Selling Spirituality Book

By commodifying spirituality, neoliberalism is cutting out the religious middleman when it comes to purveying the opium of the people. So the argument goes here. The authors trace a clear trajectory from the initial privatization/psychologization of religion in modernity to the appropriation of spirituality as a form of covert social control to produce flexible and compliant consumer subjects.

"In effect, the territorial takeover of religion by psychology (individualisation) is the platform for the takeover of spirituality by capitalism (corporatisation)." (79)

Given that the subject is spirituality in general, the authors spend a lot of time on the recent import of eastern spiritualities, conveniently secularized and individualized for an affluent Western market. Which was interesting, but I personally (and obviously) wanted more exploration of how Christianity has been been colonized and appropriated, and indeed, how it has aided and abetted its own appropriation.

I also liked the conclusion where the authors propose that "what we need at this moment are new 'atheisms' that reject the God of money" (179), for "in a context where 'the Market' has become the new God of our times, the emergence of socially oriented forms of 'spirituality', critically engaging with the wisdom of the world's 'religious' traditions, may yet have a key role to play in providing the means for resisting unrestrained consumerism and the commodification of life itself." (176-177).