Abstract

The New Age is a broad milieu which allows participants to undertake a range of activities in pursuit of self-improvement. Often characterized as a form of
religious consumerism in the popular media, it does not easily fit into received church-sect models of the sociology of religion. This article argues that the
movement’s market-type organizational logic, in which individuals typically choose from a range of belief options rather than commit to a central doctrine, is consonant
with the privatist concerns of personal authority and self-care found in its discourse. However, at the same time, the New Age does not reduce to some simple acquisitive
consumerism. It is better understood as offering solutions to the problem of personal agency in a post-traditional society which obliges individuals to assume the burden of
plotting their own destinies.