A Cultural-Sociological Approach to the Study of Religion

In unpacking our thesis in more detail, we rely upon a cultural-sociological approach that acknowledges the marked differences between distinct NRMs, yet focuses on the (counter)cultural logic that has shaped them and that defines their cultural commonality (see Bellah & Glock, Reference Bellah and Glock1976; Wuthnow, Reference Wuthnow1976, Reference Wuthnow1998; Tipton, Reference Tipton1982). In doing so, we abide by a number of methodological commitments.

First of all, we eschew moral evaluations of the “goodness” or “badness” of NRMs. As a result of their “deviance” relative to established religions and (as we will show) their shared countercultural, Romantic spirit – the existence of NRMs has long raised “moral panics” (Cohen, Reference Cohen1972; Goode & Ben-Yehuda, Reference Goode and Ben-Yehuda1994; Richardson & Introvigne, Reference Richardson, Introvigne and Bromley2007). A moral panic occurs when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests” (Cohen, Reference Cohen1972: 1). Irrespective of their particular beliefs or practices, NRMs have been widely perceived as threats, especially among more mainstream religious communities. Such moral panics have been commonly expressed in fears about brainwashing innocent children, sexual predations by charismatic leaders, drug abuse, and extreme violence. In many cases such moral concerns were well-founded. Indeed, some horrific events associated with NRMs continue to loom large in public memory. Think, for instance, of the 1978 murders and suicides of the members of Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, or the suicides by Heaven’s Gate members in 1997. Such extreme events have led some scholars to express their moral disapproval of NRMs in general.

By contrast, in this Element we are not interested in the question of whether NRMs are good or bad. From our cultural-sociological stance we study their religiosity instead as cultural meaning, particularly as a form of ultimate meaning-making based on more or less clearly formulated theodicies of good, evil, suffering, and injustice in the world (Berger, Reference Berger1967; Weber (Reference Weber1993[1963]); Campbell, Reference Campbell2007). In general, religious theodicies provide answers to existential questions about the ultimate meaning of life, which provide ontological security to people by explaining “why things are as they are” (Campbell, Reference Campbell2007: 166). Religious theodicies, expressed in doctrines, rituals, and social forms, are neither uniform nor stable. Compared to Western Christianity, for instance, Asian religions such as Buddhism or Hinduism formulate significantly different answers to existential questions and prescribe vastly different routes to salvation. Doctrines about the afterlife in Christianity, for instance, are related to Heaven, the human soul, or resurrection whereas Asian religions propose reincarnation, karma, and other solutions to the universal “problem” of death. Moreover, religious theodicies are never fixed: they differ across cultural contexts and change over time in intimate relation with broader, societal transformations.

It is from this perspective on cultural change and the dynamics of religious theodicies that we understand the formation of NRMs within the context of the counterculture between the 1950s and the 1970s. This was a period in Western countries during which the plausibility structures of “old,” established (Christian) traditions, worldviews, and epistemic certainties were critically scrutinized from the bottom up, leading to widespread cultural change (Campbell, Reference Campbell2007). The Romantic NRMs that emerged since the 1950s, we maintain, both reflected and helped spur this cultural change. Following in the cultural-sociological footsteps of Max Weber, our analysis is ideal-typological, focusing on analytical concepts rather than empirical details. Moreover, it shies away from causal historical claims to focus instead on “elective affinities” between cultural forms. This approach, most prominently featured in Weber’s classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Reference Weber2005 [1904/5]), sidesteps simplistic historical causality or social evolutionism. Conceiving history as ultimately unpredictable, it is sensitive to the possibility – indeed, likelihood – of unanticipated consequences of social action (e.g., Merton, Reference Merton1936). NRMs, we claim, may have been born in the rebellious counterculture between the 1950s and 1970s, in which new religious theodicies were constructed, but today their cultural logic is at the heart of many modern institutions, organizations, and mainstream media outlets.

Outline

The elective affinities between the Romantic spirit and the NRMs that emerged after the 1950s are analyzed in two parts of this Element, each containing two sections. In part one (Sections 1 and 2) we analyze how the Romantic counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s provided the ideological foundation of the seemingly diverse NRMs that blossomed in that period. Section 1, Historical Origins, outlines the worldview of the Romantic movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – its critique of the Enlightenment, modern industrialism, traditional Christian religion, and its focus on (human) nature and expressivism. We then discuss its revival in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Section 2, Cultural Logic, shows how this Romantic counterculture left a profound mark on the ontology, epistemology, and soteriology of NRMs that emerged in that period.

In part two (Sections 3 and 4) we then demonstrate how the Romantic religious worldview of these countercultural NRMs – at the time considered deviant and subversive – has increasingly come to infiltrate the cultural mainstream in Western countries since the 1980s, exemplified most emphatically by the New Age and Pagan movements. Section 3, Institutionalization, demonstrates how central ideas and practices of the New Age movement have been normalized in the fields of health care (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) and business (Workplace Spirituality). Section 4, Mediatization, then discusses the increased presence of Paganism in novels, movies, TV series and videogames, particularly through the fantasy genre, and the emergence of new, technology-based NRMs in Silicon Valley. In the Conclusion, we finally discuss these remarkable and paradoxical processes of institutionalization, mediatization, commodification, and technological manifestation of erstwhile countercultural NRMs from a cultural-sociological perspective on modernity.

The Romantic Critique of Modernity

How can we historically situate and define Romanticism? When Romanticism was born remains a source of controversy, but scholars agree that one of its first spokespersons was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). What Rousseau contributed to the Romantic outlook, most fundamentally, was the ideal of authenticity (Lindholm, Reference Lindholm2008: 8). For Rousseau, humans are born unique and free, but are then stifled by the cultural conventions and social norms imposed upon them by society. In this way, Rousseau was one of the first to give voice to that distinctly Romantic feeling of modern alienation, born of the disjuncture between who one feels to be and who society forces them to become (Berman, Reference Berman1970).

Romanticism has long fueled a critical diagnosis of modern society and its core ideas and institutions. For Rousseau, as for all Romantics, modern civilization spurs alienation. Because of this, we cannot simply consider Romanticism as an a-historical philosophical idea born in the abstract, but need to place it in its historical and cultural context.

Romanticism first developed in England, France, and Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a reaction to the Enlightenment, opposing its theoretical foundations as well as their practical ramifications in everyday life. The key targets of romantic critique were rationalism, modern science, industrialism, and the sense of alienation these were seen to generate. The modern natural sciences, Romantics asserted, might well provide a more objective understanding of how the world actually works, but they simultaneously turn an animated world full of wonder and enchantment into a cold mechanistic universe dominated by meaningless causal relationships. They blamed particularly Isaac Newton’s (1643–1727) paradigm-changing scientific discoveries for this “mechanization,” feeling strongly that “his philosophy had ‘clipped an angel’s wings,’ disenchanting the world and reducing all life to the status of a machine” (Campbell, Reference Campbell1987: 181). The rigid emphasis in science on reason, empiricism, facts, and objectivity was condemned as an irreparable threat to vital subjective human faculties such as imagination, personal intuition, feeling, and experience. Confronted with modern industrialism halfway through the eighteenth century – pioneered by technology and giving rise to mass production – Romantics also fiercely critiqued modern factories. In his famous poem Jerusalem (1998 [1804]), William Blake referred to these as “dark Satanic mills” substantially undermining the quality of human handcraft, polluting the “green” natural landscape with their smoking chimneys, and producing a general sense of alienation. In the Romantic discourse, then, “nature” – not least human nature – purity, and authenticity were celebrated as intrinsically sacred, juxtaposed to the disturbing profanities of modern society. In nature, Rousseau proposed, humans are free to be who they are, to express their “true” selves and to live in harmony with one another and the natural world alike, whereas in modern society they are forced to repress their basic needs and desires. For the Romantic, then, the birth of “the modern” is akin to the biblical Fall from Eden.

The Romantic movement expressed these themes in art, poetry, architecture, and philosophy. Across the works of disparate Romantic writers and artists – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Novalis (aka Georg Philipp Friedrich), or Victor Hugo – we find a rebellion against the Enlightenment’s emphasis on science, industrialism, rationalism, and formal harmony, in favor of the natural world, imagination, and self-expression (Trilling, Reference Trilling1971). Central to Romanticism is what philosopher Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor1989) refers to as “expressivism,” the idea that the principal goal of life is realizing the distinctive and original potentiality that each and every individual has within them. The assumption that there is something natural, unique, and authentic within the deeper layers of the self that needs to be discovered and expressed in everyday life is, indeed, at the heart of Rousseau’s pioneering work. It is the key to Romantic salvation in and from the modern world as well as a potential source of re-enchantment.

Moreover, the early Romantics took an ambivalent stance toward traditional religion. They were critical of secularism, maintaining that secular scientists preached nihilistic formulas that depicted the world as mechanistic, reducing it to an object of study and robbing it of its mystery and meaning. And yet, they also charged traditional Christian (particularly “churched”) religion with preaching formal doctrines insisting on obedience, conformity, and thereby obstructing vital feelings of transcendence, ecstasy, supernatural experience, and spiritual enchantment. Dismissing rationalist secularism and churched-doctrinal Christianity alike, the Romantics deemed alternative epistemological venues pivotal to imbue the world with ultimate meaning once again. Historian Peter Gay summarizes this Romantic ambition as follows:

Secularism, or what Max Weber (Reference Weber2005 [1904/5]) called the “disenchantment of the world” through rationalism, science, and industry, thus constituted the principal problem in the life-world of the early Romantics. How did they cope with this challenge? Romantics found solace in art and artistic expression. While immersed in literature, poetry, painting, and other aesthetically pleasing realms of beauty, they could temporarily “suspend their disbelief,” as Samuel Coleridge (Reference Coleridge1834: 175) famously argued. Indeed, Safranski (Reference Safranski2014) goes so far as to propose that Romanticism was essentially a continuation of religion by aesthetic means. At a more fundamental level, however, the Romantics considered artistic expression the inevitable outcome of a natural, authentic, and god-like source of creativity lying within every person. The underlying assumption was that modern individuals needed to shake off the limiting and alienating bonds that entrap them, so as to reconnect with their unique, creative, free selves to find ultimate meaning, re-unite with their (human) nature, and re-enchant the world. What distinguished the Romantic theodicy from others, Colin Campbell summarizes,

This, then, is the Romantic theodicy developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a substantial critique of modern society, complemented by the celebration of (human) nature and the ideal of self-expression. This Romanticism was not a temporary hiccup in history. It shaped, to quote Gay (Reference Gay1995: 37), once again, “the bourgeoisie’s perception of the self for decades ahead,” and transformed modern culture in many respects (e.g., Taylor, Reference Taylor1989), not least by giving rise to the NRMs in the bosom of 1960s counterculture.

The Romantic Counterculture

Early Romanticism remained largely confined to artistic and intellectual elites, manifesting itself primarily in art, music, literature, poetry, painting, and philosophical reflection. Since then, however, it has become popular in and through various social and cultural movements in the West, most notably in historical periods of rapid social and technological change. Indeed, given its critical ideological positioning against tradition and modernity, Romanticism historically played an important role in many revolutions of the masses against those in power. This is exemplified by the French revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, in which the writings of Rousseau and other distinguished Romantics explicitly fueled protests against the ancien régime and motivated a collective uprising for equality and individual freedom. On the other end of the political spectrum, Romanticism was appropriated by the Nazis in Germany from 1933 onwards, among others, to legitimate the “natural” (and hence “superior”) order of the German nation state and the Aryan race (Safranski, Reference Safranski2014). Close to the topic of religion were the mutual influences of Romanticism and the long-standing Western esoteric tradition (Hanegraaff, Reference Hanegraaff1996: 415–21), both part and parcel of a “Counter-Enlightenment” in modern culture. Esotericism constitutes a “Romantic religion” par excellence, rooted as it is in a religious naturalism that foregrounds correspondences that claim that “everything is connected” while taking humans to be essentially spiritual beings (420). Modern esoteric movements in the nineteenth century, most notable Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society (founded in 1875), Spiritualism, the New Though Movement and their later offshoots, have done much to popularize the Romantic worldview (Hammer, Reference Hammer2001).

