Are We All Spiritual?

In English 'I’m spiritual – not religious' has become a key expression of a new form of globalized religion focussing on a specific notion of spirituality, signifying a universal human essence, located deep inside each individual as a potential for wellbeing and personal transformation. The message is: Spirituality unites us into a single humanity, while religion, with its dogma and rituals, separates us. This new concept of spirituality works mostly in symbiosis with neoliberal ideas about the market, where neo-spiritual therapists and coaches offer to assist individuals in finding and developing their spirituality or 'inner potential'.
In this article, I suggest that this contemporary view of spirituality is produced within a particular social context, and is thus not self-evidently adopted in other contexts. To illustrate this, I draw on my experience of fieldwork in Canadian Mi’kmaq reserves and examples of contemporary spirituality, mainly from Sweden; and consider whether Mi'kmaq notions of spirituality are congruent with those of the 'new spirituality'.