Occulture : The New Face of American Spirituality

Far from going secular, America has entered a new era of cultural re-enchantment, in which "occulture"—from energy healing to ghost hunting—has reshaped the spiritual landscape.The last several decades have witnessed a sea change in American culture. Traditional religion has declined significantly. However, predictions that America would become predominantly secular have not come true. What has happened instead is much stranger and more interesting: America has become re-enchanted.In Occulture: The New Face of American Spirituality, Christian Smith, Matthew Coetzee, and Bridget Ritz show that while many Americans, especially younger ones, have left traditional religion, they do not find atheism or secularism attractive. Instead, they are embracing what the authors call "occulture": alternative beliefs and practices around things spiritual, psychic, mystical, magical, esoteric, pagan, occultic, and paranormal. People are buying energy crystals, experimenting with "eastern" religions, and "manifesting" their desires. They believe in energy projection, karma, reincarnation, psychic abilities, and divine energies. Significant subcultures are growing around neopaganism, magic, chakras, Reiki, ghost hunting, and monsters. Occulture dominates in most media and makes billions of dollars in profit for corporations. Until now, this sweeping cultural re-enchantment has gone largely unnoticed, either flying under the radar or being dismissed as deviant or trivial. In fact, it is a major cultural phenomenon that deserves to be taken seriously. This book does just that, drawing on original findings from national survey data, scores of interviews, field studies, and systematic analyses of media to offer a big-picture explanation of this enormous cultural transformation.The growth of occulture has massive implications for both traditional American religion and secularism, as those old rivals are joined on the field by a new contender. Occulture: The New Face of American Spirituality will fundamentally re-orient our understanding of recent religious and spiritual developments in the United States, upending what we thought we knew about the state of all things spiritual, sacred, and religious in America today.