Overall, then, Romanticism has taken many forms in Western society over the last two centuries, providing ideological fuel for revolt, protest, and revolution against established traditions and the ailments of modernity. Its countercultural potential manifested once again when it democratized and popularized among the young “protest generation” of baby boomers after WWII. Particularly during the 1960s, the Romantic critique of the rationalized modern order merged with liberal political ideals on a grand scale, giving life to an “expressive revolution” (Parsons & Platt, Reference Parsons and Platt1973; see also B. Martin, Reference Martin1981; Watts, Reference Watts2022). Notwithstanding the diversity of its young participants – ranging from political protesters and anarchists to Bohemians experimenting with mind-expanding drugs, psychedelics, and spirituality – the continuity of the counterculture with the Romantic tradition is widely acknowledged. “Considered as a group of people who are distinguished by a particular way of life and the values and beliefs that it embodies,” Colin Campbell (Reference Campbell2007: 188) asserts, “the counterculture of the 1960s can … probably best [be] understood as the social expression of Romanticism.” It animated a liberal democratic tradition of “expressive individualism” (Bellah et al., Reference Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton1985) that inspired radical lifestyle experimentation, sparked mass protest, and powered a host of social and political movements (Berman, Reference Berman1970). One of the most remarkable features of the countercultural critique in that period is that it was neither voiced by the industrial working class, nor did it single out capitalist exploitation and economic inequality as modernity’s principal shortcomings. Instead, middle-class youth served as its principal carriers (Inglehart, Reference Inglehart1977), championing what was, in effect, the same critique of modernity that earlier Romantics had articulated (Boltanski & Chiapello, Reference Boltanski and Chiapello2007).

Countercultural Romanticism directly targeted traditional Christian religion, challenging its institutional structures and rejecting church dogmas and doctrines. Counterculturalists rejected the doctrine of original sin or human depravity in favor of a Romantic conception of human benevolence (Woodhead, Reference Woodhead1993). While this critical stance vis-à-vis traditional Christian religion may at first glance appear consistent with widely accepted sociological notions of modernization and secularization, the matter is more complex than this. Sociological orthodoxy attributes the loss of authority of traditional religion and morality to an increased authority of science, technology, and rationality (Wilson, Reference Wilson and Hammond1985). In this understanding, rationalization allegedly gives rise to a warfare of science with theology (White, Reference White1960) or a religion/science conflict (Sappington, Reference Sappington1991), with “religion’s inevitable demise … framed in terms of physical science discoveries that expose the fallacies of religious superstitions and technological progress that reduces the appeal of religious promises” (Iannaccone, Stark, & Finke, Reference Iannaccone, Stark and Finke1998: 384). Yet, a crucial feature of the Romantic counterculture of the 1960s is that it was not only critical of traditional Christianity, but equally of the authority of science or, more generally, of “an ideology that places a high value on rationality, calculation and efficiency,” critiquing the latter in the name of “an ideology of self-fulfillment, spontaneity and experiential richness” (B. Martin, Reference Martin1981: 17, 18). Thus, while the Romantic spirit of the counterculture critiqued the Christian churches, it was arguably even more of a challenge to what B. Martin (Reference Martin1981: 21) calls “the instrumental enclave,” that is, modern science and the technologized systems it sustains. As she puts it,

This countercultural Romanticism is perhaps best captured by Theodore Roszak’s book The Making of a Counter Culture (Reference Roszak1969), immensely popular in countercultural circles, and itself a countercultural pamphlet as much as a social-scientific analysis. The Enlightenment dream of science- and rationality-led processes of liberation and emancipation, Roszak contended, had resulted in dominance by scientifically trained specialists, themselves mere cogs in a rationalized system on a “relentless quest for efficiency, for order, for ever more extensive rational control” (Roszak, Reference Roszak1969: 21). Due to its strictly formal rationality, this “technocracy” was rejected as void of meaning and a threat to morality, human freedom, and opportunities for personal growth. It was seen as instrumentalizing human beings and manipulating them into conformity. “‘The System’,” Roszak reprovingly observed (Reference Roszak1969: 17), “tries to make us believe that we are ‘free’ and ‘happy’.”

In addition to utilizing Roszak’s book, young countercultural critics drew much of their intellectual ammunition from the philosophers and sociologists of the Frankfurt School, who brought out basically identical arguments in a more theoretically and philosophically sophisticated manner. In Dialectics of Enlightenment – a telling title – Theodor Horkheimer and Max Adorno (Reference Horkheimer and Adorno2002 [1944]) claimed that reason’s reduction to mere instrumentality and calculability had transformed it from an emancipatory force into an essentially oppressive one. Contrary to the glowing promises of the Enlightenment, people in the West had not at all ended up living free and happy lives in tolerant, democratic societies. They were merely made to believe that they did. Horkheimer and Adorno blamed especially what they called the “culture industries” of film, radio, and advertising for keeping the public in a complacent state of unconsciousness that veils modern capitalism’s manipulative mechanisms and seduces individuals into mistaking their alienation for happiness. In addition, the Frankfurt writers accused modern positivist science of mystifying these wrongs with the cloak of clarity through its strict empiricism, bordering on “fact fetishism.” Limiting itself to the study of actually existing reality, understood as “what is,” it neglected the equally, if not more, important realm of “what is not, yet could be.” In the eyes of the Frankfurt school, a utopianism that foregrounded how the actually existing world could be transformed in ways that expand human freedom and liberate humans from their sorry state of alienation, was more important than narrowly conceived empirical social science (Horkheimer & Adorno, Reference Horkheimer and Adorno2002[1944]; see also Marcuse, Reference Marcuse1964).

Motivated by influential ideas such as these, members of the counterculture critiqued positivist science as a handmaiden of “technocracy” which forced people into slave-like existences (e.g., Roszak, Reference Roszak1969; Horkheimer & Adorno, Reference Horkheimer and Adorno2002[1944]). By accusing rationalist science of being a status-quo-serving conservative politics in disguise, they dismissed positivist claims of neutrality and objectivity. Overall, then, the upsurge of the Romantic counterculture of the 1960s not only dismissed traditional Christian religion for being overly dogmatic and reducing modern humans to obedient role-playing puppets; it also criticized modern science and its rationalist technocratic offshoots on precisely the same grounds. The alternative to this deeply felt alienation was found in a Romantic return to (human) nature and an ethics of self-expression that animated initiatives ranging from secular politics, wild anarchistic groups, musical subcultures, experiments with drugs to, indeed, the formation of New Religious Movements.

Religious Change since the Counterculture

Colin Campbell (Reference Campbell2007: 213) refers to the 1960s counterculture as “the hinge of modern history” – a transformative period that can be compared to the Renaissance, the French Revolution, and other historical periods in which dissatisfaction with the status quo and the establishment led to rapid cultural change. It is now widely acknowledged that Romantic countercultural values, not least personal authenticity and self-expression – “being your true self” – have become central to contemporary culture, even invading domains such as work and consumption. The corporate world, for instance, witnessed a shift from hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations to flatter ones, with self-directing, flexible, and proactive employees becoming the new norm (Boltanski & Chiapello, Reference Boltanski and Chiapello2007; Watts & Houtman, Reference Watts and Houtman2022). Meanwhile, self-help books no longer advise junior entrants into the labor market to adapt to work organizations’ demands, but rather encourage them to follow their personal passion and seek out opportunities for personal growth (De Keere, Reference De Keere2014). In consumer culture, authenticity has become the holy grail (Gilmore & Pine, Reference Gilmore and Pine2007), as can be seen in the contemporary appeal of vintage clothing and antique furniture (Veenstra & Kuipers, Reference Veenstra and Kuipers2013); organic foodstuffs (Ward, Coveney, & Henderson, Reference Ward, Coveney and Henderson2010); traditional craftsmanship, and artisanal production (Ocejo, Reference Ocejo2017). Reflecting on these changes in consumer culture, the historian and journalist Thomas Frank writes

Of utmost importance for this Element is how the Romantic upsurge of the 1960s changed the religious domain by animating a diversity of NRMs. It did so because the Romantic worldview rejected and undermined both principal pillars of Western society – modern science, rationalism, and reason, along with institutional “churched” Christianity and traditional religious beliefs. Even though Romanticism cannot and should not be understood as a religious movement in and of itself, the Romantic critique of modernity and the myriad experiments with alternative forms of meaning-making that emerged in the nineteenth century – from Transcendentalism and Theosophy to New Thought and Spiritualism – provided a cultural blueprint for middle-class young adults in the 1960s. That is, Romanticism nourished a deep hunger for new types of religion and the emergence of countless new, non-institutionalized religious initiatives in what has been called an open “market of ultimate significance” (Luckmann, Reference Luckmann1967: 99).

From a broader sociological perspective, this rise of new types of religion shows that the decline of Christian religion is not the end of religion as such but coincides with a process of religious transformation (Luckmann, Reference Luckmann1967; Watts and Houtman, Reference Watts, Houtman, Houtman and Watts2024). Secularization, in other words, can be understood as a “self-limiting process” that “also stimulates religious innovation” (Stark & Bainbridge, Reference Stark and Bainbridge1985: 2). Writing about the United Kingdom, historian Callum Brown notes that the period between 1956 and 1973 – “the long sixties,” as he calls it – accounts for no less than half of the total decline in British Christianity in the twentieth century: “an unremitting decline in membership, communicants, baptisms, and religious marriage which, at the start of the third millennium, shows no sign of bottoming out” (Brown, Reference Brown2001: 188). The patterns Brown observes for the United Kingdom can be generalized to Western countries (Norris & Inglehart, Reference Norris and Inglehart2004), even though there are obviously cross-national differences, with especially the United States long considered an exceptional case (see, however, Voas & Chaves, Reference Voas and Chaves2016). And yet, the massive exodus from the Christian churches in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in Western Europe, did not mark the end of religion. Many of the baby boomers that left their childhood religions behind ended up undertaking a spiritual quest for new types of religion beyond the institutional control of church and sect. As we will discuss in the next section, the NRMs that emerged in this era indeed had a marked Romanticism in common, despite their otherwise clear diversity and their roots in traditions ranging from esotericism, Buddhism, and Hinduism to nontraditional forms of Christianity.

Religious Ontology

That the 1960s counterculture unleashed a tidal wave of spiritual yearning beyond the Christian church is a central argument in Colin Campbell’s The Easternization of the West (Reference Campbell2007). A Weberian sociologist of religion, Campbell contends that this postwar era reflected a crisis of meaning, because the existential needs of the baby boom generation could not be met by the mainstream churches and their long-standing, institutionalized theodicies in Western societies. In turn, young seekers were craving novel meaning systems that could satisfy their spiritual hunger, ultimately embracing one or other Romantic type of religion. The result was a large-scale generational shift from the materialistic dualism that had long been the Western default to an Asian-style metaphysical monism, a process that Campbell (Reference Campbell2007: 60) has dubbed “Easternization.” Put another way, the radically transcendent and otherworldly God of the Puritans – which Weber saw as pivotal to the birth of modernity – was forcefully rejected, in favor of a more immanent and omnipresent conception of the divine.

In some cases, this meant a direct turn to Asian religions that are, according to Campbell (Reference Campbell2007), more animistic, pantheistic, and polytheistic than Western ones. For instance, many countercultural baby boomers became fascinated with Hinduism in the 1960s. Some of them took off to India to find a guru and live in an ashram, while others stuck to the West and embraced an imported movement from Asia. One of the most popular of these was TM (in full: Transcendental Meditation and the Spiritual Regeneration Movement), founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (d. 2008). Although he brought TM to the United States as early as the late 1950s, it was only after the Beatles visited him in India in 1968 that his teachings became well known to a Western audience and the popularity of TM took off. TM can best be characterized as a form of “Neo-Hinduism” (Sawyer & Humes, Reference Sawyer and Humes2023: 1) that basically adopts a monistic ontology which considers the divine (known as brahman) a diffuse, amorphous, yet ever-present life force that pervades everything (Rothstein, Reference Rothstein and Lewis2004). Indeed, in TM, “Reality is a Oneness made up of manifest things that arise from their transcendent source in the Being – and since we too, on the level of our physical selves, are some of the things arising from that transcendental Being, we too are not separate from it” (Sawyer & Humes, Reference Sawyer and Humes2023: 10). According to this typically monistic teaching, the divine resides within each individual and can be accessed by means of meditation techniques (Wallis, Reference Wallis and Dawson2003). In addition to TM and Westernized forms of Hinduism, many baby boomers became fascinated with the monistic vision contained in Buddhism – or at least its Westernized versions (Altglas, Reference Altglas2014). Thus, many flocked to the Japanese-born Soka Gakkai movement, known in the United States as Nichiren Soshu of America, and in Britain as Nichiren Soshu of the United Kingdom. Now known as Soka Gakkai International (SGI), the movement teaches that all individuals should seek to realize their “Buddha nature” (Métraux, Reference Métraux2013).

