in a once-and-for-all manner in early childhood; and later will undergo various kinds of ‘secondary socialisation’ as preparation for specific social and occupational roles.  Through these roles the individual is inserted into the network of social institutions which will organise and structure a considerable proportion of his or her life. 

Continental theories of postmodernity postulate a very different relationship between individual and society.  According to Alain Touraine, we are seeing “the end of the definition of the human being as a social being, defined by his or her place in society which determines his or her behaviour and actions”.  Instead, the combination of the “strategic definition of social action that is not oriented by social norms” and “the defence, by all social actors, or their cultural and psychological specificity . . . can be found within the individual, and no longer in social institutions or universalistic principles’ (1998, 177).  This theme of the changed social location of the individual in postmodernity, and the new intensity of focus, is a common feature across the whole range of theories.

“Modern society exists in its activity of ‘individualizing’ (Bauman 2000, 45).  Individualization is a fate, not a choice (46).  It consists in transforming human identity from a given into a task, and giving the actor responsibility for that task and for its consequences. 

“Freedom was desired as an absence of obtrusive and insidious constraints and limits.  Our ancestors thought of freedom as a state in which one is not told what to do and not forced to do what one would rather not do. . . . The price . . . is insecurity (or, rather Unsicherheit: a much more complex discomfort, which includes uncertainty and unsafety alongside insecurity) . . .”(Bauman 2001a, 44). 

Pierre Bourdieu reflects on the conditions necessary for a person to be capable of hoping for social transformation.  “To have a well thought-out intention to transform the present, a modicum of hold on the present is needed.  But people find that none of the most important levers and safeguards of their current situation come under their control e.g. in the case of loss of employment because of recession in the economy.  Any social position is in the longer run precarious.  Fear is diffused and ambient;  it haunts consciousness and the subconscious.  It renders all futures uncertain’ (Bourdieu 1998, 97).

How is unity is maintained in a differentiated society?  “Until recently, . . . a normative answer to this question was sought – as if participation in society led to the assumption of a minimum of obligation.  . . . increasing differentiation leads to an increasing generalization of . . . norms and values . . . their directive value decreases when the complexity of society increases” (Luhmann 1990, 422-23).  “The cosmologically/religiously founded continuum of meaning breaks down, and  . . . religion is reduced to one social function among others and condemned to a kind of faithless belief” (427).  Ethical and political discourse is not now framed around the concept of the ‘just society’ but around ‘individual rights’.  Margaret Thatcher declared: ‘There is no such thing as society’. 

As de Tocqueville long ago suspected, setting people free may make them indifferent. The individual is the citizen’s worst enemy, suggested de Tocqueville.  The individual tends to be lukewarm, sceptical or wary of the ‘common good’, of the ‘good society’ or ‘just society’.  What is the sense of common interests unless they let each individual satisfy his or her own?  The only two useful things ‘public power’ can do is to observe ‘human rights’, that is, to let everyone go his or her own way, and to enable everyone to do this in peace – by guarding the safety of a person’s body and possessions. (Bauman 2001b, 49)

Touraine’s interpretation, taken literally, would seem to make it impossible to speak of ‘society’ any longer; and attempts to formulate social policy would make no sense. 

Theories of postmodernism may nonetheless serve a useful purpose: as a dramatic metaphor for the changed sense of self, and the pervasive alienation from society, characteristic of late modernity, especially among youth.  No interpretation of their situation, or policy recommendations for supporting among them a sense of belonging, can afford to ignore these factors, to which postmodernist theory draws attention.

However, that extraordinarily prescient observer, de Tocqueville, quoted above, long ago offered an alternative interpretation, applicable to the late modern situation, but harmonising with classical social theory.  He presaged today’s symptoms of social dysfunction as the consequences of  (extreme) individualism, and foresaw clearly the threat it poses to the social fabric.  The individual pursuing only personal or family interests does not support the citizen’s concerns.  Individualism is not moved to act for the common good, or for social justice, but instead sees the only function of the State as to protect the safety of individuals and their possessions (de Tocqueville 1839/1997).

In summary, theories that define contemporary Western society as having moved into a decisively new ‘postmodern’ phase tend to define the isolation of the individual and the eclipse of community as socially determined and irreversible.  De Tocqueville, without postulating any such seismic shift in social relations, attributed similar effects to (extreme) individualism.  This may be the more parsimonious explanation; but both approaches serve to warn us that today’s young people are growing up in a situation in which the forging of basic social relationships is far more difficult than it was half a century ago.  The present project seeks to shape its research questions and analysis against this background of theoretical understanding.

The search for personal meaning; the construction of the life-story:

Young people make sense of their lives, identities and experiences through the stories they tell about themselves, their values and experiences.  Telling stories enables individuals to make sense of  their experiences, to order events in a coherent fashion, relate events to other events, attribute causality and create a sense of biographical continuity for themselves.

