Religion and Spirituality, two opposing models?. Post-catholic biographic pathways among Soka Gakkai buddhists

Abstract

In the context of the privatization of religion, still ongoing, many contemporary religious biographies seem to be motivated by the individual search for a religious alternative far away from the repertoires of beliefs, rituals and institutions of traditional religion. Following the increasing use of this term by many social actors at least since the sixties of the twentieth century, part of the Sociology of Religion has referred to the alternative religiosity as Spirituality (Wood 2009) (Heelas 2008) (McGuire 2008) (Flanagan 2007) (Giordan 2007). The new models of spirituality account both for the decay of traditional forms of religiosity (based on the community of faith, the participation in collective rituals and the congregational identity) and for the spreading of a new spiritual subjectivism, whose high individualism have moved some authors to assert that a reconstitution of collective religiosity is impossible, as Steve Bruce (1996) and Daniele Hervieu-Leger (2003) have argued. This paper tries to explore the possibilities of this theoretical framework analyzing some discourses, discourses and practices of Buddhist converts in Spain, who have previously developed an extensive spiritual ride through several varieties of the so-called New Age milieu, the most important style of religious fragmentation and subjective revolution in the religious fields.