What made this ontological shift from religious dualism to monism possible was not only the generational disenchantment with traditional Christianity, but also the increased exposure to imported Asian religious ideas and practices. For at the very moment when Western baby boomers were becoming disillusioned with the Christianity of their parents, they were introduced to a host of gurus and teachers from Asia, who skillfully adapted their exotic teachings to fit Western values and assumptions. In fact, while it remains true that many NRMs owe much to Asia, it would be inaccurate to see them as wholly foreign to the West, because metaphysical monism also had a long history in Europe, dating back to at least the Renaissance (Hanegraaff, Reference Hanegraaff1996). This “Eastern” tradition within the West, as Campbell calls it (Reference Campbell2007), blossomed in nineteenth-century Europe and America in the form of movements such as Spiritualism, Mesmerism, Transcendentalism, New Thought, and Theosophy (see Fuller, Reference Fuller2001; Bender, Reference Bender2010; Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2012). These sundry movements typically combined Asian teachings and practices with Romantic sensibilities and ideals.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find monisms which are indebted to the Western esoteric tradition – a tradition that has been rejected, stigmatized, and marginalized by Christianity (e.g., Barkun, Reference Barkun2006). Most notable are Pagan movements like Wicca or the Church of All Worlds, which often romanticize an imagined premodern past wherein the divine, the natural world, and humanity existed in holistic and enchanted harmony (Luhrmann, Reference Luhrmann1991 [1989]; Hanegraaff, Reference Hanegraaff1996; Adler, Reference Adler1997[1986]).

While the 1960s not only sparked interest in (typically Westernized) “Eastern” religion and “Western” forms of monism (e.g., esotericism, Paganism), they also set off a Christian revival, with nontraditional forms of Christianity popping up left and right. The most prominent of these were the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements, which have since spread across the globe (D. Martin, Reference Martin2002). While Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians do not reject the idea of a God who is radically transcendent, Charismatic ontology is nevertheless remarkably monistic (Hunt, Hamilton, & Walter, Reference Hunt, Hamilton, Walter, Hunt, Hamilton and Walter1997; Poloma, Reference Poloma2003; Campbell, Reference Campbell2007). As anthropologist Simon Coleman (Reference Coleman2000: 235) explains, “These Christians worship a God who is both within the self and a permanently moving force on the earth as a whole.” So, while Charismatics retain the characteristically Christian notion of a personal deity, they combine this with a holistic conception of God’s relationship to humans, which promises each and every individual ready access to God’s presence and power in this world. The result is many Christian-inspired NRMs bearing ideological resemblances to Asian imports. For example, Barker observes in her 1984 study of the Unification Church that although the movement retained certain traditional dualisms, it simultaneously embraced the counterculture’s holism, treating as sacred ideals of harmony, wholeness and, of course, unity. Like other NRMs, then, the Unification Church reflected a syncretism of Western and Eastern religious thought (Wallis, Reference Wallis and Dawson2003).

Religious Epistemology

The shift to a more monistic religious ontology brought with it a shift in epistemology. Following the ideal-typological analysis of Hanegraaff (Reference Hanegraaff1996), there have existed three competing epistemologies within the Western tradition: reason, faith, and gnosis. The Middle Ages were a period of religious faith, when doctrine-based epistemologies prevailed. The Enlightenment, then, marked a period when reason rose to prominence, as modern science and rationality were heralded as essential tools in the emancipation of humankind. Finally, according to Hanegraaff, gnostic epistemologies, which ground claims to truth in personal experience, feeling, and intuition, have since the Renaissance been marginalized in the West.

The counterculture and the NRMs it fostered foregrounded precisely such “gnosis,” underscoring their preoccupation with personal experience rather than modern science and technology (reason) or traditional religion (faith). As Robert Wuthnow (Reference Wuthnow and Dawson2003: 104) puts it, “the freedom that triumphed in the 1960s was freedom to feel one’s own feelings and to experience one’s own sensibilities.” We see this clearly in the NRMs of the era. Donald Stone (Reference Stone, Bellah and Glock1976: 95) writes about his study of the Human Potential Movement, which began as an academic enterprise based on the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) and other post-Freudian psychologists, but soon morphed into a potent site of spiritual seeking: “Whether participants seek cosmic bliss or the pleasure of the moment, they all have in common the quest for direct experience through an expanded consciousness or awareness.” Likewise, in her study of Pentecostals and Charismatics (“P/C”), sociologist Margaret Poloma (Reference Poloma2003: 23) observes that both “tend to be anticreedal, believing that ‘knowing’ comes from a right relationship with God,” concluding that “the P/C worldview is experientially centered.” It is indeed hardly surprising that most NRMs endorse an experiential epistemology, because if the ontology of the divine is conceived monistically as an omnipresent life force or energy, it follows logically that subjective experience will be considered the medium through which one receives divine guidance or insight. A renewed appreciation for feelings and experience thus became a hallmark of the 1960s, with the newly emerging NRMs being first of all “religions of experience” (Dawson, Reference Dawson1998: 138).

At first glance, some might presume that, due to this gnostic epistemology, NRMs would be averse to science. The truth is, however, more complicated than this, because NRM members commonly viewed their own specific religious or spiritual beliefs as perfectly compatible with science. An example is Transcendental Meditation. Meditation is often understood as a spiritual practice promising “a direct, inner, mystical experience of the Self,” so that “when that experience becomes permanent … the meditator reaches a state of spiritual enlightenment” (Sawyer & Humes, Reference Sawyer and Humes2023: 8). But it is simultaneously presented as a secular, scientifically sound technique to reduce stress and improve health – even by its founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (25). TM is moreover sometimes seen as potentially proving the claims of (quantum) physics by facilitating experiences of “transcendental consciousness” (Rothstein, Reference Rothstein and Lewis2004). Another example is Scientology claiming that all of its religious assertions can be verified through science and experimentation (Rothstein, Reference Rothstein and Lewis2004). In fact, L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986), who founded the Church of Scientology in California in 1956, presented its self-improvement program Dianetics as grounded in science. He even (unsuccessfully) sought legitimation for these claims by the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association (Bigliardi, Reference Bigliardi2023: 6). Overall, then, many NRMs have stressed that spiritual searching, much like scientific inquiry, relies on empirical observation – the only difference being that it demands sensitizing oneself to one’s own feelings, bodily sensations, and inner thoughts. In some cases, the claim is even made that this experiential form of empirical investigation is epistemically superior because it captures the underlying holistic reality that remains invisible in the reductionistic-dualistic approach of modern science (Hanegraaff, Reference Hanegraaff1996). Their emphasis on experience also explains why these NRMs place so much emphasis on concrete practices like chanting, meditating, praying, or different forms of bodywork, such as yoga, tantra, Reichian therapies, or breathing exercises. After all, these are activities that aim to induce subjective experiences, altered states, ecstatic emotions, and out-of-the-ordinary feelings that allegedly provide direct access to the divine. Successful recruitment of new followers depends heavily upon this promise of accessing deep, spiritual experience through techniques. Indeed, instead of believing claims of NRMs – made by their leaders and written in foundational texts – one is encouraged to experience the truth by just trying out some of these practices. In NRMs varying from Christian evangelical movements to New Age, Lyon argues: “Belief is demoted, experience promoted” (Reference Lyon2000: 94). At the same time, such subjective spiritual experiences are often the starting point of socialization – or rather, the slow, gradual “interpretive drift” in which experience and cognitions develop in tandem so that beliefs, postulated by NRMs, become more plausible (Luhrmann, Reference Luhrmann1991 [1989]).

Their emphasis on experience also helps clarify why NRMs adopted the organizational forms and structures of authority they did. This is because an experiential epistemology tends to give life to one of two organizational dynamics. At one extreme, it may lead to what Campbell (Reference Campbell, Kaplan and Løøv2002[1972]) has dubbed a “cultic milieu,” defined by what he elsewhere (Campbell, Reference Campbell2007: 134) calls “epistemological individualism” – each individual having “his or her own version of the truth.” Such a diffuse milieu, which facilitates the adoption of ideas, practices, and products in accordance with one’s present whims and fancies, is a logical outcome of the primacy of experience. This is because, as Hammer (Reference Hammer2001: 331) explains, “There’s no need to believe in any particular doctrine, nor is one obliged to trust in their antiquity or their scientific basis. The ultimate litmus test is whether you can experience their veracity for yourself.” This first scenario is indeed an apt description of the New Age and Human Potential movements, both of which place a premium on allowing individuals to find and tread their own unique “spiritual path” (Campbell, Reference Campbell2007: 130) through experience. Within the holistic New Age milieu, writes Heelas (Reference Heelas1996: 23), “The ‘individual’ serves as his or her own source of guidance,” which indeed rules out stable and enduring organizational forms.

At the other extreme, however, an experiential epistemology can also underpin more hierarchical and structured organizational forms. This is the case if these forms have their roots in what Max Weber (Reference Weber, Roth and Wittich1978 [1921/22]) referred to as “charismatic” authority, as opposed to its traditional and rational counterparts. For if an NRM is led by a charismatic leader, experience remains the authoritative source of spiritual truth, even though here the leader’s experiences and intuitions are privileged over those of rank-and-file members (Hammer, Reference Hammer and Lewis2004). Charismatic churches are a good example. Their stability rests upon the ability of the pastor to temper and rein in the spiritual intuitions of their members, and to privilege their own experiences and insights above those of others. In that sense, David Martin (Reference Martin2002: 13) writes, “Pentecostalism invites an antinomian anarchy which can only be kept from dissolving the assembly in confusion by exercise of pastoral oversight.”

Interestingly, the evolution of the Church of Scientology reflects a gradual shift from a relatively antinomian organizational form, premised on an egalitarian epistemological individualism, to a deeply hierarchical and authoritarian organizational form, rooted in a privileging of the supposedly divine revelations of L. Ron Hubbard. As Wallis (Reference Wallis1975) outlines, as Scientology grew in stature and membership, there was increased pressure on members to adhere to official doctrine. This enforced conformity was justified on the grounds that these interpretations were rooted in the direct experiences of the leader. Of course, Scientology is far from alone in this. Many, if not most, NRMs exhibit a similar dynamic – which is why they have long been considered controversial. The commonplace fears of NRMs brainwashing their adherents emerge out of the fact that some followers have become so enamored with their leader that they are willing to exploit themselves, harm others, and even commit crimes for the leader. While such extremism is by no means typical, it is a predictable and understandable outcome of an experiential epistemology. What takes place in such instances is that the leader’s experiences and intuitions have been imbued with the highest epistemic authority, such that they have come to define and delimit reality for their followers.

Religious Soteriology

Due to their entanglement with the Romantic worldview the vast majority of NRMs hold that self-realization is imperative: one needs to express the authentic, inner or deeper self and become “who one really is.” This is the highest good, the telos of human life. Indeed, conceiving of life in a modern society as utterly alienating, disenchanted, and meaningless, NRMs turn the Romantic ethic of self-expression and self-realization into a spiritual quest for salvation.

