What is Secular Spirituality?
Today Westerners are increasingly approaching spirituality outside traditional religious frameworks. While Christianity is still professed by a significant percentage of citizens in all Western nations, regular church attendance is low and falling and Christianity no longer dominates our spiritual landscape as it did for our grandparents.
Instead, since the 1970s an extensive range of alternative approaches to spirituality has become available. These include yoga, meditation and prayer groups of all kinds, Wicca, Tantra, Inner Light, Taoism, Gnosticism, transformational psychology, integral spirituality, and so on.
This development has occurred over the past three hundred years, when Western liberal democracies began separating state and church, centuries-old feudal hierarchies disintegrated, morality was tied to secular laws and social norms rather than to religious commandments, and individual freedoms were accepted as fundamental to just human interactions.
The upshot is that we live today in a post-religious age. That is, liberal secular values have supplanted traditional religious values as the drivers of contemporary Western culture.
With respect to morality, this means that our collective ethical decision-making is driven by secular laws rather than by ancient religious commandments.
With respect to belief in God, the traditional idea of God as a personal being in heaven has been replaced for many by the concept of God as an immanent or transcendent spiritual power, force or presence. Others have adopted an agnostic, non-theistic or atheistic spiritual perspective. Spirituality that has no place for God is actually a long established position. Both Buddhism and Sikhism reject the idea of God and so practise ancient forms of what may be termed pre-secular spirituality.
