Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead have just published their The
Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality,
Blackwell, £15.99 ISBN 1405119594.  Order here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1405119594/thechristaqua-21

My copy has not yet arrived (so take these comments accordingly), but is it
really true that there is no spirituality in traditional hierarchical
religion?  Surely this is a bit simplistic, merely repeating the cries of
those alternative thinkers who are disillusioned with organised religion?

Spirituality is very alive in the Catholic church services I attend,
although yes this is a formalistic, ritualised spirituality that owes much
to routine and familiarity.  I will be very interested to see how the
research "measured" spirituality and concluded that it was absent in
traditional church settings but present in community yoga classes, for
example.

For an audio file of a keynote presentation by Paul Heelas on the spiritual
revolution click here http://www.asanas.org.uk (at the Alternative
Spiritualities and New Age Studies Conference 2003)(long download time and
turn up the volume).

The book was reviewed in an article in The Times, November 04, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1342587,00.html

Spirited away: why the end is nigh for religion
Carol Midgley

Christianity will be eclipsed by spirituality in 30 years, startling
new research predicts. Our correspondent reports on the collapse of
traditional religion and the rise of mysticism

IN THE beginning there was the Church. And people liked to dress up
in their best clothes and go there on Sundays and they praised the
Lord and it was good. But it came to pass that people grew tired of
the Church and they stopped going, and began to be uplifted by new
things such as yoga and t'ai chi instead. And, lo, a spiritual
revolution was born.

It is unlikely that you, the average punter going to your
aromatherapy or meditation group this evening, imagine that you are
revolutionising the sacred landscape of Britain. But, little by
little, you are.

Study after study appears to prove that people are increasingly
losing faith in the Church and the Bible and turning instead to
mysticism in guises ranging from astrology to reiki and holistic
healing. The Government, significantly, said this week that older
people should be offered t'ai chi classes on the NHS to promote
their physical and mental wellbeing.

More and more people describe themselves as "spiritual", fewer
as "religious" and, as they do so, they are turning away from the
Christian Church, with its rules and "self last" philosophy, and
looking inwards for the meaning of life.

Twice as many people believe in a "spirit force" within than they do
an Almighty God without, while a recent survey hailed a revival of
the Age of Aquarius after finding that two thirds of 18 to 24-year-
olds had more belief in their horoscopes than in the Bible.

If you don't believe it, take a walk around Kendal, Cumbria,
population 28,000. Since the millennium dawned, the ultra-
traditional home of the mint-cake has been the subject of a
spiritual experiment. Linda Woodhead and Professor Paul Heelas, both
specialists in religion at Lancaster University, chose the town to
measure the growth of the "holistic milieu" and the decline of
Christian congregational worship.

The conclusion of their new book, The Spiritual Revolution, is
dramatic: Christianity will be eclipsed by spirituality in this
country within the next 20 to 30 years. Many people believe that
this "New Romantics" movement will prove more significant than the
Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

This is gloomy stuff for the traditional churchgoer. Only 7.9 per
cent of the population now attends church, down from 11 per cent 20
years ago. Although holistic practices are still comparatively small
(less than 2 per cent of the population nationally participate) it
is the phenomenal rate of growth not just among the young but also
the middle-aged and much older that is threatening to overshadow
traditional churchgoing.

Kendal mirrors the national statistics with eerie precision: 2,207
people in the town — 7.9 per cent of the population — attend church
on Sunday while 600 — 1.6 per cent of the population of the town and
environs — take part in some kind of holistic activity.

During the 1990s, when the town's population grew by 11.4 per cent,
participation in the "new spirituality" grew by 300 per cent.
Woodhead and Heelas contend that "mini revolutions" have already
taken place, and point out that in Kendal the holistic milieu now
outnumbers every single major denomination apart from Anglican.
(There are 531 Roman Catholics, 285 Methodists and 160 Jehovah's
Witnesses.)

"If the holistic milieu continues to grow at the same linear rate
that it has since 1970 and if the congregational domain continues to
decline at the same rate that it has during the same period, then
the spiritual revolution would take place during the third decade of
the third millennium," they write with prophetic zeal.