We see this, for instance, in the Human Potential Movement – itself a nebulous collection of groups and activities associated with the more academic wing of the counterculture – and its offshoots. One of the most prominent among the latter was Erhard Seminars Training (est), which ran 60-hour training sessions for individuals seeking self-expression, self-improvement, and self-actualization. Other examples include the Inner Peace Movement, founded in 1964 by Francisco Coll (d. 1999), and Insight, both of which boasted effective methods for achieving spiritual and psychological growth. Like many other post-psychoanalytic schools of therapy, these groups subscribed to the notion that the goal of therapeutic programs is to enable an individual to realize their authentic self or, as psychotherapist Carl Rogers (Reference Rogers1961: 169) puts it, “to be that self which one truly is.” Indeed, the ideal of self-realization as a form of salvation lies at the core of talk of “human potential” (Hanegraaff, Reference Hanegraaff1996). In line with the Romanticist worldview, this spiritual quest to contact a deeper, authentic, or spiritual self lying underneath the different roles we play, is intimately connected with a critique of modern society. Like other NRMs, the Human Potential Movement asserted that individuals could only “transcend the oppressiveness of culture by transforming themselves” (Stone, Reference Stone, Bellah and Glock1976: 93). In this way, although practitioners of est, the Inner Peace Movement, and Insight may have seemed selfishly committed to their own betterment, the philosophy of these movements made no distinction between self-transformation and world-transformation. On the contrary, it was a central tenet that the source of world betterment is self-improvement on a mass scale. This is equally true of the New Age movement. As Hanegraaff (Reference Hanegraaff1996: 281) explains, according to New Age religion, “the supreme moral task is not to do what is good and avoid evil, but, rather, to develop one’s inner potential.”

The language to describe this source of salvation – the “inner self” – differs between NRMs and is framed through various traditions. It may be called the higher self (derived from Theosophy), divine spark (the gnostic tradition), inner Buddha (Buddhism), inner child (humanistic psychology), or even simply the soul (Christianity). Salvation lies in a variety of spiritual practices that allegedly unlock human potential and that may be either individually or collectively performed. The latter is the case in Paganism where the “magical” or “divine” self may be liberated through collective rituals, procedures, and performances: “Look within yourself; everything for which you are searching is there; Know thou art Goddess / know thou art God” (Berger, Reference Berger1999: 33). Pagans assume that once the “magical self” has been awakened, one leaves the profane world and enters the sacred world of nature, where everything is possible and holistically interconnected.

The soteriological focus on finding and expressing the inner self is not limited to world-affirming NRMs like the Human Potential Movement, the Bhagwan Movement (Osho), or more recent New Age currents, but is also central to more world-rejecting NRMs. The Unification Church, for instance, requires members to center their lives around God, conforming to the rules and regulations of the church and to evangelize in order to save humanity. However, here too, the prescription is methodologically individualistic. As Barker observes about Unification theology,

We also find a marked Romantic expressivism in the Charismatic Christian movements. As D. Martin (Reference Martin2002: 169) puts it, “Pentecostalism … is about finding your voice.” What he means by this is that, although Pentecostals and Charismatics speak often about obeying God’s will, what they mean by this is God’s will as it manifests as the “voice within.” Much like members of the Human Potential and New Age movements, or Paganism, Charismatic Christians hold that achieving salvation amounts to becoming who they truly are – which is who God intended them to be. And vice versa: finding one’s true self is associated with finding God. Thus, we might say this conception of salvation presupposes an ideal of positive freedom, which Harold Bloom (Reference Bloom1992: 26) refers to as a “purely inner freedom.” Moreover, achieving this involves identifying and overcoming the internal barriers that impede recovery of the authentic and divine core that defines one’s true identity. D. Martin (Reference Martin2002: 169) therefore concludes that Charismatic Christianity amounts to “an adaptable form of heart-work and spiritual self-exploration.”

According to Wallis (Reference Wallis and Dawson2003), what distinguishes est, the Inner Peace Movement, Insight, New Age, and certain forms of Pentecostalism from other NRMs, is their world-affirming and/or world-accommodating character – meaning, their embrace of modern society and its sociocultural norms. In some respects this is accurate. As we demonstrate in the following section, particularly contemporary “spiritual” New Age groups often willingly embrace the institutions of modern capitalism and apply spiritual techniques to achieve worldly ends (see Heelas, Reference Heelas, Wilson and Cresswell1999). However, the distinctions between world-affirming, world-accommodating, and world-rejecting can also mislead, for they tend to obscure the underlying cultural similarities. A case in point is that they share the soteriology of self-expression, personal growth, or self-realization. Most scholars of NRMs agree, for instance, that one of the most prominent world-rejecting movements has been the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. No doubt, the Hare Krishnas stand out in light of the strict lifestyle, diet, and dress code they follow. Because of ISKCON’s asceticism and apparent exoticism, observers have tended to stress its differences from more world-affirming movements of the New Age variety. Nevertheless, the commitments of Hare Krishnas, too, are ultimately grounded in a desire for self-realization as salvation. As Rochford (Reference Rochford2007: 10–11) explains, the spokesperson of ISKCON, Caitanya, “preached that all people, regardless of their caste or position in life, could gain self-realization by serving Krishna… Central to this process of self-realization is chanting the Hare Krishna mantra.”

In short, even the most world-rejecting NRMs typically espouse the same religious soteriology as the most world-affirming and world-accommodating ones.

The opposite applies as well. Despite the fact that the Human Potential and New Age adepts are accommodationist in crucial respects – nowadays affirming rather than rejecting free-market capitalism and private property – it would be wrong to see them as entirely uncritical of mainstream society. For Romantic expressivism always contains within itself a strident critique of society, which frames conformism to social norms and conventions as major impediments to the pursuit of self-realization. As Bellah (Reference Bellah, Bellah and Glock1976) argued, most NRMs in the 1960s already shared a rejection of utilitarian individualism which holds that the goal of life is to maximize self-interest. Many also shared with the social and political movements of the era a rejection of traditional racial, gender, sex, and lifestyle norms and conventions, which countercultural baby boomers saw as stifling and repressive (see Watts, Reference Watts2022). Rather than distinguishing world-rejecting, world-affirming, or world-accommodating NRMs, it therefore makes more sense to emphasize that their religious soteriologies of seeking, finding, and expressing the real self entail a countercultural stance that is either implicitly or explicitly grounded in a Romantic critique of modernity.

NRMs: Theodical Unity in Diversity

Although NRMs exhibit a manifest diversity in their doctrines, practices, and organizational forms, they nevertheless share an underlying cultural logic that consists of three interrelated dimensions: (1) a distinctive religious ontology that replaces dualism with a monistic-holistic perspective on nature; (2) an epistemology that places emphasis, not on belief or faith but on subjective experience as a path to truth; and (3) a soteriology which sees self-realization as the sole route to the ultimate goal of salvation. Many of the Romantic NRMs are organized around fresh interpretations of Asian religions, for example, Hare Krishna, TM, or the Rajneesh movement, while others build on Western Pagan currents, such as Wicca, revisiting or re-inventing traditions and worldviews featuring animism, polytheism, and magic. Notwithstanding this diversity, these NRMs share a cultural logic that is informed by the spirit of Romanticism. This even applies to those that build on Western Christianity, such as the Unification Church or Pentecostal movements. Just like their non-Christian counterparts, these movements have a “common emphasis on intense, even ecstatic, emotional experience” through spiritual, self-oriented practices, and their aim is similar: “to achieve wholeness” (Campbell, 2006: 347).

Many studies have completely overlooked this cultural unity underlying NRMs. Our cultural-sociological approach helps to make clear that the collective emergence of NRMs in the 1960s was neither coincidental nor a temporary historical blip. It was grounded in the widespread dissatisfaction among baby boomers with long-standing (Christian) dogmas, “churched” religion, and alienating social systems and, based on this, their active reconstruction of religion and culture in and through NRMs. More than anything else, NRMs between the 1950s and 1970s were laboratories of cultural resistance, social experimentation, and religious innovation. In these NRMs’ “new” theodicies of ultimate meaning – underpinned by Romantic ontologies, epistemologies and soteriologies – were actively constructed and established. It is the “new” Romanticism of NRMs that, in turn, informed widespread societal antagonism during this turbulent period. From a historical-sociological perspective, the question remains how stable and persistent such cultural-religious innovations have proven to be over the last decades. In NRM studies, this question is often raised as, “When do New Religions stop being new?” or relatedly, “How sustainable are New Religious Movements over time?” (e.g., Barker, Reference Barker2004). Romantic NRMs are, after all, nontraditional by nature: during the period of the counterculture they were generally built on charismatic leadership emphasizing subjective experience, such that “few guarantees of survival existed.” Moreover, members were first-generation converts, making intergenerational transmission from parents to children unlikely. On top of this, many NRM memberships already turned out to be unstable and volatile during the 1960s and 1970s, with romantic-religious seekers pursuing better, higher, and deeper spiritual experiences often switching their allegiances from one NRM to another—a dynamic encouraged by the increasingly competitive “market of ultimate significance” (Luckmann, Reference Luckmann1967: 99).

So what happens when New (Romantic) Religions stop being new? Taking a historical-sociological approach, we will argue in the next two sections that the ideologies and practices of NRMs persisted over the last decades, but that their social form has changed. Instead of their typical lack of “alignment” with the “dominant culture,” their countercultural protest against “the structure and interests of dominant institutions” (Bromley, Reference Bromley2004: 92), and their social positioning on “the fringes of society” (Melton, Reference Melton2004: 73), NRM ideologies and practices have become part and parcel of dominant institutional domains like work, health, media, games, and technology.

From Alternative to Complementary Health Care

One of the major ways in which NRMs have transformed the institutional fabric of the West is through their influence on health care. The process is an outcome of the alternative health care paradigm that developed in spiritual circles in the 1960s counterculture, most notably in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Alternative ideas about health and healing are indeed key issues in New Age literature, courses and practices and they “undoubtedly [represent] one of the most visible aspects of the New Age Movement” (Hanegraaff, Reference Hanegraaff1996: 42). These ideas provide answers to questions like “What is health?” “What is (the cause of) illness?” and “How can humans be ‘healed’?” which differ significantly from those given by medical science and modern health care. The principal tenet is that modern society produces physical, psychological, and spiritual health problems that modern health care not only cannot cure, but in fact may be the cause of. From the 1960s onwards the paradigm has therefore critically “challenged the bureaucratic, high-tech and iatrogenic aspects of conventional medicine or what medical anthropologists generally refer to as biomedicine” (Baer, Reference Baer2004: 1).

The healing process is here seen as rooted in a monistic or holistic ontology that understands nature as a restorative power and human beings as capable of curing themselves (e.g., Hanegraaff, Reference Hanegraaff1996; Campbell, Reference Campbell2007). The logic of holistic health in New Age thought does not so much target Christian religious dualism, but the mind-body dualism associated with Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) that is firmly institutionalized in modern health care. Modern health specialists, it is argued, approach patients as machine-like entities by treating the body, mind, and spirit as isolated and separate. Hence, they require separate professional disciplines and specializations to treat human illness. On the one hand, doctors, surgeons, and pharmacists treat physical illness without considering the mind, emotions, and personal or traumatic experiences as possible causes of physical health issues. In doing so, they allegedly treat symptoms rather than real problems. Psychologists and psychiatrists, on the other hand, analyze the human mind and emotions without taking notice of their fundamental embeddedness in the body. The spiritual dimension, which forges a connection between body and mind and which is taken to be pivotal to what it means to be human in the first place, is thus neglected in both instances. The New Age Movement, but also the related Human Potential Movement, Asian healing groups, and Pagan movements like Wicca, all critique the secular-scientific paradigm for slandering this crucial dimension under the banners of irrationality, superstition, and illusion. They replace the modern dualism that is held responsible for this with a holistic perspective that connects body, mind, and a spiritual life force or energy. Emphasizing the “interconnectedness of all things in the universe” (Løøv, Reference Løøv2024: 33), the holistic approach to health thus differs dramatically from that of conventional modern Western medicine:

The dissemination of ideas about holistic healing has popularized a range of therapies that rely on natural remedies – herbs, oils, crystals, sound, light, color – that build on patients’ own natural abilities, and that use “non-invasive, hands-on manipulative techniques” (Campbell, Reference Campbell2007: 103). Chiropractic, acupuncture, homeopathy, aromatherapy, Reiki, yoga, tai chi, meditation, Ayurvedic massage, and related therapies stand out as some of the best-known examples. What they have in common is not just that they are based on the Romantic understanding of humans as naturally whole beings, but also on the premise that (human) nature needs to be protected against invasions from the realm of the non-natural, the artificial, the human-made, and the technological. Recovery from disease and acquisition of immunity are seen as natural processes that cannot, and should not, be technologically short-circuited. In the long run, chemical drugs and vaccines are conceived as doing more harm than good, as they ultimately damage the human body’s self-healing potential. Hardly surprising, then, this type of Romantic New Age spirituality is a strong predictor of vaccine skepticism and low faith in science alike (Rutjens & van der Lee, Reference Rutjens and van der Lee2020; Rutjens et al., Reference Rutjens, Zarzeczna and van der Lee2022; Rutjens, Zarzeczna, & van der Lee Reference Rutjens, Zarzeczna and van der Lee2022). Consequently, during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 some spiritual practitioners opposed state-led vaccination campaigns (Houtman & Aupers, Reference Houtman, Aupers, Houtman and Watts2024).

