From “religiosity” to “spirituality”: the European context

Recently the quite not sociological term ‘spirituality’ has become widespread in the Western sociology of religion and is often contrasted with the term ‘religiosity’ as a description of religious consciousness. Many authors write not only about traditional church religiosity, but also about ‘fuzzy fidelity’, ‘spirituality’, ‘spiritual revolution’ as a stable trend for many European countries and beyond. The article focuses on the question how the changes of religion are considered by European scientists, how they interpret the term ‘spirituality’ — is it a ‘megatrend’, a ‘methodological artifact’, a commodity of ‘spiritual supermarket’ or a part of an overall commodification process — and what are the difficulties of its study.

religiosity, spirituality, religious changes, ‘fuzzy fidelity’, spiritual revolution, post-Christian spirituality, spiritual shift