Essay
Belief
Culture
Weirdness
5 min read

The cost of selling spirituality

A $3.7 trillion industry ‘market’ for spiritual consciousness and wellness says something about today. Daniel Kim explores what’s driving this commodification and its market failure.

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

A white neon sign against a brick wall reads: 'This is the sign you have been looking for.
Sign o' the times.
Austin Chan via Unsplash.

Apparently, Scorpio women from Gen Z are the most passionate about astrology, while Taurus Gen X men are the most skeptical. At least, that’s according to a delightfully insightful consumer report put together by the Peoplestrology website after surveying 2,800 people. I’m a Taurus 1995 MillZennial man so I’m not sure where that puts me. I’m also a trainee Anglican vicar which may contribute more to my demographic features, but that’s beside the point.  

We are increasingly fascinated by spirituality and religious practices. We are at a point where we can no longer assume that ticking “No Religion” on a survey means you’re an atheist or that you don’t believe in a supernatural realm or a God. In fact, a report by Theos found that only 51% of people in the UK who claimed ‘No religion’ also claimed that ‘they don’t believe in God’. That’s unreal. Another unbelievable insight from the 2022 UK religious data was the ‘Shamanism’ is now the UK’s fastest growing religious movement. Meanwhile, #WitchTok had 18 billion views in 2021, even hitting the mainstream when it got its own BBC article last year. For the uninitiated, these are TikToks that introduce people to witchcraft practices. A quick wander around the Waterstones ‘What We Recommend’ tables is enough to see the huge push to retrieve ‘ancient traditions’ that help people navigate the spiritual wilderness of modern life. Marcus Aurelius’ Stoicism, and the Confucian classics, are making their comeback. It goes beyond self-help.  

I used to work in a Soho advertising agency. I remember sitting on a teal coloured mid-century sofa with colleagues discussing star signs and pagan mythology over a coffee break. As the Christian, I was the one feeling like the cynical sceptic. That’s a strange experience and feels like cultural whiplash. Flashback ten years and secondary school in the mid-noughties and early-tens was brutal as a Christian. I watched Richard Dawkins' polemic God Delusion documentary during my religious education classes and my fellow classmates laid into Christianity like it was the most vile and stupid thing in the world. Anyone who believed in a supernatural reality was equally vile and stupid. Today, the New Atheist movement seems like a strange late-twentieth century aberration that has very much given way to a re-spiritualising world. In some cruel corners of Reddit, the New Atheist is even a subject of ridicule. 

It’s possible to discern two impulses going on in this re-spiritualisation. On one side of the heart, there are those who are reaching for the spiritual but not the religious - wanting connection with something bigger than themselves to provide meaning and an experience of transcendence. On the other hand, there are those who lean more religious but not spiritual - we want something to provide structure and order to our lives. There’s less of a concern about the spiritual experience but a desire to reign in the chaotic life - I used to have agnostic friends who would pop into a Catholic Mass because they liked the stability of the ritual. These are two ends of a continuum and invariably we are all somewhere in the middle. Both impulses are profoundly important ingredients to a life that is full of meaning. 

This, in my opinion, is an exciting and positive move in our society. It turns out that humans really can’t live on ‘bread’ alone - not least live on careers, brunches, or think-piece articles - and we certainly can’t live on ‘content’ alone. There is a spiritual vacuum, and we’re reaching for the oxygen. 

But in all of this, there’s a serious concern. Because wherever there’s demand, there is profit to be made - and right now, there is ample spiritual demand.

The ‘market’ for spiritual consciousness and wellness will be a $3.7 trillion industry. 

When reflecting on astrology’s role in contemporary society, the Peoplestrology report deems it the ‘perfect solution for our hyper-individualised culture’ and the report ends with an ominous recognition that the ‘market’ for spiritual consciousness and wellness will be a $3.7 trillion industry. The valuation of the ‘spirituality marketplace’ and the emphasis on ‘hyper-individualism’ has me seriously worried. It opens the door to the commodification of religio-spiritual practices and extracting capital value from people’s genuine spiritual search. It can become a product that we use rather than a profound source of ultimate meaning. And it’s already happening.  