It is no surprise that holistic ideas about health and healing evoked hostility and accusations of quackery from the public and the medical establishment. And yet it has been popularized and normalized over the last decades. Although holistic health continues to meet with scientific skepticism, and its practitioners are sometimes still called “witch doctors” (Brown, Reference Brown, Houtman and Watts2024) – particularly in extreme cases when patients are advised to reject conventional medical treatments altogether – much of the public resistance to medical alternatives has withered away since the 1990s. Part of the explanation is that self-enclosed NRMs that were freely experimenting with alternative ideas and healing methods have made way for a broad public interest in what is now known as Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). To give an indication: about one-third of the adult population in the United States used some form of CAM between 2002 and 2012, with a significant increase across this period. Particularly holistic practices like yoga, tai chi, and qi gong became more popular, increasing from 5.8 percent in 2002 to 6.7 percent in 2007 and 10.1 percent in 2012 (Clarke et al., Reference Clarke, Black, Stussman, Barnes and Nahin2015). In Europe, over the course of the year 2018, no less than 25 percent of the population used at least one form of CAM – such as manual therapies, alternative medical systems, traditional Asian medical systems, and mind–body therapy.

These data demonstrate a mainstreaming of CAM and its Romantic worldview, but at the same time they show the increased instrumentalization of its use. CAM treatments have been pragmatically integrated into mainstream health care institutions alongside modern biomedicine (Fisher & Ward, Reference Fisher and Ward1994; Winnick, Reference Winnick2005). So while initially developed and applied in countercultural NRMs as an alternative to mainstream health care, CAM is now generally used as a supplement to modern medical and/or psychological therapies. Holistic health has as such become less and less of an alternative to conventional medicine, having instead evolved into what is nowadays called “integrative” medicine. Given the absence of credible scientific evidence for either the efficacy of holistic healing or its metaphysical underpinnings, this integration of biomedicine and complementary holistic healing is quite remarkable (Brown, Reference Brown, Houtman and Watts2024). It appears to be a response to public discontents about the impersonal character of modern health care and concerns about its side effects. Among motivations to engage in CAM, we typically find “a preference for natural care instead of biomedical medicine, a desire for more personalized and holistic care, dissatisfaction with biomedicine and dissatisfaction with the doctor–patient relationship” (Kemppainen et al., Reference Kemppainen, Kemppainen, Reippainen, Salmenniemi and Vuolanto2018: 449). The increased clinical significance of holistic health has coincided with processes of professionalization, as exemplified by the establishment of a range of peer-reviewed and scientifically recognized journals devoted to the study of CAM (e.g., Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine, since 1994; Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, since 1995; Alternative Medicine Review, since 1996; BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, since 2001; and Journal of Traditional and Complementary Medicine, since 2011).

The increased reliance on holistic health is part and parcel of a more general “re-habilitation of nature” that has occurred since the 1970s (Campbell, Reference Campbell2007). In the wake of concerns about worldwide environmental issues, animal rights, and a Romantic celebration of nature, it is indeed hardly surprising that the appeal of holistic health has increased. Campbell (Reference Campbell2007: 97) goes as far as to argue that this turn to nature has resulted in “a revolution in mental therapy,” in which it is widely assumed that “health and wholeness are natural conditions and that illness is something created by humans themselves.”

While biomedicine and holistic healing have thus become increasingly integrated, it would be incorrect to believe that conflicts between the two paradigms of health and healthcare have disappeared (Barrett et al., Reference Barrett, Marchand and Scheder2003) or that their differences no longer give rise to protest and criticism. Advocates of the biomedical model can still be found lamenting that patients are being misled, and this scientific skepticism prompts calls to empirically assess the actual efficacy of holistic therapies by using double-blind randomized control trials – considered the gold standard in scientific circles due to their ability to effectively cancel out so-called placebo effects. However, given that such controlled experiments are informed by the very dualism and reductionism that advocates of holistic health reject, the debate over the validity of CAM goes on. Academically trained Dutch general practitioners who double as holistic healers dismiss the notion that modern biomedicine can actually cure their patients (Raaphorst & Houtman, Reference Raaphorst and Houtman2016). They use biomedicine pragmatically to prevent their patients from dying, to be sure, but do nonetheless sharply distinguish between death prevention and health care, the latter conceived holistically. For these doctors, then, seeking refuge in biomedicine entails a necessary, albeit unfortunate, response to long years of health neglect, including that of nonphysical (spiritual) problems that could and should have been treated holistically much earlier on (Raaphorst & Houtman, Reference Raaphorst and Houtman2016). Debates and disagreements about the validity, utility, and shortcomings of holistic health and biomedicine still linger, in short, even though visible conflicts appear to be increasingly rare – with the exception of the widespread opposition to COVID-19 vaccines. Meanwhile, the popularity of holistic healthcare and spiritual healing continues to grow.

Spirituality in Business

Another development that exemplifies the mainstreaming of the Romantic-religious logic of NRMs, particularly in the form of New Age ideas and practices, is its integration into the world of work (Watts & Houtman, Reference Watts and Houtman2022). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Romantic counterculture and the NRMs formed in its bosom, powered trenchant critiques of modern capitalism, dismissing it as alienating, dehumanizing, and disenchanting. Things have changed considerably. Since the 1980s, many adherents of the New Age movement have ceased to think of work and life, profit and self-expression, and capitalism and spirituality as irreconcilable. Quite the contrary. According to Paul Heelas (Reference Heelas1996), the aim became increasingly to overcome work-life “schizophrenia” and to shift to more world-affirming approaches. The process is evident in the increasing integration of various forms of New Age spirituality and business. Pointing out the business world’s interest in and adoption of New Age ideas, Human Potential courses, and Asian practices such as Zen meditation and hatha yoga, Heelas (Reference Heelas1996: 30) observes: “Inner spirituality is here utilized as a means to experiencing the best of the outer world, rather than being intrinsically valued. Downplaying, even ignoring the role played by detachment, the emphasis is now on empowerment and prosperity.”

The first examples of “New Age capitalism” or the “prosperity wing” of the New Age movement, as Heelas (Reference Heelas1996) calls it, emerged in the 1970s in the United States and have since spread across the globe. Perhaps the most influential example is Erhard Seminars Training (est). Its founder Werner Erhard (b. 1935) was an active member of the Church of Scientology, but also offered spiritual seminars based on a mixture of gestalt therapy, psychosynthesis, Zen meditation, and management training. Unlike most countercultural gurus, he encouraged participants to use spiritual insights to function better in private life and at work alike. Under the motto “Whatever the world is doing, go do that,” est exemplifies a new approach combining the “best of both worlds” – the spiritual world of holism (valuing inner spirituality, self-expression) and business life (work, efficiency, and personal success).

According to the sociologist Steven Tipton (Reference Tipton1982), this approach became successful in the 1970s for two related reasons. On the one hand, countercultural members of NRMs became disappointed and disenchanted with the revolutionary ideals, promises, and prophecies of a coming New Age of Aquarius. This led the emphasis in the New Age milieu to shift from social transformation to personal spiritual growth. On the other hand, having had their formative years in the 1960s and cherishing self-expression as the highest value, many felt increasingly stifled in their nine-to-five routines, imprisoned in Weber’s (Reference Weber2005 [1904/5]) “iron cage” of modern working life. Reporting on the “efforts of soul-seeking, spirituality, sensual re-enchantments and self-expressivism” among this cohort at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Casey (Reference Casey2004: 72, 76) writes: “Their activities are responses to experienced lackings in overly rationalized, instrumentalized and dispirited bureaucratic organizations and industrially disciplined workplaces.” Indeed, as self-expression and spirituality became the core ideals for private life in the wake of the 1960s, many workers – especially among the professional-managerial class – began to yearn for an integration of those ideals in their professional lives, too. Est was one of the first and one of the most popular seminars that tried to combine these worlds:

The goals of “inner satisfaction” and “external success” were, thus, reconciled in est trainings, and this synthesis has become more mainstream ever since. In 1984, Erhard founded Erhard Transformational Technologies, which invited companies to attend its seminars. Other examples from this same period include Lifespring and the Silva Mind Control Method (“Use the power of your mind to increase your sales”). Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (aka Osho, 1931–1990), who mobilized holistic ontologies to coin the term “materialist spirituality” and to deconstruct the dichotomies of spirituality versus prosperity, work versus detachment, and this-worldliness versus other-worldliness, even offered trainings in “efficiency management.”

The mainstreaming of “workplace spirituality” is also captured by the increased popularity of commercial courses and the booming business of self-help literature. In sociological terms, the New Age evolved from an alternative “cult movement” to a commercial “client and audience cult” offering spiritual services (Stark & Bainbridge, Reference Stark and Bainbridge1985: 209). New Age became a broad cultural phenomenon oriented toward people in all layers of society, functions, and professions (Hanegraaff, Reference Hanegraaff1996). This development was initiated from within the spiritual milieu itself, where adherents dropped out of formal, narrowly enclosed NRMs and cults in order to take advantage of an attractive spiritual approach to everyday issues like work and prosperity. Meanwhile, companies, business organizations, and managers co-opted spirituality in the 1980s, considering it valuable, or plainly strategic, to take a more humanistic or spiritual stance. Indeed, management literature formerly emphasizing rational reasoning, strategic thinking, and instrumentality, began to open up to spiritual discourse in the 1980s. Titles like The I-Ching on Business and Decision-making (Damian-Knight, Reference Damian-Knight1986), The Intuitive Manager (Rowan, Reference Rowan1986), and Working and Managing in a New Age (Garland, Reference Garland1990) demonstrate this shift. Influential management gurus like Tony Robbins and Stephen Covey emerged and destigmatized spirituality, introducing it to a large audience. In bestsellers like Unlimited Power (Reference Robbins1997 [1989]) and Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Physical and Financial Destiny (1991), Robbins connected “inner power” with societal status and success. In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (Reference Covey1992 [1989]) Stephen Covey, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, argued for a veritable paradigm shift through an “inside-out approach” in business life by opening up to personal growth and spiritual experience.

In addition to this self-help literature focusing on individual managers, a growing number of management journals such as People Management, Industry Week, and Sloan Management Review started giving explicit attention to the role of spirituality in business organizations. Reviewing this literature, which also took off in the 1980s, we find that the Romantic critique of technocratic thinking is paradoxically co-opted and incorporated to serve the interests of business. The management scholars involved decry narrowly prescribed work roles, functions, and positions in hierarchical organizational structures as dehumanizing, because they alienate people from who they really are – their deeper, inner, or “spiritual selves.” Donde Ashmos and Dennis Duchon (Reference Ashmos and Duchon2000: 136) correctly observe that the spiritual discourse in the world of business is an attempt to demolish the problematic segregation between the private and the public realm and, in doing so, to re-introduce a sense of personal meaning or “soul” at the workplace: “The spirituality at work movement is about more meaningful work, about connection between the soul and work.” In the same vein, based on extensive in-depth interviews and 2,000 surveys in American companies in the 1990s, Mitroff and Denton (Reference Mitroff and Denton1999: 14) conclude that it is pivotal for organizations to integrate spirituality:

Even though these arguments are clearly derived from the Romantic counterculture, they are hardly formulated as critiques of the goals and foundations of modern capitalism. Although some refer to the need for a paradigm shift in business life, most calls for holism, authenticity, experience, and self-expression actually respect the neatly defined boundaries of traditional economic and instrumental management thinking. Drawing on the holistic perspective, the argument is simply that there is no conflict between economic striving and spiritual development, so that we are dealing with a win-win situation. Here, happy people are considered efficient people, or as Klein and Izzo (Reference Klein and Izzo1998: 18) put it, “work is about spirit as much as salary.” Intrinsically motivated people guided by “inner spirituality” allegedly experience less stress in their job, and are much more productive, communicative, creative, and competitive, which is profitable for every organization. Starting from this assumption, countless commercial centers and professional trainers have emerged in the United States and Western Europe since the 1990s, offering their spiritual services to companies in order to accommodate Romantic longings for self-realization with capitalist profit seeking.

