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Churches have long been sites of local charity work as well as national political movements. What happens when people engage in more individualistic forms of spirituality, like mindfulness meditation or yoga, rather than participate in religious communities? Might the rise of individualized forms of spirituality lead to a decline in political engagement? Or, among people averse to religion, might spiritual practice operate as a substitute, and potentially contribute to political engagement? Drawing on burgeoning theory of religion and spirituality as socially-situated boundary objects, we use data from the 2020 National Religion and Spirituality Survey to examine the relationship between self-reported spiritual and religious practices and political engagement. First, we investigate whether study participants distinguish spiritual and religious practice as distinct concepts through factor analysis. Next, we use those results to examine the association between these practices and reports of political behavior. We find a consistent, positive relationship between spiritual practice and political engagement of comparable magnitude to that of religious practices. Notably, during an era of heightened political polarization around religious engagement, political progressives, respondents of color, and members of the LGBT community are more likely to report spiritual rather than religious practices. This points us to a theory of spiritual practice as a substitute for religious engagement among groups alienated from religious institutions, with the former capable of fostering similar proclivities for political action as the latter. Our results suggest critiques of a “selfish” spirituality have been overblown.

This introductory chapter sets up the volume’s themes and contributions. The first section outlines contemporary interest in spirituality and argues that current approaches to understanding contemporary spirituality are insufficient. The next section outlines what we call “first wave” scholarship on spirituality that, beginning in the 1990s, documented the society-wide shift toward spirituality. We then outline the elements of “second wave” spirituality that our volume represents. Thematically, our analytic framework views spirituality as eminently social and its meaning as fundamentally relational. The next three sections highlight how spirituality, both as lived experience and as analytic category, is always influenced by social (national, political, religious, etc.) context; how spirituality is undergirded by collective practices and serves as a resource for pragmatic problem-solving; and how it is influenced by power dynamics and institutional relations. We close with an overview of each chapter collected in the volume.

When spirituality moves—from one religion to another, from religious to secular fields, or from private to public spheres—it can change in many ways, based on who is sending and who is receiving the practices, and the local and broader institutional contexts in which practitioners abide. Yet scholarship seldom interrogates how strongly different cultural and structural layers of social settings impact spiritual practitioners’ experiences, and the pluralistic forms of spirituality that result. To show how peer and institutional cultures can shape spirituality in their own likeness and to serve their own needs, I provide illustrative examples of how, in order to resonate with new audiences, spirituality changes. These examples reveal how deeply socially situated American spirituality is in broader social and institutional fields, in contrast to common perceptions among the public and scholars that describe spiritual practices as typically individualistic private means of transcending social life.

We develop the concept of “social movement school’ (SMS), showing how these organizational spaces are deliberately designed for purposes of educating, mentoring, training, and coordinating individu...

People experience meaning in various ways across different secular and sacred situations. However, scholars know relatively little about the situational contexts in which meaning occurs. In this article, we first explored the daily contexts of meaning using data collected by a unique, 2-week experience sampling method through participants’ smartphones. Meaning levels were highest during religious and spiritual practices, as well as during traditional work hours. They were also higher with some activities, such as talking to other people, than other activities, such as playing video games. Second, we examined how feelings of meaningfulness were related to sacred states, parsing out which preceded the other. Sacred states, in which people were aware of God or a higher being, tended to come before feelings of meaning rather than the reverse. From these analyses, meaning emerged as richly patterned in everyday life and closely associated with—and often a consequence of—sacred awareness.

Using Arab Barometer data (2011), the authors examine Muslim men’s gender attitudes in four predominantly Muslim Middle Eastern and North African countries (Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen) during the Arab Spring. They examine if living in insecurity – which may threaten men’s ability to attain masculine ideals – is related to male overcompensation, evident in strong support for patriarchal gender ideology. They then investigate if Islamic religiosity influences this relationship. Results reveal that political Islam is strongly related to Muslimmenamen’s patriarchal gender attitudes across the region. The effects of living in insecurity and other facets of Islamic religiosity on men’s gender ideology vary by country. The results on the many effects of insecurity and Islam on men’s gender ideology challenge stereotypical representations of the region as uniformly Islamic and patriarchal.

We explore how people experience the sacred in their everyday lives using a recently developed research technique—smartphone-based experience sampling method (S-ESM). The primary goal of our experience-driven approach is to explore the contours and variations of spiritual awareness within people's day-to-day lives. We seek to better understand when and where spiritual awareness is likely to arise, and the contexts in which it is rare. Our smartphone-based data allow us to track the many contexts in which an awareness of the sacred occurs, as reported in real time during people's normal daily activities. We parse out how immediate contextual factors and how people's more habitual behaviors are related to their spiritual experiences. This illuminates a wide range of factors that influence spiritual experiences that have not received much scholarly attention, and enables us to connect cutting-edge quantitative methods with qualitative scholarship on spirituality. We hope this will open the door to the development of new theories of situated spiritual experience.

