Selling Spirituality

* Book: Jeremy Carrette and Richard King. Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (2005).

Review

Erik Haines:

1.

"Selling Spirituality is a sustained critique of the privatization, individualization, and corporate capture of religion through the discourse of “spirituality” in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalism. It is a politically engaged critical-religious-studies work tracing how historical religious traditions have been reorganized into privatized, market-friendly cultural products, rendered instrumentally useful to corporate, educational, healthcare, and managerial regimes."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-enchanted-flatland-iain-mcgilchrist)

2.

"What Watts’s Spiritual Turn names, and what Selling Spirituality named seventeen years earlier, is the philosophical-anthropological formation running through all four clusters as their common centre of gravity. The formation is romantic-liberal in the precise technical sense Watts develops at length: it draws on the post-1960s spiritual turn toward deinstitutionalized, individualized, experientially grounded religiosity; it operates within the broader liberal political framework of the educated middle class across the Anglophone world; it valorizes authenticity, depth, expressive individualism, and self-actualization as the core human goods; and it treats the recovery of meaning, spirituality, and purpose as the central cultural task of late modernity. Watts is careful to distinguish romantic liberalism from progressive liberalism—they are politically and culturally distinct, often opposed—but he demonstrates they share the underlying liberal moral framework, and that the differences between them are inflections within a single broader formation rather than fundamental disagreements about what human life is for. This formation is genuinely culturally generative. It has produced the wellness industry, the contemplative-revival publishing arc, the integral-spiritual conference circuit, the meaning-crisis podcast economy, and a substantial portion of contemporary popular religion in its non-institutional forms. On Watts’s analysis, it is the single most influential moral-metaphysical position in the contemporary educated-Anglophone world. The philosophical-anthropological work of figures like McGilchrist, Vervaeke, Dempsey, and Segall serves as the highbrow articulation of what the formation believes about itself.

What Selling Spirituality had already named in 2005 was the political-economic substrate of the formation. Carrette and King traced with considerable empirical detail the way the discourse of spirituality had been progressively privatized, commodified, and metabolized by neoliberal capitalism—turned into a market product, instrumentalized for managerial and corporate ends, and severed from the socially transformative dimensions of the historical religious traditions it claimed to draw from. Under neoliberalism, right-hemispheric modalities like mindfulness and flow states are stripped of their ethical demands and repurposed as corporate productivity hacks, stress-reduction techniques for burnt-out managers, or personal-brand enhancers for the creative class. Carrette and King’s diagnosis is sharper than Watts’s precisely because it foregrounds this political-economic mechanism: the formation is not merely a moral-metaphysical position with systematic blind spots, but a culturally productive arrangement of religious and spiritual resources serving specific political and economic functions in late capitalism. It is spirituality defanged of its capacity to challenge structural economic realities. Watts adds the ethnographic and theoretical depth that Selling Spirituality did not have time to develop. Taken together, the two books constitute the empirical substrate from which this essay’s diagnostic proceeds. The formation has its political-economic substrate (Carrette and King), its philosophical-anthropological articulation (Watts), and its highbrow-philosophical apparatus (McGilchrist, Taylor, Segall, McGrath, Vervaeke, Dempsey). It has its institutional carriers (Perspectiva, Rebel Wisdom, CIIS, Integral Life, the Daily Wire in its meaning-crisis register, the Liminal-Meaning web more broadly). And it has—though few of its participants would recognize this—its political downstream: the post-2016 cultural-political wave mobilizing romantic-liberal philosophical resources for an explicit political project that romantic liberalism itself, as a moral-metaphysical position, would not endorse but cannot recognize itself as enabling.

The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves (December 2024), written as the first sustained public deployment of the diagnostic this essay extends, took up Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart category of the lifestyle enclave and applied it specifically to the American integral community organized around Wilber’s Integral Life platform. The argument was that what began as an integral movement aspiring to civic, intellectual, and spiritual transformation had progressively become a lifestyle enclave in Bellah’s precise sense: a community organized around shared private leisure consumption, internally cohesive but politically disengaged, religiously serious in form but entirely unable to translate its commitments into the public-sphere institutions through which democratic life is actually sustained. A lifestyle enclave retreats from the friction of structural politics into the comfort of shared aesthetic and spiritual consumption. The present essay extends that diagnostic at scale. What was true of the American integral case is true, in different inflections, of the British Perspectiva-Rebel-Wisdom cluster, of the CIIS-process-relational tradition, of the Vervaeke-Peterson mass-cultural strand, and of the broader Liminal-Meaning web ecosystem taken as a whole. The institutional infrastructure across all four clusters produces lifestyle enclaves at increasing scale, anchored philosophically by the romantic-liberalism Watts diagnoses, served philosophical-anthropologically by figures like McGilchrist, and completely unable to recognize themselves as such because the categories of analysis available within the formation cannot reach the structural-political level at which the diagnostic operates. That diagnostic is what Section V now lays out."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-enchanted-flatland-iain-mcgilchrist)

Discussion

An update on this book, by Erik Haines:

"Expanding upon the groundwork laid by Carrette and King seventeen years prior, Galen Watts’s The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity (2022) provides a deeper ethnographic and theoretical evolution of the maps first drawn in Selling Spirituality. Utilizing the frameworks of Bellah, Charles Taylor, and Émile Durkheim, Watts delineates the philosophical anthropology of a cultural shift originating in the post-1960s West—a move toward a deinstitutionalized, individualized, and experientially-centered spirituality. This paradigm has since crystallized into the primary moral imaginary for the educated liberal classes throughout the Anglophone sphere. Watts demonstrates, through rigorous ethnographic data, that this is a structurally coherent moral and metaphysical stance, possessing its own unique anthropology and inherent blind spots."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-enchanted-flatland-iain-mcgilchrist)