If you were searching for a symbol of this revolution, you need look
no further than the United Reformed Church in Dent. This building
was once the nucleus of the Christian community of Dent, a
quintessentially English village a few miles outside Kendal. But
over the years apathy crept in and the congregation declined until
it was down to one. To raise money, the church hired out its old
schoolroom as a spiritual meditation centre. Local interest in
meditation ballooned. When the church was forced to sell the
building the meditation group bought it and refurbished it. Now it
is flourishing where the old church failed. One of its trustees is a
Church of England warden.

So what does meditation have that conventional worship does not?
Neutrality, suggests Elizabeth Forder, who runs the centre. "We are
not affiliated to any religion and there is no belief system imposed
on anybody here," she says. "I was brought up a Christian, but it
held no real meaning for me. I would class myself as a universalist,
believing that all religions offer the same end. At its simplest,
meditation is giving the body and mind a very deep level of rest,
freeing us to be ourselves." She mentions an 87-year-old man who
used to belong to the congregation and now meditates regularly.

If disaffected churchgoers are seeking neutrality, they are also in
flight from judgment. "I don't want to be preached at any
more", "I'm sick of being made to feel guilty" or "I don't need to
be told how to live my life," people will say when asked why they
stopped attending church. And when they speak of their spiritual
malaise, they use the language of the therapist's couch. One Kendal
woman in her forties summarised her spiritual shift thus: "A one-
hour service on a Sunday? It's not really enough time to address
your self-esteem issues, is it? I didn't find any help in the
churches. I found it in a 12-step programme. That was the start of
my personal journey."

Critics will say that this is merely the end product of a prosperous
me-me-me society that has encouraged navel-gazing and pampering of
the self via routes ranging from personal therapy to facial massage.
This is too simplistic, insist Heelas and Woodhead. "It is standard
to lash this kind of thing and cite it as evidence of the
narcissistic self," says Woodhead. "But I would say it is inaccurate
to say that people are doing this just for pleasure. Trying to
become yourself but better through your relationships with others is
a very noble activity."

Heelas adds: "It's a shift away from (the idea of) a hierarchical,
all-knowing institution and a move towards (having) the freedom to
grow and develop as a unique person rather than going to church and
being led. A lot of the comfort of religion is in postponement — a
better life after death. But belief in Heaven is collapsing, so
people believe it is more important to know themselves and make
themselves better people now."
The need to "know thyself" is now so entrenched in our culture that
Heelas's statement hardly sounds revolutionary. Striving "to be a
better person" sounds Christian — perhaps because those struggling
to shore up organised religion have been so keen to adapt to modern
mores.

That is part of the problem, suggests the Rev Brian Maiden, of Parr
Street Evangelical Church in Kendal. He believes that the liberalism
of Christianity has turned people off it. "The people of Britain
have been inoculated with a dead, mild form of Christianity, which
has given them resistance to the real thing. It has been diluted
with human philosophy. People want to be told what to do and how to
do it. Often they don't realise that 's what they want until they
hear it. The message here is traditional Protestantism. We teach the
message of the Gospels and that there will be a Judgment."

Those who think they can find the god within are swiftly put
right. "To try to find the solution in oneself is bound to fail
because human nature is fallen," says Maiden. "Christianity isn't
about us trying to make ourselves better people. It is about God
trying to do something for us 2,000 years ago which redeemed
people."

Perhaps he is right, but some of those losing their religion were
brought up with just the kind of dogmatic beliefs that Maiden is
describing. Take Julie Wise, 44 and a mother of two, who was raised
on a Lancashire farm in the Church of England tradition. Three
decades of religion failed to touch her, she says, and it was only
in her thirties, when she went to an exhibition in Manchester and
saw a man performing Infinite T'ai Chi, that she felt truly
spiritually touched. "It was like divine intervention," she
says. "It was one of the most beautiful, meaningful things I had
ever seen." She is now an Infinite T'ai Chi practitioner and
performs "soul readings", a way, she says, of seeing life patterns
and energies that haven't been released in the past.