Sacred Design Labs, for example, is a consultancy that looks to ‘translate ancient wisdom and practices to help organizations develop products, programs, and experiences that uplift social and spiritual lives.’ Their vision is genuinely very positive - it’s to make the workplace a less sterile and meaningless place. Don’t we all want that? However, they are also  perfect examples of the trend in  capitalising on this burgeoning market. To illustrate the point, one New York Times article recounts where the consultancy was hired to pull together hundreds of religious practices and categorise them by emotional states in order to give them possible uses in different corporate contexts. This exercise made the client ‘realize how many useful tools existed inside something as old-fashioned as his childhood church’. I’m glad that religious practices are getting a hearing in mainstream corporate contexts, but it saddens me to hear words like ‘useful’ being used to describe them. That’s only a hop and a skip away from ‘efficient’ or ‘profitable’.  

The inconvenient truth is that this commodification of spirituality is not just something corporations can be guilty of. We as late-modern individuals can be guilty of stripping religious practices out of their religious context and incorporating them into our self-care programmes. Tara Isabella Burton, author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, calls this the ‘bespoke-ification of religion’. As Burton notes - ’We risk seeing spirituality as something we can consume, something for us, something for our brand’. And when we turn spirituality into a product, we turn it into something trivial. 

The irony is that this is profoundly counter-productive. Haven’t we agreed that hyper-individualism, and the commodification of everything, were precisely the things that led us to the spiritual vacuum we are now living in? If there was anything that Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley, and Billy Graham could agree on, it’s at least that. Are we doomed to repeat the radically individualistic cycle of dismantling the very thing that we are desperately grasping after - deep connection with our community, with our work, with our bodies, with our universe, and perhaps, just maybe, with our God? Satisfying our spiritual hunger is about more than just increasing our efficiency and decreasing our blood pressure. It’s about answering some of the most important questions any human individual can ask. Who am I? What am I made for? Is there a God or a spiritual dimension to the universe? Am I free or fated? What happens after I die? All these questions require us to look beyond ourselves, and to stare into the wild edges of human experience.   

If we are going to embark on a journey of spiritual discovery, whether it’s through astrology, pagan mythology, silent retreats, Tibetan Buddhism, or dare I say, Christianity, we can’t let our spiritual hunger be commodified for profit. Neither can we let it shrink back to the hyper-individualism that will keep us locked away in a prison called “self”. Our spiritual wellness is too important for that; it is worth more, infinitely more, that $3.7 trillion or a subscription service advertised to you on Instagram.

Article
AI
Culture
Digital
Education
6 min read

Could thinking and feeling become futile pastimes in the future?

AI, and more, is eroding our agency, we need to act now

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A seated teenager stretches back bored, a phone is on the table in front of them
Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Jane Austen is an author universally acknowledged. So much so that she was acknowledged on the £10 note in 2017. The quote the note bore is not the immortal opening sentence from Pride & Prejudice, but something less obvious:  

'I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading.' 

So concise, so inspiring. However, the quote belongs to her character Caroline Bingley. She isn't reading for pleasure, she's just trying to impress the dashing Mr Darcy. Jane Austen, well before 2017, has always been on the money. Her parable of disparity shows that despite the odds, Lizzie Bennett has agency as she comes face-to-face with Darcy to thrash out their differences. 

Such human agency is now being lost in many ways, as the art of empathy, reality itself, and even thinking are under attack. 

 Firstly, there's what Simon Burton-Jones startlingly outlined Seen & Unseen recently. Our empathy for our fellow creatures, which is taking a nosedive, has a direct correlation to our lack of seeing each other face-to-face.  

Secondly, he noted that reality, or reality as we've known it up until now, might only be really experienced by the wealthy. The fullness of life that is available to each of us is diluted and diminished because we don't suck the marrow out of life, we simply observe it from afar through digital lenses. 

