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Does the counter-cultural character of new age persist? Investigating social and political attitudes of new age followers

From its beginnings in the 1960s up to the present, the New Age movement has undergone considerable change. Originally, it was a counter-cultural movement, interacting with other counter-cultural movements of that time, such as the ecology, hippie, and commune movements. During the last decades, spiritual and esoteric methods have been popularised and commercialised by an expanding market of literature and workshops. This has made New Age a socially accepted phenomenon and it has thus lost much of its anti-modernist and culture-critical character. In this article, I will show by means of quantitative empirical analyses that in spite of the transformations, the affinity between New Age activism and culture-critical attitudes persists to a certain degree. This is particularly the case for persons aiming at self-perfection by means of spiritual exercises and alternative health methods. Among persons who are primarily interested in esoteric methods, such as astrology and Tarot cards, hedonistic and authoritarian attitudes are, however, more widespread.