This dissertation investigates the social history of New Age spirituality within the United States. The essay defines New Age spirituality as a symbol system structured around the Romantic themes of Self-Reliance and the Bildung journey from alienation to integration. As both themes flow from an antiauthoritarian attitude, New Agers feel no obligation to religious traditions inherited from family. Rather, they adopt or invent traditions that affirm Baby Boomers’ own spiritual intuitions, and support their efforts toward self-transformation.

Events of the 1960s aroused Baby Boomers’ anti-authoritarian, Romantic spirit: the Civil Rights movement demonstrated the effectiveness of civil protest, and the Vietnam War provided opportunities for elaborating anti-authoritarian positions. During the early 1970s, when the movement fragmented and protest became dangerous, many Boomers quit protesting, internalized their anti-authoritarianism, and sought the goal of personal liberation.

In contrast with studies that trace only the intellectual provenance of New Age spirituality, this dissertation uses resources from the sociology of religion, and from literary criticism, to analyze New Age symbolism. Like Max Weber’s studies of world religions, this essay examines ways that New Age spirituality helps resolve concrete historical tensions experienced by its carrier stratum. Relying upon Robert Bellah’s theory of Religious Evolution, it analyzes New Age spirituality as an example of Modern religiosity—grounded in human needs, and self-consciously created by human beings. Applying Meyer Abrams’ insights, the essay analyzes Romantic themes as a naturalistic recasting of supernaturalistic motifs salient within biblical religiosity. Bellah’s and Abrams’ concepts help illuminate continuities between New Age and mainstream religiosity in the United States.

The essay identifies three preoccupations of New Age spirituality: harmonial mysticism, holistic healing, and Earth-Based spirituality. The dissertation examines ways in which these preoccupations function within the overarching symbolic structure of New Age spirituality: the Bildung journey from alienation to integration. Using examples, the dissertation shows how harmonial mysticism, holistic healing and Earth-Based spirituality naturalize central categories of supernaturalistic biblical religiosity. It traces harmonialism from its origin within the 1870s New Thought movement to the present, and traces holistic healing from its origin within psychoanalytic discourse to its central position within New Age culture.