Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion

Selling Spirituality offers a critical analysis of the rise of spirituality as a powerful commodity in the global marketplace.It shows how spirituality is big business, examining how spiritual discourses, practices, and institutions have been reshaped by neoliberal forces.This expanded second edition provides significant updates to the book in light of developments from the previous decades, particularly the consolidation of neoliberalism through digital technologies, emerging AI and platform capitalism.Building on the original analysis of the privatisation of religion and the privatisation of welfare, the authors introduce a third privatisation: the outsourcing of attention, affect, and mental resilience to spiritualised techniques of self-regulation amid conditions of precarity, algorithmic governance, and informational overload.Four new chapters examine neoliberalism as a quasi-religious orthodoxy; the commodification of Christian prayer and interiority; mindfulness as a technology