Zoeken naar zuiverheid. Religieuze purificatie onder jonge new-agers, evangelicalen en moslims

Contains fulltext : 84640.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)This article addresses New Age spirituality, evangelicalism and Salafism, three vital forms of religion among contemporary Dutch youth. Despite the obvious differences between these religions there is a crucial similarity: it is demonstrated that young people adhering to these groups formulate strong critiques of what they consider to be ‘perverted’, ‘unreal’ and ‘inauthentic’ traditional religious institutions and, motivated by this, actively search for a more pure, authentic religious alternative. These findings, the authors argue, have important theoretical implications, since the anti-institutionalism found among these young people neither leads them to a secular position (the secularization thesis of, for instance, Peter Berger), nor motivates a ‘privatized’ form of religion without any social or public significance (the privatization thesis of, for example, Thomas Luckmann). The analysis brings the authors to a third option: that young people’s collective pursuit of an ‘authentic’ religion that ‘really matters’ can better be understood as a development of purification (the purification thesis)