One of our own studies in the Netherlands (Aupers & Houtman, Reference Aupers and Houtman2006) shows the goals, worldviews, and practices of this spiritual industry emerging in the 1990s. One of the first and most influential centers was Oibibio, founded in Amsterdam in 1993 by Ronald-Jan Heijn. Oibibio’s business department offered training in spiritual management, such as “Team management and the soul” and “Management in astrological perspective,” aimed at keeping companies “ready for battle” during times when “dynamic streams of production, services and information increasingly put pressure on organizations and managers.” They made the following claim in their flyer: “Our trainers are builders of bridges: they speak the language of business life and pragmatically know how to implant the spiritual philosophy in your organization; they do so in cooperation with your employees” (Aupers & Houtman, Reference Aupers and Houtman2006: 212). Although Oibibio went bankrupt in the late 1990s, this certainly did not trigger a decline of New Age capitalism in the Netherlands. Instead, its bankruptcy marked the birth of many other, more successful New Age centers, such as Metavisie, Soulstation, Being in Business, and Firmament. Such centers typically describe their services as follows:

In the wake of the 1990s, spirituality thus ceased to be incompatible with work, commercial goals, and business life. Corporate as well as governmental organizations – from banks to insurance companies and government ministries – started offering spiritual training to their employees. Examples include Guinness, General Dynamics, Boeing Aerospace, and even the US Army (Heelas, Reference Heelas1996). More recently, Dennis LoRusso (Reference LoRusso2017: 5) has observed that common managerial sense increasingly dictates that, “business leaders and managers have an obligation to attend to the spiritual needs of their employees.” This wisdom has been imbibed by companies as large as Google, Nike, and Salesforce, each of which now carves out “physical spaces where individuals may ‘recharge’ through relaxation, meditation, or engage in daily prayers” (Gog et al., 2020: 5). Google even established its own mindfulness-based management training program, called Search Inside Yourself, which has meanwhile been exported to business schools around the globe.

Naisbitt and Aburdene (Reference Naisbitt and Aburdene1990: 273) refer to a survey of 500 American companies, at least half of which had, at some point, offered “consciousness-raising techniques” to their employees. It is estimated that in the 1990s American companies spent at least $4 billion annually on New Age consultants, accounting for more than 10 percent of the $30 billion spent on company training each year (Swets & Bjork, Reference Swets and Bjork1990; Nadesan, Reference Nadesan1999). Perhaps the best illustration are offerings of Zen meditation or mindfulness training to employees in companies such as Google, General Mills, Intel, Goldman Sachs, Nike, and AstraZeneca. Even though such in-company trainings and consciousness-raising techniques are for obvious reasons not always explicitly referred to as “spiritual” in such professional contexts, their Romantic religious underpinnings remain in play.

Meditation has been increasingly adapted to a Western context and disconnected from Asian traditions, since its introduction through Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among Beat Poets like Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg – open-minded, spirituality-seeking rebels and forerunners of the counterculture in the 1950s – meditation was still primarily a countercultural practice aimed at detaching from the burdens of everyday life and work routines. Its principal contemporary offshoot, mindfulness, has however become almost completely disconnected from any religious and spiritual roots, and is now presented as a neutral, efficient technique to discipline the self (Cortois, Aupers, & Houtman, Reference Cortois, Aupers and Houtman2018). This disconnection from religion explains much of its popularity in business organizations where, as Kucinskas (Reference Kucinskas2018) observes, the “mindful elite” is collectively trained to be productive and stay competitive in the context of contemporary capitalism. In her book Selling Yoga: From Counter Culture to Pop Culture, Andrea Jain (Reference Jain2014) takes this analysis a step further, characterizing the common practice of yoga in contemporary business life as “neo-liberal spirituality.” She considers in-company yoga training as capitalism’s latest trick to control employees, now that hierarchical and authoritarian modes of control have lost their former legitimacy. From a more general stance, spirituality in business life has become part and parcel of what Boltanski and Chiapello (Reference Boltanski and Chiapello2007) call “the new spirit of capitalism” – an exercise in “soft power” derived from the artistic, creative, and expressivist ethic of the Western counterculture.

Whereas advocates applaud attempts at bringing “the soul back to work,” critics point out the logic of capitalism that underlies such initiatives by emphasizing its role as a new, concealed mode of social control (Watts & Houtman, Reference Watts and Houtman2022). Even so, it is quite clear that Romantic religion has increasingly found its place in the business world. In short, this development signifies a marked shift from world-rejecting – and even millenarian – forms of New Age spirituality, practiced in enclosed communities that sustain a tension with the outside world, to a more world-affirming stance in which spirituality is mobilized in work and everyday life. And of course, the argument can also be formulated the other way around: spiritual New Age training – from Human Potential courses, yoga, and reiki to mindfulness meditation – have lost much of their former social stigma as deviant, fuzzy, irrational, or dangerous. Much like holistic health, mindfulness has been de-stigmatized and normalized in the twenty-first century. In the next section, we discuss a much neglected cause of this increased social and public significance of Romantic forms of religion: their dissemination in and through movies, television series, and videogames, and their subsequent penetration into the heart of Silicon Valley’s high-tech industry.

Occulture in Fiction, Film, and Television

In the 1960s and 1970s, NRMs were still chiefly considered deviant and sometimes even dangerous. Their increased popularity among young people in the 1960s triggered what can be called a wave of “moral panic” (Cohen, Reference Cohen1972). Worried parents, priests, politicians, and groups like the anticult movement considered NRMs the ultimate symbol of evil – a “folk devil” and scapegoat blamed for the decline of established Christianity and common decency. Mass media played a vital role in stirring this moral panic and intensifying tensions between NRMs and the societal mainstream. News media reported on NRMs in a highly sensationalistic fashion by selecting the most extreme examples and relying on pars pro toto stigmatization, stereotypes, exaggeration, and distortion (Richardson & Introvigne, Reference Richardson, Introvigne and Bromley2007). Fictional books and movies at the time often portrayed NRMs and alternative religious ideas as evil Others. Movies exhibited a veritable “Satanic scare” and generated a more general fear of esotericism, Paganism, and occultism by juxtaposing “good” Christianity with “bad” Pagan religion or imagery. Their narratives dramatically framed the latter as a horrifying threat to Western society in general, and to vulnerable, pure, innocent babies, children, and women in particular. For instance, in the 1968 movie Rosemary’s Baby, a young, somewhat naïve woman gradually finds out that she is part of an occultist conspiracy, which includes her husband and neighbors, and that she has been made pregnant by Satan. The film The Exorcist (1973) features a child possessed by the devil, spitting green sulfur and shouting profanities at her mother and the Catholic priest trying to save her. In The Omen (1976), a politician and his wife adopt a boy named Damian, who starts killing people when he reaches the age of five. He proves to be the anti-Christ himself. Most notable, in the movie The Wickerman (1973), a policeman investigates a young girl’s disappearance on an isolated Scottish island where Pagan folklore and rituals still prevail. In solving the mystery, the film unveils the horrifying truth about this ancient, non-Christian, and “barbaric” Pagan community, ending with a human sacrifice. Such movies demonstrate how, in the 1970s, NRMs, particularly non-Christian forms of Paganism and occultism, were framed as the horrifying, irrational Other of modern (Christian) society and civilization – quite literally as a folk devil. Such movies thus functioned as an effective trope to consolidate and strengthen the boundaries between “good” Christianity and rational modernity, on the one hand, and “bad” pagan religion and irrationality, on the other.

Although there are still examples of films in which paganism is presented as evil in folk horror (e.g., The Witch [2015] or Midsommar [2019]), we have witnessed a change, or even a reversal, of this moral stance over the last decades. Particularly popular horror TV series and sitcoms in the 1990s, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Charmed (1998–2006), and Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996–2003), reflect and shape a more positive perspective on Paganism, occultism, and magic. In these series, typically female protagonists are engaged with evil as well as good supernatural creatures. They possess spiritual powers, practice magic, and use this in their battle against wicked forces. Paganism, in this frame, is considered empowering. Another telling example of the popularization and normalization of magic is, of course, Harry Potter – particularly the film series, based on the widely read novels of J. K. Rowling that came out in eight films between 2001 and 2011. Popular fantasy narratives like these, Feldt (Reference Feldt2016) argues, relocate magic to the ordinary life-worlds of young people and influence the ways they perceive religion, spirituality, and magic: “Harry Potter has powerfully re-introduced magic and prevalent ideas from contemporary magical milieus, along with other religious fragments and a teleological, purposeful world, into the mainstream of the Western collective imaginary” (Feldt, 2016: 109–10).

This normalization of paganism, Witchcraft, and magic in popular culture has, of course, not gone uncontested in conservative Christian circles. Many have denounced it as morally harmful and advocated the banning of such media texts (Feldt, Reference Feldt2016: 109–10). On the other hand, it cannot be denied that their proliferation contributed much to the appeal and growth of NRMs like Paganism, Wicca, and Witchcraft among teenagers in the United States, allegedly “spark[ing] continent-wide interest in witchcraft and award[ing] the official Hollywood stamp of ‘cool’” (Partridge, Reference Partridge2004: 131). In addition, Gothic horror movies like Interview with a Vampire (1994), featuring famous actors like Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Christian Slater, humanized vampires as figures experiencing pain, suffering, and existential crises. Instead of evoking disgust and fear, these dark mythical creatures allowed audiences to identify with their anguish. Even Satanism – once feared in the form of the Church of Satan set up by Anton LaVey (1930–1997) in 1966 and culminating in “satanic panic” in the 1980s (Laycock, Reference Laycock2024: 55) – has come to be framed in popular culture as a constructive symbol of rebelliousness (Partridge, Reference Partridge2004).

In addition, science fiction films like Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999) feature Pagan and spiritual themes. Star Wars introduced The Force: an invisible, immanent, and all-pervading power that special individuals – particularly “the Jedi” – can harness for good or evil. In that sense, “Star Wars lured its viewers away from a Christian worldview and introduced them to a ‘New Age’ system of belief” (Partridge, Reference Partridge2004: 120). Caputo (Reference Caputo2001: 79, 85) considers the movie a “reproduction of elemental mythic structures,” acknowledging that the “metaphysics of Star Wars is monistic.” Furthermore, Possamai (Reference Possamai2005) points out that the Star Wars worldview spawned the fiction-based NRM of “Jediism,” the followers of which consider the movie series to be serving as a latter-day holy text. The classic film The Matrix similarly plays with both technologically enhanced (trans)human superpowers and esotericism, Buddhism, and Asian-mystical speculations about the ontological status of reality (Yeffeth, Reference Yeffeth2003). Having analyzed these and other forms of “invented religions” in film, television series, and popular culture, Cusack concludes that both “Matrixism and Jediism are evidence of the undiminished narrative power of (filmic) science fiction to inspire religion in the twenty-first century” (Reference Cusack2010: 131).

Overall, it is clear that the Romantic-religious worldviews of NRMs, once demonized in mainstream media, have lost much of their negative status and stigma. Indeed, Partridge observes the rise of “popular occulture” (Reference Partridge2004) at the expense of Christian culture. He builds on Colin Campbell’s (Reference Campbell, Kaplan and Løøv2002 [1972]) “cultic milieu” concept, which relativizes the boundaries between society on the one hand and sects, cults, and NRMs on the other, thus installing epistemological individualism and spiritual eclecticism as the new norms. Arguing that “occulture is … a resource on which people draw, a reservoir of ideas, beliefs, practices and symbols,” Partridge’s (Reference Partridge2004: 84) analysis leads him to the conclusion that we are witnessing a “re-enchantment of the West” due to “the center of spiritual gravity … moving away from Judeo-Christian theology to the eclecticism of occulture” (Partridge, Reference Partridge2004: 128). Crucially, then, “occulture” is not just appropriated in a few marginal books, movies, or series, but has become a well-established and fully institutionalized genre in the culture industries, with Paganism being abundantly mediatized, commodified, and popularized. The genre of fantasy fiction, for example, constitutes the pinnacle of this “mediatized paganism” (Aupers, Reference Aupers, Hofstee and van der Kooij2013).

