Rethinking the Distinction between Religion and Spirituality from the Viewpoint of a Christian Women’s Organisation in Flanders, Belgium’

This paper aims to discuss the usefulness of making conceptual distinctions between ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’, and does so by starting from research on Femma – a large Christian women’s organisation in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern region of Belgium. It focuses on Femma’s recent policy papers outlining the women’s organisation’s policies regarding women’s zingeving – a Dutch term that can be translated in English as the process of giving meaning to collective or individual life, or as those specific values, feelings or goals that give meaning to life. The paper approaches Femma’s policy-making as an area of rethinking and (re)constructing understandings about religion, spirituality and women’s emancipation. Its analysis demonstrates that making distinctions between religion and spirituality in exploring Femma’s construction of women’s zingeving is useful to comprehend the ways in which Femma is creating new understandings build upon various sources of inspiration. At the same time, the analysis reveals that Femma’s construction of women’s zingeving is indeed breaking through the boundaries supposed by the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’, by discursively blurring and fusing multiple stories, languages, religions and spiritualities and thereby creating new connections to what it regards as women’s emancipation. The paper argues that the distinction of ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ therefore serves as a double-edged sword: it both reaffirms existing assumptions about this distinction, and reveals the moments of challenging, breaking through and/or reconstructing the distinction and assumptions connected to it. The paper continues by arguing for reading Femma’s zingeving simultaneously critically and as a critique regarding assumptions about spirituality as free of gendered power dynamics. Femma’s zingeving can first be read as a critique on the idea of the ‘individual pick-and-choose religion’ that emerged in the study of spirituality in West European countries. Second, Femma’s zingeving needs to be probed regarding its own ‘powerful’ possibilities to fuse Biblical inspiration and non-Biblical spiritualities. As it doesn’t reflect upon the power relations that exist between different religions, spiritualities and worldviews worldwide, nor upon differences among women, it can be critiqued for an uncritical appropriation of non-Christian spiritualities and wisdoms for the benefit of predominantly white women’s agency