The cultural stock-in-hand on which individuals can draw for their stories ranges from complex narratives which embody entire worldviews down to component ideas, values and symbols, expressed in language, music, clothing, leisure activities, whole ‘lifestyles’.  Moreover, people in different social settings access and adapt these cultural materials in different, socially-structured ways, and the kind of picture or story that results has important consequences both for the individual and for the society.

Bauman, describing how people construct life-narratives in an increasingly individualized society, suggests that “the point of the utmost sociological relevance is  . . . where the boundary between one’s doings and the conditions under which one acted (and, by definition, could not have acted otherwise) is drawn in the course of the narrative. . . . Lives lived and lives told are closely interconnected.  What is taken for granted as an unchangeable condition in the telling, is likely to be accepted as one in the living. One lives one’s life as a story yet to be told, but the way the story hoping to be told is to be woven decides the technique by which the yarn of life is spun.” (2001, 7-8).  As mentioned above, Giddens (1994) argues that now, in Western societies, individual biographies are formed ‘reflexively’, as individuals make meaning by drawing on an ever-increasing range of resources.

Sociological theory, from the time of the discipline’s founders, identified religion as intimately involved in the process of socialisation (Durkheim, 1912/1961).   Religion authoritatively defines the relationship of the individual and the society: it is the zone of culture containing the “master-narrative” which encodes the culture’s worldview; it provides the language for expressing the sacred or transcendent, the rituals and other practices for maintaining its place in daily life.  Religion also comprises an ethos—a detailed value system for individual and social life, given religious legitimation in the worldview,  ranging from general principles to detailed practical norms.  Religion lays the foundation for community life (Putnam, 2000, p.66).

Spirituality, in the traditional context, largely overlapped with religion. In contemporary society, where religious themes have begun to become available 'unbundled' from particular traditions and communities, 'spirituality' has come to be quite widely understood in a much more individualistic mode: self-constructed rather than simply accepted from one’s religious tradition; free to borrow from various traditions, but separable from religion, and at times reacting against it - an alternative to religion (Marler & Hadaway 2002, Fuller 2001).   It becomes possible for young people to have a very low level of involvement in organised religion, but still to view spirituality positively.

There are several alternative explanations for the changes in participation in institutional religion, especially among those in their late teens and twenties.  Some sociologists note the development of consumerist attitudes to religion: Luckmann and secularisation theorists suggest that religion, still intimately entwined with the formation of personal identity, is now restricted to the private sphere, and that its dominant themes are personal autonomy, self-development and self-realisation. Instead of embracing the worldview and ethos of one particular tradition and religious community, the individual assembles items from a variety of sources available in the 'spiritual marketplace' (Roof, 1999) into a loose collage (Bibby, 1993, Hughes et al., 1995; Bruce, 1999).  For many, contemporary spirituality is experienced and understood as an evolving story or journey - a 'spiritual quest' rather than the location of one's identity in a particular community (Batson et al., 1993; Wuthnow, 1998).

Religion and spirituality are significant in relation to citizenship, we believe, for reasons that echo Weber’s argument against Marx:  no doubt the decline in adherence to institutionalised religious communities and the growth of individualistic spiritualities is mostly a reflection of  the changed social location of the individual in post-traditional society; but culture is not always the dependent variable vis-à-vis economic and social change: where spirituality remains attached to a religious community, there is a basis for resistance to individualising trends.  “Religious institutions tend to promote norms of cooperation and a worldview that encourages a focus on problems lying outside the self” (Crystal & DeBell, 1998).

f) ‘The Spirit of Generation Y’ – The Spirituality of Australian Youth and Young People aged 13-29.

This is an ongoing three-year research project (Singleton, Mason & Webber 2004).[9]  The project began in 2002 with a pilot study, consisting of 20 lengthy interviews, and was used to refine our definition of spirituality, our interview schedule, and an initial analytical framework.. It was followed in 2003-2004 by Phase 1 of the main project, recently completed, which consisted of 40-minute, in-depth, face-to-face interviews with 64 teenagers and young adults from widely varying backgrounds.  Phase 2, now commencing, comprises a telephone survey of a national random sample of about 1100 teenagers and young adults; in Phase 3, another 70 qualitative interviews will be conducted – some of them with the same subjects who were interviewed in Phase 1.

The purpose of the first phase was to investigate in detail the variety of spiritualities to be found in our target age-group. As in all qualitative research, it was not our aim to profile the population, or to describe typical cases, but to explore in depth a selection of cases chosen to manifest the range and variations of spirituality.

Target sample. The sample was designed to include a diverse range of young people, including private and public school students, tertiary students, those in the workforce, the unemployed and those from both high and low socio-economic backgrounds. We sought to have equal numbers of male and female informants, and an appropriate mix of rural and urban. The sampling was strategic: we sought to interview a number of people from each cohort so as to enable us to get a sense of the types of spiritualties one might find amongst these different groups.

Achieved sample. In the core project, a total of 64 interviews were conducted with young people aged 13–29. Approximately half were female and half male.