Pagan Fantasy in the Culture Industry

The affinity between fantasy fiction and Paganism is established in a number of studies (Luhrmann, Reference Luhrmann1991 [1989]; Adler, Reference Adler1997[1986]; Berger, Reference Berger1999). Paganism is, first of all, a “literary culture,” with “potential magicians enter[ing] magic through browsing in bookstores” (Luhrmann, Reference Luhrmann1991 [1989]: 238). Pagans ground their worldview in books claiming objectivity, like historical works on Greek mythology, Celtic lore, Eleusian mysteries, folklore studies, or anthropological works on witchcraft or shamanism. But they also freely use fictional works to design and legitimate their own traditions (Luhrmann, Reference Luhrmann1991 [1989]). This use of fiction is, for instance, demonstrated by the Pagan appropriation of Witchcraft Today (1954) – a book written by Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), the founder of the Wicca movement, which is known to be a fictional ethnography. Another example is The Church of All Worlds, an American Pagan movement founded in the 1960s around Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). The Pagan movement self-consciously and playfully creates its own “mythopoeic history” in a modern, disenchanted or “myth-impoverished” world (Luhrmann Reference Luhrmann1991 [1989]: 238, 241).

Most influential in shaping the Pagan imagination is what is called “high fantasy.” In one of the early studies on Paganism in the United States, Adler (Reference Adler1986: 285) concludes that “science fiction and fantasy probably come closer than any other literature to systematically exploring the central concerns of Neo-Pagans and Witches.” The genre of fantasy typically features a Romantic critique of modernity while simultaneously offering monistic, nature-based forms of myth and spirituality as meaningful alternatives. Notable, in this respect, is the work of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) – an Oxford University professor who specialized in medieval English language and literature, best known for writing The Hobbit (1937) and the famous Lord of the Rings (LoTR) trilogy that was originally published in 1954 (The Fellowship of the Ring) and 1955 (The Two Towers and The Return of the King respectively). Together with C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and other fantasy writers that united in an informal Oxford-based group called the “Inklings,” Tolkien is generally considered the founder of high fantasy. Although he was a Roman Catholic, his work and its underlying worldview were deeply informed by Pagan traditions. LoTR (Tolkien, Reference Tolkien1954[1987]) takes place in “Middle Earth,” a fictional world inspired by the Middle Ages, which is inhabited by hobbits, orcs, elves, and wizards, each with their own habits, songs, languages, beliefs, and rituals. LoTR is largely based on Norse mythology and embraces a “polytheistic-cum-animist cosmology of ‘natural magic’” (Curry, Reference Curry1998: 28).

These premodern religious worldviews are important, Tolkien felt, because he believed that “the ‘war’ against mystery and magic by modernity urgently requires a re-enchantment of the world, which a sense of Earth-mysteries is much better placed to offer than a single transcendent deity” (Curry, Reference Curry1998: 28–9). The fiction of LoTR (Tolkien, Reference Tolkien1954[1987]) both reflects and constitutes this “Neopagan reverence for nature,” which became increasingly popular in the 1960s and 1970s at the expense of Christianity. It embodied the Romantic underpinnings of the countercultural NRMs at the time, emphasizing monism, experience, and expressivism. “Taken together,” Curry states, LoTR and high fantasy constitute “radical nostalgia” for a premodern world and “a remedy for pathological modernity in a nutshell: namely the resacralization (or re-enchantment) of experienced and living nature, including human nature” (Reference Curry1998: 25, 29). In his famous essay On Fairy Stories, Tolkien (Reference Tolkien2001 [1938]) himself explained that the genre of high fantasy, not unlike religion, provides a universal truth and “consolation” vis-à-vis human suffering; nevertheless, he insisted that the creation of a mythical “secondary world” filled with nature-based religion and spirituality is not a frivolous matter. A good mythmaker, he argues, “makes a secondary world that your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates to is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world” (Tolkien, Reference Tolkien2001 [1938]: 12).

The evolution of the public reception of LoTR is indicative of the normalization of the Pagan worldview and its institutionalization in the culture industry. When first published in 1954/1955, it was negatively reviewed by the literary world, with one reviewer even denouncing it as “juvenile trash” (cited in Curry, Reference Curry1998: 13). However, due to its Romantic critique of modern institutions and plea for nature-based spirituality and lived experience, it became a bestseller in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, LoTR resonated with the Romantic ideals of the counterculture. It inspired various Pagan movements and spiritual communities modeled after “The Shire” (the Hobbits’ fictional country), and it motivated political activists and hippies to launch the political campaign Frodo for President (Davidsen, Reference Davidsen2014: 185–204). Saying, as Curry (Reference Curry1998: 13) does, that “Tolkien has outlived the counter-culture in which he first flourished” is an understatement. By now, over 600 million copies of the trilogy have been sold and its successful film trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson, has become a landmark in Hollywood. The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003) were crucial to bringing high fantasy to a wide mainstream audience in audiovisual format. LoTR’s cultural legacy continues to live on in fantasy films and TV series like HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019), House of the Dragon (2022–2024), or The Chronicles of Narnia (2005–2010). Campbell acknowledges the pivotal role of the fantasy genre in animating what he calls the “mythopoeic culture” that emerged in the countercultural 1960s and 1970s, sensitizing people to post-Christian, alternative forms of religion and spirituality:

In the twenty-first century, Pagan narratives have become trans-medial due to their migration from mass media formats – literature, film, and TV series – to computer games that invite their players to escape modern life by actively immersing themselves in virtual fantasy worlds that are brimming with magic, mysticism, and the supernatural. Instead of passively reading texts or watching movies and television, gamers can now actively participate in such worlds through role-playing and the formation of social communities. Digital games exemplify what can be called the “spiritual experience economy” (Aupers, Reference Aupers, Houtman and Meyer2012).

Already in the 1970s, early game designers drew inspiration from the work of Tolkien and the fantasy genre (Turkle, Reference Turkle2002; Bartle, Reference Bartle2004). As Davis (Reference Davis1999 [1998]: 208) observes, “The Lord of the Rings didn’t just make you want to escape in another world; it made you want to build your own.” Sherry Turkle (Reference Turkle2002: 18) confirms: “The personal computer movement of the 1970s and 1980s was deeply immersed in Tolkien and translated his fantasy worlds into hugely popular (and enduring) role-playing games.” From board games like Dungeons and Dragons (1972) to the first digital multiplayer games like Adventure (1976) and countless text-based role-playing games like The Shire (1979), Ringen (1979), Lord of the Rings (1981), LORD (1981), Ring of Doom (1983), Ringmaster (1984), The Mines of Moria (1985), Bilbo (1989), The Balrogian Trilogy (1989), and Elendor (1991) – the Pagan spirituality of LoTR was, and still is, highly influential in the game industry. In that sense, Richard Bartle (Reference Bartle2004: 61–2), one of the most influential designers in the field of online gaming, stated, “The single most important influence on virtual worlds from fiction is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.”

Narratives featuring Romantic (Pagan) religion and spirituality are particularly prevalent in Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). The first generation of these online games, developed in the 1990s and 2000s, include Ultima Online (1997), Everquest (1999), Dark Age of Camelot (2001), and World of Warcraft (2004). As the producers of World of Warcraft comment in their advertisements: “A world awaits … Descend into the World of Warcraft and join thousands of mighty heroes in an online world of myth, magic and limitless adventure … An infinity of experiences await. So what are you waiting for?” The main difference between these and console games (those played on an Xbox or PlayStation) is that these online environments facilitate interactive role-playing and collective community building in an audiovisual space inhabited by multiple players, often thousands of them. Indeed, MMORPGs are not just games, but interactive worlds that boast lived experiences. Given the fantasy content of these games, Rushkoff (Reference Rushkoff1996: 127) argues, they afford a “world of paganism” – otherworldly environments that “include pagan rituals, magic spells, interdimensional travel, mysterious keys, objects with totemic powers, companion animals.” Through role-play, gamers can freely experiment with Pagan worldviews, animism, and polytheism and, in doing so, reflect on their value for their own (religious) identity (Schaap & Aupers, Reference Schaap and Aupers2017). They can also “play a religious Other” and start to empathize with religious-spiritual worldviews that are not their own (De Wildt & Aupers, Reference de Wildt and Aupers2019). Two examples of MMORPGs demonstrate the possibilities that religious role-play games afford. In Everquest, one can become a sorcerer, warlock, wizard, enchanter, illusionist, coercer, summoner, necromancer, conjurer, druid, warden, fury, shaman, defiler, or mystic. In Dark Age of Camelot, one can become a cabalist, rune master, bone dancer, spirit master, healer, bard, mentalist, or animist. All of these player roles are well defined in their instructions and come with different spiritual qualities and rituals. For instance, if you choose to be a shaman, you can do the following according to the manual of World of Warcraft:

In addition to role-playing, players can choose clans, tribes, or guilds to connect and collectively celebrate their adopted beliefs. In World of Warcraft, for instance, one can choose to join the Church of the Holy Light, a full-fledged religious organization with a council of bishops, priests, and approximately 800,000 members who do not adhere to a transcendent God, but embrace a spiritual force that permeates everything. Much like The Force in Star Wars, this Holy Light enhances human power and advocates treading the “path of the three virtues.” This demonstrates the fact that whereas Paganism plays the most prominent role in computer games, it is complemented with countless other forms of religiosity. Religious eclecticism is indeed the norm in game design, with producers freely drawing on “fiction-based religion” as well as “history-based religion” (Davidsen, Reference Davidsen2014). Twenty-first-century games such as Age of Mythology (2002), Assasins Creed (2007–2023), Final Fantasy (1987–2023), Ōkami (2006), Prince of Persia (1989–2024), Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), and myriad others have their roots in Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Chinese, Shinto, Zoroastrian, and other theo-mythologies (De Wildt & Aupers, Reference de Wildt and Aupers2021). Despite the fictional character of their narratives, these games are often considered “real” by their audiences and devoted fans, either because they are decoded in a nonliteral, existential, or symbolic fashion (Campbell, Reference Campbell2007), or because they are subjectively experienced as real (Aupers, Reference Aupers, Houtman and Meyer2012). Moreover, they often provide resources to develop “pop theologies” in online discussions (De Wildt & Aupers, Reference de Wildt and Aupers2019) or even build a full-fledged “invented religion” (Cusack, Reference Cusack2010), “fiction-based religion” (Davidsen, Reference Davidsen2014), or “hyper-real religion” (Possamai, Reference Possamai2005).

In conclusion, Paganism is now omnipresent in media – in books, films, TV series, as well as online games. Particularly through high fantasy it has entered the culture industry as a stable and institutionalized genre available to a large, diverse audience. This development is as ironic as it is paradoxical. Like all countercultural NRMs, Paganism is intrinsically critical of the modern world of science, technology, and capitalist consumption. And yet, it is now repackaged, produced, and consumed in a fully mediatized and commodified context. Online games produced by Sony, Microsoft, Blizzard Entertainment, and other companies in the game industry, literally sell Pagan worlds of mystery, magic, and spirituality. One game designer goes as far as to say that at a conference on videogames “spiritual experiences are, in fact, our business” (Moriarty, 1993, cited in Aupers, Reference Aupers, Houtman and Meyer2012).