The mindfulness movement’s unobtrusive, consensus-based tactics were effective in popularizing, embedding, and legitimizing contemplative practices in a wide array of powerful social institutions. Yet, using consensus-based tactics and relying upon elite endorsements and support also opened the movement up to criticisms of potential cooptation along many fronts. Although movement leaders succeeded in changing the minds and hearts of many professionals, the movement as a whole failed to produce desired organizational reform. This concluding chapter discusses these implications of these tactics’ strengths and shortcomings not only for the contemplative movement but for other similar movements trying to change institutions through insiders working within and across targeted organizations and movements. These include the movements for LGBTQ rights, women’s equality, and environmental protection.

The mindful elite attracted new high-status sympathizers in targeted organizations by using their professional symbolic power, social status, and social skill to build legitimacy for meditation and other contemplative practices. In this chapter the author builds upon scholarship on legitimation by identifying the various kinds of legitimation the contemplatives are able to secure. These different kinds of legitimacy are interrelated and build upon each other over time, creating a cultural movement that is increasingly difficult to derail. However, in building their base among a privileged coterie of social, economic, and intellectual elites, the contemplatives risk losing touch with ordinary people and the issues of inequality that affect them. This weakens the contemplatives’ ability to stand by and implement direct social reforms to influence root causes of the issues they care about, such as rising inequality, greed, and materialism.

From the halls of the Ivy League to the C-suite at Fortune 500 companies, this book reveals the people behind the mindfulness movement, and the engine they built to propel mindfulness into public consciousness. Based on over a hundred interviews with meditating scientists, religious leaders, educators, businesspeople, and investors, this book shows how this highly accomplished, affluent group has popularized meditation as a tool for health, happiness, and social reform over the past forty years. Rather than working through temples or using social movement tactics like protest to improve society, they mobilized by building elite networks advocating the benefits of meditation across professions. They built momentum by drawing in successful, affluent people and their prestigious institutions, including Ivy League and flagship research universities, and Fortune 100 companies like Google and General Mills. To broaden meditation’s appeal, they made manifold adaptations along the way. In the end, does mindfulness really make our society better? Or has mindfulness lost its authenticity? This book reveals how elite movements can spread, and how powerful spiritual and self-help movements can transform individuals in their wake. Yet, spreading the dharma came with unintended consequences. With their focus on individual transformation, the mindful elite have fallen short of the movement’s lofty ambitions to bring about broader structural and institutional change. Ultimately, this idealistic myopia unintentionally came to reinforce some of the problems it originally aspired to solve.

Through the accounts of contemplative leaders, this chapter shows how the mindful elite promoted meditation across a variety of secular institutional fields. They began by convening elite sympathizers and using their social influence as insiders in wide-ranging professional organizations to bring contemplative intervention programs into their workplaces across institutions. Once their programs were established, interventions in reputable organizations, such as Google and Stanford University, became benchmark programs. Others in similar kinds of organizations, and the public, could refer to these programs as exemplars demonstrating the efficacy and legitimacy of contemplative practice. From there, as scientific research and media accounts of mindfulness were published and gained traction, the legitimacy of mindfulness was bolstered and the practices diffused more widely in mainstream culture.

This chapter examines what meditation is intended to do for practitioners at a micro-level in their “intervention” programs. Mindfulness educators carefully introduced meditation practices to new adopters through modeling and gradual exposure to religious ideology. Meditation practice was used to fundamentally change how participants construed themselves, their place in the world, and their interactions with others at work and in other parts of their lives. Participating in mindfulness programs changed many people’s individual worldviews, self-regulation, and interactions with others. However, there is not conclusive evidence suggesting that contemplative interventions have deep, lasting structural impacts on the organizations and institutional fields they are working in.

This chapter introduces the contemplative mindfulness movement, its successes in legitimizing and popularizing mindful meditation, and its shortcomings. This case demonstrates how elite movements can initiate widespread cultural change by combining elements of social movement mobilization, institutional entrepreneurship, field theory, and cultural diffusion. Investigating the contemplatives sheds light on how a movement can support elites’ cultural pet projects across multiple powerful institutional fields. This approach to cultural change is particularly efficacious for elites’ and professionals’ initiatives for social reform, as they can draw upon their social networks, institutional resources, and symbolic power to advance their causes in the course of their everyday lives at work. While such movements may succeed in spreading compelling new cultures, they may struggle to initiate deeper structural social reforms.

With the rising popularity of mindfulness and other contemplative practices, a backlash has emerged. Critics have suggested that the contemplative movement has abandoned its Buddhist ethical roots, has lost authenticity, has been coopted by corporate interests, and has failed to initiate deep, structural social reform. This chapter shows how movement leaders have responded to such claims by performing collective authenticity in their meetings. They hearkened back to Buddhist sacred texts, teachers, and ethics and affirmed their sense of social responsibility and their commitment to social reform. The contemplatives showed how, as a movement, central organizations can enact authenticity as a process to confront external and internal threats, to reflect on and connect to their ideological roots, and to strengthen their collective identity.

