Individual Globalism: A New Religious Culture of Advanced Industrial Societies
Behind the seemingly chaotic multiplication of religious groups in post-industrial societies, it is possible to discern an orthodoxy that oscillates between the search for oneself and openness to all. This constitutes a form of individual globalism that is accompanied by a mysticism expressed at times in quasi-scientific language and at others in a neo-traditional discourse and that is based on the cult of energy, a paradoxical substance that is both natural and supernatural, personal and impersonal: in short, it is both individual and global. This orthodoxy, which is the ideology of faith-based NGOs as well as the regulating culture of the global religious space, is today spilling over strictly religious borders and into health, sport, tourism, food, economics, and politics.