This is, of course, not an entirely new development. Sociologists of religion have characterized the new religiosities that play out beyond the Christian churches as governed by the logic of the market: as a “market of ultimate significance” (Luckmann, Reference Luckmann1967), a “client and audience cult” (Stark & Bainbridge, Reference Stark and Bainbridge1985) or even a “commodification of spirituality” (Carette & King, Reference Carette and King2004). The Paganism that is endemic to computer games does not merely entail a commodification of spirituality, however, but also indicates a “spiritualization of commodities” (Aupers, Reference Aupers, Houtman and Meyer2012). In what has been called the “experience economy” (Pine & Gilmore, Reference Pine and Gilmore1999), esotericism, Paganism, magic, and mysticism drive a narrative that promises to enrich consumers’ personal lives. According to Lau (Reference Lau2000: 9), such religious narratives do not simply “circle back to an imagined past existing prior to industrialization, a past epitomized by references to more integrated relationships and the interconnectedness of all living things,” but also promise to heal “the anxieties about risk society and the diseases of modernity.”

This paradox of seeking (spiritual) salvation in a fully mediatized, technological, and commodified context can be taken one step further with the rise and popularity of what may be called “NRMs 2.0” in the heart of the modern tech industry: Silicon Valley.

NRMs in Silicon Valley

In his global bestseller, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, the historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari writes, “The new religions are unlikely to emerge from the caves of Afghanistan or from the madrasas of the Middle East. Rather, they will emerge from research laboratories (Harari, Reference Harari2016: 351). Spiritual salvation, Harari contends, is no longer monopolized by traditional religion from East or West. “Despite all the talk of radical Islam and Christian fundamentalism,” he observes, “the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley. That’s where high-tech gurus are brewing for us brave new religions that have nothing to do with God, and everything to do with technology” (Harari, Reference Harari2016: 351).

We can consider the online game worlds discussed earlier as examples of such “brave new religions.” Highly advanced computer technology – complex software programs, algorithms, animations, graphics, and pixels – here opens up the possibility to immerse players in premodern religions and provide them with supernatural powers. Yet, Harari refers not so much to religious narratives in virtual worlds but rather to a religion of digital technology, that is, to NRMs in which participants conceive advanced digital worlds as capable of enhancing human potential and bringing spiritual salvation. In a variation on the famous slogan of Marshall McLuhan: such NRMs hold that the medium itself is the (religious) message.

To be sure, such technologically enhanced new religions have a long history in Western, Christian culture (Noble, Reference Noble1999 [1997]), but most relevant for our analysis is the fact that contemporary varieties can be traced back to the Romantic counterculture of the 1960s. Extending his analysis of the counterculture (1968), Theodore Roszak noted in From Satori to Silicon Valley (Reference Roszak2000) that the countercultural milieu of the 1960s did not unambiguously consider technology alienating. The counterculture certainly featured nature-celebrating Romantics and NRMs that adopted a strict luddite, anti-technological stance. Those concerned considered high-tech part and parcel of “the system” and understood giant mainframe computers – developed and owned by large corporations like IBM, the state, and the military – as basically incompatible with spirituality. At the same time, however, the counterculture also featured a typically unacknowledged wing of technophiles – Romantic hippies, spiritual hackers, and programmers who similarly resisted “the system” yet considered personalized computer technology a powerful tool of salvation rather than alienation (e.g., Rushkoff, Reference Rushkoff1994; Aupers, Houtman & Pels, Reference Aupers, Houtman, Pels and de Vries2008; Aupers, Reference Aupers2009; Aupers & Houtman, Reference Aupers and Houtman2010). This technophile wing of the counterculture has given rise to countless new NRMs in Silicon Valley, all based on the same Romantic underpinnings as New Age, the Human Potential Movement, and Paganism. The main difference is that these “NRMs 2.0” have revised ontological understandings of (human) nature by embracing technology as a source of spiritual experience and salvation. As Davis (Reference Davis1999 [1998]: 119) argues, such new NRMs in Silicon Valley “reject the pastel visions of the New Age” and “extol a new strain of technological perfectionism, one that comes across as a brain-jacked, hardheaded revision of the human potential movement.”

Key players in the California spiritual milieu responsible for the development of such “high-tech New Age” (Hanegraaff, Reference Hanegraaff1996: 11) were people like Ken Kesey, Terrence McKenna and, most notably, Timothy Leary. Their early experiments with hallucinogenic drugs as a tool for self-knowledge and spirituality go hand in hand with an interest in digital technology. During the 1980s and 1990s, Leary argued already that “hard technology” may in fact promise a more effective avenue toward spiritual experience and salvation than “soft techniques” like yoga, tai chi, chakra healing, or even mind-expanding drugs. He compared the personal computer to LSD (e.g., Dery, Reference Dery1996), proposed to move from “psychedelia” to “cyberdelia,” and suggested that one can escape an “alienating” and “repressive” modern society by immersing oneself in the new otherworldly realm of cyberspace that computer networks were opening up at the time:

Leary was no exception in the 1990s. The new technologies of the personal computer, internet, and the World Wide Web rapidly gave rise to “counter culture 2.0” (Dery, Reference Dery1996) or “cyberian counterculture” (Rushkoff, Reference Rushkoff1994: 6–7). Its aficionados in the San Francisco Bay Area were countercultural hippies, New Agers, and self-proclaimed techno-pagans and spiritual hackers working in the domain of high-tech – all sharing ideas about the role of digital technology in extending human potential and the coming of a technology-enhanced New Age. Douglas Rushkoff summarizes:

More than the fantasy genre, it was science fiction that inspired religious-spiritual imaginations of cyberspace and virtual reality in this period. Most notable was the work of cyberpunk authors like William Gibson (who coined the concept “cyberspace”), Vernor Vinge (“The Other Plane”), and Neal Stephenson (“The Metaverse”). In his novel Neuromancer (1995 [1984]), Gibson famously described a future society in which the protagonist “lived for the bodiless exul-tation [sic] of cyberspace,” experiencing ordinary life and material reality as “the fall” and the body as “meat” or “a prison of flesh” (Gibson, 1995 [Reference Gibson1984]: 12). Hackers, internet gurus, writers, and journalists made cyberspace and virtual reality the staple of a romantic-spiritual discourse in the technophile wing of the counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area. The discourse was featured in countercultural journals and magazines like the New Earth Catalogue (founded by Stewart Brand), Mondo 2000, and Wired Magazine; at raves, multimedia performances, and outdoor festivals like Burning Man in the Nevada desert, where art, psychedelics, and technology are ritualized to transform human consciousness; and at seminars like MindState or Technology and Transcendence (Zandbergen, Reference Zandbergen2011). Such events in the 1990s imagined cyberspace as an otherworldly and disembodied space of spiritual liberation: a “paradise” where we “will all be angels, and for eternity!” (Stenger Reference Stenger and Benedikt1992 [1991]: 52), a “new Jerusalem” (Benedikt Reference Benedikt and Benedikt1992 [1991]: 14), indeed a “technological substitute of the Christian space of heaven” (Wertheim Reference Wertheim1999: 16).

This techno-spirituality was not a short-lived trend in the 1990s, but has become a permanent feature of the culture of Silicon Valley that co-evolves with and is constantly updated by new developments in the domain of technology. Various technology-focused NRMs exemplify this. The Raelian movement, founded in 1974 by Claude Vorilhon (b. 1946), had traditionally held that humans are genetically engineered by space aliens (the Elohim), but has more recently come to seek salvation and eternal life through cloning, biotechnology, and nanotechnology (Machado, Reference Machado, Aupers and Houtman2010). The so-called “Extropians,” founded by the philosopher Max More in 1988 and represented in the World Transhumanist Association (1998) and the Journal of Transhumanism (1998), strive for human enhancement and eternal life by investigating developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, robotics, and space exploration.

Much of this type of techno-spirituality falls under the heading of trans- or posthumanism (Fukuyama, Reference Fukuyama2002; Geraci, Reference Geraci2010; Harari, Reference Harari2016). Unlike nature-oriented NRMs, these new movements focus not so much on “who we really are” or “how we can become who we really are,” but rather adopt a constructivist perspective that foregrounds “what we can become.” Here humanistic forms of spirituality, so characteristic of Paganism, the Human Potential Movement, and the New Age, are transformed into posthumanistic ones. This discourse does not hold that we are essentially Gods, hidden in the deeper layers of our beings, but rather that we can become like (immortal) Gods through the use of new technology. It is from this perspective that Harari writes about the creation of Homo Deus (Reference Harari2016). Ray Kurzweil – probably the most outspoken and influential posthumanist in the milieu – argues in Transcendent Man (Ptolemy, Reference Ptolemy2009), the documentary about his life and work: “Does God exist? I would say, ‘Not yet’.”

Kurzweil is not a marginal figure in Silicon Valley. He is a respected and influential computer scientist, well known for inventing the first print-to-speech reading machine and for his work on life-extension as director at Google’s spin-off company Calico since 2012. In his bestselling books The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Reference Kurzweil1999) and The Singularity Is Near (Reference Kurzweil2005), he optimistically prophesizes the ultimate promises of biotechnology, information communication technology, and artificial intelligence, that is, radical improvements in human cognition, health, and wellbeing. Kurzweil doesn’t stop at pointing out these mundane advantages. He predicts that humans will ultimately merge with technology so as to become, literally, supernatural creatures that transcend the human condition, plagued as it has traditionally been by misfortune, illness, and death. Together with a handful of pioneers in the fields of techno-science – for example, Hans Moravec (robotics), Eric Drexler (co-founder of nanotechology), and the late Marvin Minsky (cognitive science, co-founder of AI) – Kurzweil prefigures variegated technologies of salvation, the most spectacular one being “storing consciousness into a computer” or “uploading it to cyberspace” so as to attain immortality (Aupers & Houtman, Reference Aupers and Houtman2010; Geraci, Reference Geraci2010). Based on radical materialist interpretations of the brain and human consciousness as being “mere patterns of information” that can be copied, saved, and transferred to a computer, robot, or the Internet, trans- or posthumanists hold that we can live forever online like disembodied and immortal gods, angels, or spiritual entities.

Various NRMs have formed around these posthumanist dreams in online groups (see Aupers, Reference Aupers2009; Geraci, Reference Geraci2010), like the Society for Universal Immortalism, according to which, “We have a soul and it’s informational by nature.” The I-will-be-God theme figures prominently among Silicon Valley trans- and posthumanists. David, an aerospace engineer and programmer, who talks about his conversion from Christian fundamentalism to a believer in this new tech-religion, hopes to get “rid of the meat” and “set the spirit free.” Eric, a producer of digital chips in a Silicon Valley factory, muses about his experiences once his consciousness has been uploaded: “Here I am in a computer. And I am faster, I could be transmitted across the universe as bits, instead of a body. This maps out the notion of being souls, spiritual entities.” An Extropian programmer referring to himself as Reason, finally, comments:

All of the foregoing demonstrates how the Romantic logic of the NRMs no longer arouses concern or panic, but has become mediatized, commodified, and technologized. First of all, it has become a mainstay in popular (oc)culture since at least the 1990s. Films and TV series use its signs and symbols as tropes to hack out an imaginary space of ultimate meaning in juxtaposition to Christianity and the alienations of late-modern life. It has meanwhile also become prominent in online computer games that allow players to (inter)actively immerse themselves in virtual worlds of magical possibilities and enchantment. The contemporary culture industry thus paradoxically thrives on the religious logic of NRMs that initially opposed rationalization, capitalism, and mass media as alienating forces. The irony of this has not gone unnoticed. Over the last decades of the twentieth century, Frank (1998) notes, capitalist corporations have co-opted countercultural Romanticism in a relentless “conquest of cool.” In a similar vein, Heath and Potter point out that markets, brands, and advertisements nowadays target the “rebellious consumer” since “the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for the past forty years” (Reference Heath and Potter2004: 98).

This relocation of the countercultural logic of NRMs to the heart of modern society plays out not least in Silicon Valley, where digital technologies – from the personal computer in the 1970s, the internet and cyberspace in the 1990s, to contemporary nanotechnology, robotics, Artificial Intelligence and biotechnology – are no longer considered alienating, but seen as tools to afford spiritual experience and re-enchantment. Whether we are witnessing veritable “brave new religions” of the future (Harari, Reference Harari2016) or “the creation of a religion for the Third Millennium,” as VR-specialist Giulio Prisco calls it (in Geraci, Reference Geraci2010: 87), remains to be seen. What is important in the context of this Element, is that the countercultural logic of the NRMs has permeated Silicon Valley’s high-tech industry, where it has spurred NRMs 2.0 that have made the digital medium the spiritual message for the new millennium.