Individualized Religion: Practitioners and their Communities

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Drawing on ethnographic research, this book explores individualized religion in and around Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. Claire Wanless demonstrates that counter to the claims of secularization theorists, the combination of informal structures and practices can provide a viable basis for socially significant religious activity that can sustain itself. The subjects of this research claim a variety of religious identities and practices, and are suspicious of religious institutions, hierarchies, rules and dogmas. Yet they participate actively in an overlapping and cross-linking informal network of practice communities and other associations. Their engagements propagate and sustain a core ideology that prioritizes subjectivity, locates authority at the level of the individual, and also predicates itself on ideals of sharing, mutuality and community. Providing a new theory of religious association, this book is a nuanced counterpoint to the secularization thesis in the UK and points the way to new research on individual religion.

Reviews

[A]n enlightening ethnographic study by Claire Wanless [that] offers an important qualification to secularization theory by looking at individualized religious practice ... The book aims to provide nuance to the secularization debate by proposing new ways of theorizing individualized religion, [and] new ways of thinking about the relationship between individualized religious practitioners and the communities (10). This is done successfully. * Reading Religion *
This outstanding account of contemporary spirituality turns received wisdom on its head by showing that its individualism is its greatest strength. * Linda Woodhead, Distinguished Professor, Lancaster University, UK *
A number of ethnographies of vernacular religion and the holistic milieu have recently appeared. But the specific form of religion which sustains them remains undertheorised. Individualised Religion: Practitioners and their Communities addresses this gap though a ground-breaking case study of individualised religion. Based in an ethnography of non-aligned Buddhists, Pagans and Quakers in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, Wanless recovers and theorises a nuanced middle ground of practitioners and their communities who do religion between the polar extremes of secularization and spiritual revolution. Based in theories of learning and community practice rarely employed in the Study of Religion/s, this is a benchmark study in how the holistic milieu actually works. * Steven Sutcliffe, Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion, University of Edinburgh *

Author Bio

Claire Wanless is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, UK