New Age
Religion, spirituality, and esotericism

In discussing the New Age, academics have varyingly referred to "New Age spirituality" and "New Age religion". Those involved in the New Age rarely consider it to be "religion"—negatively associating that term solely with organized religion —and instead describe their practices as "spirituality". Religious studies scholars, however, have repeatedly referred to the New Age milieu as a "religion". York described the New Age as a new religious movement (NRM). Conversely, both Heelas and Sutcliffe rejected this categorisation; Heelas believed that while elements of the New Age represented NRMs, this did not apply to every New Age group. Similarly, Chryssides stated that the New Age could not be seen as "a religion" in itself.

The New Age movement is the cultic milieu having become conscious of itself, in the later 1970s, as constituting a more or less unified "movement". All manifestations of this movement are characterized by a popular western culture criticism expressed in terms of a secularized esotericism.

— Scholar of esotericism Wouter Hanegraaff, 1996.

The New Age is also a form of Western esotericism. Hanegraaff regarded the New Age as a form of "popular culture criticism", in that it represented a reaction against the dominant Western values of Judeo-Christian religion and rationalism, adding that "New Age religion formulates such criticism not at random, but falls back on" the ideas of earlier Western esoteric groups.

The New Age has also been identified by various scholars of religion as part of the cultic milieu. This concept, developed by the sociologist Colin Campbell, refers to a social network of marginalized ideas. Through their shared marginalization within a given society, these disparate ideas interact and create new syntheses.

Hammer identified much of the New Age as corresponding to the concept of " folk religions " in that it seeks to deal with existential questions regarding subjects like death and disease in "an unsystematic fashion, often through a process of bricolage from already available narratives and rituals". York also heuristically divides the New Age into three broad trends. The first, the social camp, represents groups that primarily seek to bring about social change, while the second, the occult camp, instead focus on contact with spirit entities and channeling. York's third group, the spiritual camp, represents a middle ground between these two camps that focuses largely on individual development.
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