The next, equally startling way agency is being lost is detailed in Mary Harrington's guest essay in the New York Times about how 'thinking is becoming a luxury good'. Only the Caroline Bingleys, and not the Bennetts of today would be reading and expanding their minds for pleasure: 

'In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures… as new generations reach adulthood having never lived in a world without smartphones, we can expect the culture to stratify ever more starkly.'

In other words, there's an ever-widening gap. As our digital and real worlds blend, we need to narrow the gap not just between women and men of different classes, but also where our agency truly resides: our appreciation for our own thinking and feeling. 

This is a tall order, given our devaluing of thinking. We shortcut our brains with AI and cut short the careers of those who've been taught to compute and analyse. The edifice on which many have constructed their careers is crumbling. So, there's the equal danger that thinking becomes both elitist and also perceived as futile. 

It might not be a silver bullet, but education can still lead the way. Parents can't delegate responsibility to schools and must surely be part of the solution. And neither is confining thinking and feeling to those who appreciate Shakespeare. As veteran educationalist Sir Ken Robinson noted, there is an inherent creativity, not necessarily academic, in children that is often flattened beyond all recognition by the education system itself. Any parent of small children will know, as I do, that there is an intriguing inquisitiveness and playfulness in our early years. As a father, I want that to come alive in my children. 

Education can close the gap between pleasure and thinking. The teachers I remember well took the kindling of dry subjects and ignited them. Philip Womack recently said, in The Spectator, that children's literature is increasingly becoming 'easily translated, and easily disseminated, but will it sing in a child's mind, or set it alight?'. 'With a massive decline in children reading for pleasure, this trend will become worse, as publishers attempt to lure children away from screens with increasingly desperate pandering.'  

So let's remove the competition: we must implement Jonathan Haidt's pleadings around banning smartphones for the young. They steal away resilience. 

The division between head and heart is the sort of false dichotomy that works well on an Instagram reel but fails to account that thinking and feeling are not in opposition.

But in a reactive world, what else can we adopt to ensure each child grows up with agency over their thoughts and feelings? Where might deeper resources come from that we can build upon? The Christian tradition offers us a solid foundation. This might not seem instinctive, as Christians can take a dualistic approach to thinking and feeling. I've often heard talk about 'head knowledge' and 'heart knowledge', among some of the Christians I hear. The former is dry and irrelevant at best, and something more sinister at worst. Blaise Pascal wouldn't have recognised this. Sadly, sometimes the more exuberant expressions of Christianity have championed anti-intellectualism. The division between head and heart is the sort of false dichotomy that works well on an Instagram reel but fails to account that thinking and feeling are not in opposition. Advertisers have long understood this.  

Looking back historically, there was an understanding that one's heart comprised both the emotions and thinking. Tennyson encouraged us to 'keep your head about you', and someone losing their temper might phrase it as 'I'm losing my mind.' If our heads are online, it's not just our heads that are on the line. 

Further back, St Paul writes about the Gentiles' 'futile' thinking. There's that F word again. He writes that: 

'They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.' 

To be desensitised to an incarnate life is to numb our thinking and feeling. And the numbing that Paul writes of here is to be separated from the life of God. Paul wants his fellow believers to have 'the eyes of their hearts' enlightened. And the enlightening here is the revelation of who God is. 

This was the gift of the printing press at the time of the Reformation - that power resides not in the pulpit, but in the people's hands. We are now at danger of delegating our thinking and feeling not to a priest but to AI. The Bible is not a straightforward life manual that will tell you which school to send your children to or which car to buy. You have to think deeply, to connect the dots of the grand narrative, to engage your head and your heart. This takes us not only deeper into ourselves, but out of ourselves to one another. Paul's letter to the Ephesians emphasised the closing of the gap between types of people made possible by the cross. For this same Bible warns against being too wise in our own eyes. Ultimately, God’s thoughts are higher than ours. In him we ultimately find the place to process and develop our thoughts and feelings. 

As we convulse through another great revolution, we need to take courage that we each have agency to feel and think, if only we give them enough airtime in our crammed headspace. It's enough to make us think. And to rethink. But we can fling open the gate to an enchanting and enriching hinterland we can never fully traverse. 

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