What exactly is spirituality? How does it relate to religion? Are both misunderstood? And what stands beyond and behind the idea that it has all simply been commodified to be about wellness, big business and celebrity? Andrew Singleton joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on this and more, including his experience researching young people’s spiritual practices in Australia, and time spent in Papua New Guinea.

Andrew describes how what has been called the “spiritual turn” emerged through the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and led to today’s “spiritual marketplace”. We ask whether the young people of today’s Generation Z are more open-minded than their elders – and whether, across the Global North and Global South, people are meeting a need for betterment in the “here and now” through spirituality, but also religion.

Plus: what did Marx really mean when he described religion as the “opium of the people” – and how has that quote taken on a (rather cynical) life of its own? Also, from reactions to the bestselling Eat, Pray, Love to the historical condemnation of female fortune tellers, why do our definitions and dismissals of spirituality seem to be so deeply gendered?

Guest: Andrew Singleton
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

From The Sociological Review

• The spiritual turn and the disenchantment of the world: Max Weber, Peter Berger and the religion–science conflict – Galen Watts, Dick Houtman
• The “Belief” issue of The Sociological Review Magazine (May 2022)
• Capitalising on faith? An intergenerational study of social and religious capital among Baby Boomers and Millennials in Britain – Stuart Fox, et al.

By Andrew Singleton

• Freedoms, Faiths and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity (co-authored with M.L. Rasmussen, A. Halafoff, G. Bouma)
• Religion, Culture and Society: A Global Approach
• The Spirit of Generation Y: Young People’s Spirituality in a Changing Australia (co-authored with M. Mason, R. Webber)

Further reading and listening

• “Selling Yoga” and “Peace Love Yoga” – Andrea Jain
• “Selling Spirituality” – Jeremy Carrette, Richard King
• “Selling (Con)spirituality and COVID-19 in Australia” – Anna Halafoff, et al.
• “Women's Work: The Professionalisation and Policing of Fortune-Telling in Australia” – Alana Piper
• “Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World” – Alexandra Roginski
• “The Dream” podcast – Jane Marie

Read more on the life and work of Gary Bauma, as well as about Karl Marx and Michel Foucault.

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