38% of Gen Z Australians identify as spiritual and half of them believe in karma. Why is spirituality so popular?
Spirituality is increasingly popular with young Australians: recent research shows 38% of Gen Z Australians identify as spiritual.
- Spirituality is increasingly popular with young Australians: recent research shows 38% of Gen Z Australians identify as spiritual.
- When it comes to activities equated with spirituality, 28% of Gen Z Australians practise meditation and 22% practise yoga.
- In Australia, spirituality is strongly, enduringly central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and culturally and religiously diverse communities.
- The most recent trend in studies of religion – frequently associated with spirituality – is a reported close connection with nature.
What is spirituality?
- Spirituality has often been seen as the “individualised good-guy”, as a counterpart to the “institutional bad-guy” of religion.
- According to Warraimaay historian Victoria Grieve-Williams, spirituality is deeply relational and ethical, honouring interconnections with human and more-than-human beings.
- In the Gen Z Australians survey, 22% self-identified as spiritual but not religious, with a further 16% identifying as both religious and spiritual.
How spiritual are Australians?
- Through colonisation and migration, Europeans brought Christian and Jewish religions, which also include spiritual dimensions, to Australia.
- Many of their spiritual frameworks also stress interdependency with and compassion for all lifeforms.
Spirituality is big business
- So-called Western interest in spirituality had earlier iterations in theosophy, an esoteric philosophy based on older religions and myths, and spiritualism, a way of life combining philosophy, science and religion.
- But spirituality boomed globally as part of the alternative 1960s counterculture.
- Since then, interest in spirituality and the expanding $4.4 trillion wellness industry has grown exponentially.
- “Classically, it is an ancient Indian philosophy espousing an eight-limbed approach to conscious living.”
At the turn of the 21st century, some experts predicted spirituality would eclipse religion, given this thriving “spiritual marketplace”.
Spiritual risks and harms
- While spirituality was previously associated with hippies and “peace, love and mung beans”, reports of spiritual harms – emotional, sexual and financial abuse – are increasingly being revealed in both religious and spiritual communities.
- The uptake of conspiracy theories in spiritual communities – and vaccine resistance within them – have also been deeply troubling in recent years.