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New Age Spirituality

The Commission on Living Faiths - Dialogue and Community will work to discover and promote the engagement of the churches and church people with those of other cultures than their own, and people of other faiths.  It will do so with explicit awareness of, and regard to, the Australian Aboriginal and Islander Communities, the multicultural churches, and the secular environment.

In many respects, the spiritual experience known as “New Age Spirituality” is a socio-religious and cultural phenomenon of the “western world”. It is also a way of “being spiritual” in the minds of many people which seem to imply that the Christian world-view which once shaped and provided answers for human questions is no longer able to speak meaningfully.   

The radical changes that came to bear upon the identity and the basic orientation of the western individual during the last 300 hundred years or so are somewhat responsible for this attitude. As a consequence, today many have come to acknowledge that while the last century is responsible for many beneficial advances in science, unfortunately – along with advances in technology – it is also accountable for creating destruction and devastation in a fashion that humanity had never experienced before.  The two World Wars and subsequent politically motivated catastrophes have demonstrated that technology could be used not only to better life, but to cultivate and perpetuate greed and selfishness which could lead ultimately to its demise. Alongside these experiences the development of the capital-based market economy in the western world must be counted too.  The irony about all these is not that such advances took place in the West, but that the "Christian faith", which evolved as an inseparable partner of the western tradition, provided much of the "cultural resources" that were responsible for such events and developments. "Cultural resources" means symbols, meanings, ideologies, and legitimacy that political actors use within a given situation to justify their collective actions, to recruit supporters, persuade bystanders, and neutralize opponents. Christian "cultural resources", for instance, enabled political movements to harness capitalism of which the end results were: individualism, materialism and consumerism as people experience them today. These have shattered the naive belief in human progress which was promised by the ideals of the Enlightenment. Those ideals (optimism, rationality, and search for absolute knowledge) fostered the view that the self is the agent of all knowledge and are, therefore, the medium in which such ideals can materialize and flourish. While this placed a very high valuation on the individual self, this well-intended project collapsed because it was that very project that brought destruction upon humanity.

These various currents of changes in Western society for the last three decade or so ..

• propose that the society, culture and lifestyle of the present times in which spiritual matters must be understood are significantly different from what they were, say, ten years ago.
• express a concern with concrete issues such as developments in mass media, the consumer society and information technology.
• suggest that these kinds of developments impact upon our understanding of more abstract matters such as meaning, identity, humanity, God, and reality.
• claim that the methods used previously by organized religions – especially Christianity in the West – to articulate spirituality are no longer applicable or useful, and that new approaches and vocabularies must be created to understand the situation of the present.
• make it obvious that the questions concerning (Western) spirituality cannot be effective without meaningful dialogue with other living faiths of the world.
• suggest that "spirituality" as understood by contemporary culture is not the domain of one religious tradition, but rather the product of a religious eclecticism that cuts across all religions.
• propose that the understanding of contemporary spirituality needs to be constantly made relevant in the context of its practice.

The New Age spirituality and all that goes with its expression and practice are symptomatic of all these changes.

As the phrase expresses clearly, New Age Spirituality is the spirituality for the “new age” occasioned by the aforementioned events.   It is a “new” expression of the human quest for meaning, faith, and personal identity in our times.   Its “wrongness” or “correctness” cannot be judged based on the frameworks and criteria of faith and spirituality that belong to a period which is prior to the “New Age.”

Within this broad understanding of the context which has given rise to this phenomenon, it seems possible to say that the new form of “spirituality” we witness today has evolved beyond the boundaries of organized religions. In this respect, it is also important to bear in mind that what we call “organized religions” themselves have evolved over a period of time without clear-cut boundaries of their identities until each religion came to encounter another. It is in the process of encountering another, that each religion has come to organize itself into the forms that we know today. However, with radical changes in society and in the world at large occasioned by events such as globalization, the boundaries of these organized religions have begun to blur again. Many people find themselves on the edges where “organized” religions merge or overlap with one or many other religions.

The experience people go through on these blurry boundaries is another way of describing the “new age” spiritual experience. Many, inspired by this kind of spirituality, seem to express themselves through practices that one may call “spiritual” without necessarily identifying with one religion or another. Demonstrating that the more organized or “packaged” (and also rationalized) forms of religion of the modern period are being continually challenged, new age spirituality also has a deep affinity with the non-linear, non-rational, emotional realm.  

While we may not be prepared to relate to this form of spirituality entirely, we are challenged to ask the question: “is this phenomenon descriptive of the core of the religious experience of the 21st century?”  

The Revd Dr Ruwan Palapathwala
Noel Carter Lecturer, Trinity College University of Melbourne
Lecturer in Asian Religions, United Faculty of Theology

Member of the VCC Commission for Living Faiths and Community Relations