This chapter introduces the historical cultural antecedents to the contemplative movement, showing that mindfulness builds upon the rhetoric and logics of prior religious liberal and spiritual thought in the United States. Americans were exposed to Buddhism, and its emphasis on cultivating inner spiritual life through solitude and reflection, in the mid-nineteenth century from the Transcendentalist literature of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the late nineteenth century, the Theosophists and the World’s Parliament of Religions meetings brought additional attention to Buddhism, aligning it with science. Interest in Zen and solitary, reflective Buddhist practices surged in the mid-twentieth century based on the influence of D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and the politicized literature of the Beats. These romanticized portrayals of Buddhism were then more widely popularized with the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The contemplatives built upon the work of these prior streams of Buddhist-inspired American spirituality.

This chapter provides an overview of what the contemplative founders stood for and why they sought to spread meditation into professional sectors. From the beginning, contemplative leaders sought to legitimize and popularize Buddhist-inspired meditation by institutionalizing their programs in powerful organizations and institutional fields in order to initiate progressive social change. The contemplative movement is an alterative one, operating on the theory that partial change in individuals’ cognitive patterns and behavior will gradually lead them to fully transform. The movement leaders hoped that spreading contemplative practices would promote and increase personal development and awareness of interdependence with others. They thought that this, in turn, would aid democratic processes and counter materialism and greed.

Many religious and spiritual movements mobilize to establish sacred fields which influence everyday life in multiple social domains. Because these devout groups operate across many institutional fields, scholars of religiously motivated movements are uniquely poised to contribute to scholarship on multiinstitutional politics and on how institutional change can be initiated and influenced by external cultural movements. In this paper, I bring attention to how religious movements can mobilize through unobtrusive political tactics which build upon extant social structures in multiple institutional fields, rather than through contentious tactics which are the focus of most movement research. Based on prior scholarship on religious movements and my own research, I identify how religious movements can expand through unobtrusive, nonconfrontational tactics such as “discursive politics,” developing a “state within a state,” “burrowing into” targeted organizations, and “assimilating into” mainstream organizations. These mechanisms identified in religious movement scholarship contribute to underdeveloped areas of scholarship at the intersection of social movement mobilization, organizational change, and field development, and provide a platform upon which future research can build.

To advance understandings of how religion manifests in subtle, nuanced ways in secular institutions, we examine student religiosity and spirituality at an elite liberal arts school marked by a strong intellectual collective identity. Using mixed research methods, we examine how the college’s structures and dominant culture influence students’ religiosity and spirituality. Despite an institutional commitment to promoting students’ self-exploration and inclusion of social “diversity,” we found both campus structures and mainstream culture deterred open spiritual and religious exploration and identification. The structure of the college and its dominant secular, intellectual culture reinforced: (1) a widespread stigma against religious and spiritual expression, (2) a lack of dialogue about the sacred, (3) discreetness in exploring and adhering to sacred beliefs and practices, and (4) a large degree of religious and spiritual pluralism. Our findings additionally illustrate that early exposure to the campus culture’s critical regard for religion had a long-lasting impact on students’ religiosity. A majority of students kept their religious and spiritual expressions hidden and private; only a marginalized minority of students embraced their expressions publically. To increase students’ comfort with religious and spiritual exploration, we propose that colleges foster intentional peer dialogues early in the college experience. Furthermore, we recommend that campus communities prioritize religious and spiritual literacy and respect. (author's abstract)

This article uses updated purchasing power parity measurements of countries’ income and a new strategy for approximating global inequality to examine how global income inequality—as a combination of increasing average within-country inequality and decreasing between-country inequality—changed in the period 1980–2005. In view of the overwhelming influence of China and India on trends in global inequality change, the authors base their strategy on estimating the change in world average within-country inequality from change in within-country inequality of these two countries. The authors find that global inequality decreased continuously throughout the period. They also project that global inequality will likely rise again in the next 25 years unless the stellar economic performance of China and India spreads widely to other developing countries.

Despite the importance of young people in determining future trends in women's advancement in the predominantly Muslim countries of the Middle East, no quantitative study to date has focused exclusively on the relationship between Islamic religiosity and gender egalitarianism among youth in the region. Using data from the Youth, Emotional Energy, and Political Violence Survey, I investigate the relationship between Islamic religiosity and gender egalitarianism among youth in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, devoting special attention to gender differences within countries. Particular dimensions of Islamic religiosity have different effects on gender egalitarianism by group, reflecting social currents in each country's civic sphere. For young men in both contexts, orthodoxy and mosque attendance are negatively associated with gender egalitarianism. In contrast, for Egyptian young women self-identified religiosity positively affects gender egalitarianism while for Saudi Arabian women, Islamic religiosity has no effect.