Mahatma Gandhi, Neoliberalism, and the Bourgeois Study of Spirituality

In psychological literature, the concept of spirituality is typically defined as something private, internal and experiential that includes meaning-making, sacred values, connectedness, and/or transcendence. Thus, spirituality is distinct from social, economic, and political spheres of human life. M...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Lindgren, Thomas (Author) ; Sonnenschein, Hannes (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Brill 2020
In: Research in the social scientific study of religion
Year: 2020, Volume: 31, Pages: 43-62
Further subjects:B Cultural sciences
B Religious sociology
B Social sciences
B Religionspsycholigie
B Religionswissenschaften
B Religion & Gesellschaft
B Gender studies
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Summary:In psychological literature, the concept of spirituality is typically defined as something private, internal and experiential that includes meaning-making, sacred values, connectedness, and/or transcendence. Thus, spirituality is distinct from social, economic, and political spheres of human life. Most scholars who concern themselves with spirituality assume that it is a universal phenomenon that is essentially the same everywhere. But the isolation of spirituality as a sphere of life that is separated from other spheres is not a universal feature of human history. Mahatma Gandhi, who argued that spirituality is associated with political activism and the struggle for social and economic justice, illustrates this point. Spirituality is a modern concept with a specific history and what counts as spirituality and what does not depend on different configurations of power. In this paper, we explore why a category as amorphous and indeterminate as spirituality has maintained such a currency in the literature of the psychology of religion. We argue that the category of spirituality is a sociopolitical management technique for reinforcing political quietism, which is necessary for the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo.
Contains:Enthalten in: Research in the social scientific study of religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/9789004443969_004