Individualized Religion: Practitioners and Their Communities

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.

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

Amy L. Allocco is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Multifaith Scholars Program at Elon University, USA.

Bettina E. Schmidt is Professor in the Study of Religions and Anthropology of Religion in the Centre of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK.

Steven J. Sutcliffe is Visiting Fellow in Religious Studies at The Open University, UK. He is the co-editor (with Carole Cusack) of The Problem of Invented Religions (2016) and (with Ingvild Gilhus) of New Age Spirituality: Rethinking Religion (2014), and is the author of Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices (2003). He is one of the editors of the series Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies, which publishes theoretically astute, evidence-based monographs and edited volumes on the study of religion.