Symbolic Pollution and Religious Change: The Religious Imaginary of Anglo-Canadian Spiritual but Not Religious Millennials.

In this article, we advance a cultural sociological approach to religious change that foregrounds the role of symbolic pollution and shifting religious imaginaries. Leveraging interviews with 50 Anglo-Canadian Millennials who identify as spiritual but not religious , and ethnographic research at thr...

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Publicado en:Sociology of Religion Vol. 87; no. 1; pp. 1 - 30
Autores principales: Watts, Galen, Reimer, Sam
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Oxford University Press / USA Spring2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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          Watts, Galen
          Reimer, Sam
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          University of Waterloo, Canada
          Crandall University, Canada
      su:
        Canada
        Religion
        Secularization
        Millennials
        Culture
        Intellectual life
        Social history
        Canadians
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        subj:
          Religion
          Secularization
          Millennials
          Culture
          Intellectual life
          Social history
          Canada
          Canadians
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        copyrightHolder:Association for the Sociology of Religion
        copyrightYear:2026
        cultural sociology
        inLanguage:en
        publisher:Oxford University Press
        religious change
        religious imaginary
        sameAs:https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srae012
        secularization
        symbolic pollution
        copyrightHolder:Association for the Sociology of Religion
        copyrightYear:2026
        cultural sociology
        inLanguage:en
        publisher:Oxford University Press
        religious change
        religious imaginary
        sameAs:https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srae012
        secularization
        symbolic pollution
      ab: In this article, we advance a cultural sociological approach to religious change that foregrounds the role of symbolic pollution and shifting religious imaginaries. Leveraging interviews with 50 Anglo-Canadian Millennials who identify as spiritual but not religious , and ethnographic research at three field sites, we sketch a religious imaginary comprising four discourses of "religion." According to our informants, "religion" is (1) anti-modern ; (2) conservative ; (3) American ; and (4) colonial. Next, we draw from a combination of modern intellectual history and social histories of twentieth-century Canada to trace each of these discourses genealogically, thereby elucidating how "religion" became symbolically polluted for a large cohort of Canadian Millennials. We conclude with a discussion of the implications our account holds for secularization theory and the study of religious change more broadly.
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