You might expect those visiting her to have been raised in broadly
godless households, but this is not the case. "About 50 per cent of
the people I see were brought up quite religiously, so the seed of
spirituality was there but the Church wasn't fulfil-ling their
spiritual need," she says. "People are so much better educated now.
They are less inclined just to accept what they are told; they need
to know it for themselves."

Not that she sees any conflict between her practices and
Christianity. "The Christian mystics taught that you can know God
only through your own experience. All great religions taught `know
thyself'. That is what this movement is about, experiencing it
yourself rather than through a priest."

It's an intriguing comparison. Once, mystics were the minority, the
outsiders: what most people wanted was to come together and share in
something greater than themselves. Increasingly, the reverse seems
to be true. Joyce Armstrong, a former resident of Dent and a regular
at the meditation centre, was raised according to strict Christian
traditions. In her forties she converted to Buddhism after
discovering that the Church did not speak to her. Before Buddhism
she had been attracted to Quakerism — which has a strong history in
Ken-dal — partly because of its lack of a priesthood and its
tradition of silent contemplation.

"I had always been interested in personal spirituality, but the
Church seemed so set in everything," she says. "Until you have a
hold of yourself, you can't know what it's all about."

But must the rise of new forms of spirituality necessarily mean the
decline of Christianity? There are life-long Christians who think
not. Among them is Victor de Waal, 75, the former Dean of Canterbury
Cathedral. He meditates daily and regularly visits the centre at
Dent. "I don't see it as an alternative; I see it as deepening one's
faith," he says. "Because it's not committed to a particular
tradition, it is open to all".

But isn't it self-indulgent to look inwards? "It is not about
discovering your ego, but the divine within yourself," he
says. "Most religious traditions make a distinction between the ego
and the self. In the New Testament Paul talks about `Christ in me'.
It is about finding one's deepest humanity. People who have been on
the fringes or have given up the Church enter into their own
spiritual selves and discover it again."

This, certainly, has been the spiritual journey of Martin Rayner, a
kitchenware businessman from Windermere, Cumbria. Martin stopped
attending a Christian church when he was 20, disillusioned by the
break-up of his parents' marriage. Years later his own marriage
broke down. He met a new partner and began meditation. He also
attends yoga and t'ai chi classes. Eventually, Rayner's "New Age"
spirituality led him back to his faith, and to the Church, which he
attends regularly. "My biggest criticism of Christianity at the
moment is that it is very verbose," he says. "You don't get a chance
to be your silent self."

It was meditation, not traditional worship, that allowed him to be
quiet. "I did feel in a spiritual vacuum, but I am now a lot more
grounded and focused on what really matters in life. The world is
getting faster and faster and meditation helps to order things in
your mind. The Church has a great tradition of meditation, but seems
to have lost it."

Conservative believers — Roman Catholics and Protestants — are
adamant that New Age spirituality is merely a new form of gnosticism
which turns the proper order upside-down by putting human beings in
the place of God.

But there is no doubt that spiritual language is starting to seep
into everyday discourse. The Spiritual Revolution points to terms
such as feng shui and yin and yang now being common parlance. By
contrast, theistic language has lost its vitality in ordinary
language. The word "goodbye", for instance, used to mean "God be
with you". It marks the shift away from the Church and towards the
social empowerment of individuals in modern times. In other words,
it is simply part of a general "flight from deference".

So where does this leave the typical Christian church? The Rev Ron
Metcalf, of the majestic Holy Trinity Church in Kendal, which
achieves an average congregation of 200 on Sundays, does not
criticise the new seeking of spirituality. "If it leads to something
better, then I can't say that I'm going to condemn it," he
says. "The spiritual quest is not in itself unhealthy; that search
is important, though I myself don't see how it is fulfilling."
He pauses. "I think [people] will find that yoga won't get them very
far."

The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to
Spirituality, Blackwell, £15.99

What does spirituality give that religion does not? E-mail
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