Secularisation, Wellness Industries, and Nonreligious Spiritual Health Care

As more and more people do not affiliate with religion, narratives of spiritual wellbeing are evolving to recognise the spirituality and spiritual care needs of nonreligious people. This chapter outlines a history of global wellness industries—which provide holistic, including spiritual, health care—as a way of charting the changing articulation and function of nonreligious spiritual care. It attends particularly to the ways that wellness discourses, institutions, and practices make claims about spiritual health care; and conversely, how ideas of spiritual care have shaped wellness industries. The chapter traces the development of the discourse of wellness to its emergence in public health in the 1950s, the formalisation of wellness infrastructure through wellness entrepreneurs in the 1970s, and its function as a tool of neo-liberal governmentality in the twenty-first century. It finds a polyvalent history, in which the relationship between wellness industries and nonreligious spiritual health care blends spiritual yearning, satisfaction, exploitation, and disappointment. It is a story of resistance to hegemonic bio-medicine and bio-power as well as the triumph of neo-liberal spirituality.