20 Spirituality Studies 9-2 Fall 2023 alternative psychology, mindfulness, or the revival of paganism and ancient traditions. The role of globalism, marketing, authenticity, and politics either strengthens or weakens these forms of belief (Bowman 1999; D’Andrea 2007; Schouten, McAlexander, and Koenig 2007; Kasim 2011; Gauthier 2021, 2022). In the history of Hungary, in a country with a predominantly Christian background, the subject of faith, or the “not unquestionably plausible supernatural agent” (Rüpke 2019, 1202) of one’s belief has always been the Christian God. But the alternative forms of religion and the emergence of “muddled beliefs” (Gilliat-Ray 2005, 364) have affected this notion, and nowadays, in certain contexts, believers prefer to avoid the term “God” (with a capital G) and refer to the “higher power” they believe in as the divine, ancient power, transcendent, energies, gods (in the plural), supernatural, and so on. It has also become more common to describe one’s religious self-classification as spiritual, but not religious (Erlandson 2000; Fuller 2001), believing without belonging (Casanova 2020; Tromp, Pless and Houtman 2020), or religious in one’s own way (Tomka 1986; Ivan 2012) in order to distance oneself from 1) “religion” as a concept, 2) a (particular) religious institution, or 3) God. These slight differences become more apparent when conducting empirical fieldwork, both in quantitative research (usually with a questionnaire with pre-defined answers from which the respondent must choose one option regardless of the wording) and in qualitative research (where the respondent is free to express their views in their own words, resulting in many different answers that are difficult to analyse together). Especially in contexts where scholars have faceto-face contact with their respondents, the various answers need to be handled carefully. If respondents do not classify themselves as religious or spiritual but do believe in some kind of higher power and/or do not belong to a religious institution but use religious semantics, the interpretation of their belief system cannot be called “religious” or “spiritual”, especially because of the wide range of different understandings of these terms in both academic and everyday circles. The researcher does not have the authority to decide whether someone is religious or spiritual if they explicitly reject these terms. He or she can only use these terms carefully and explain them in the context in which they are applied [1]. 3 Religion, Alternative Concepts, and Spirituality Many have, of course, recognised this problem and solved it by introducing terms such as “quasi-religion” and “pseudo-religion”. The distinction between these terms was made by Paul Tillich (1963, 5–6), who explained “pseudo-religion” as a movement with similarities to traditional religions, such as new religious movements, New Age beliefs, and similar currents, while “quasi-religions” are non-religious movements with similarities to religion, such as a political party, for example. This distinction seems appropriate, but it severely limits the use of the two terms, especially in the non-institutionalised environment. First, defining the two terms as movements already implies that there must be a community, a group, or an institution behind these gatherings or ideologies, which excludes those who have beliefs of some kind but reject the idea of the institution, preferring for example to experience or live their faith alone or in temporary communities. Second, while quasi-religions unintentionally resemble religions and use religious semantics, pseudo-religions do so intentionally, excluding those who use religious semantics intentionally outside the institutionalised environment or who are aware of the religious meaning of the symbols or ideas they use but reinterpret them in their own way. Defining religion has always been a challenge in any discipline and at any time, resulting in several definitions with different focus points, such as the functionalist approaches of Durkheim, Bellah, or the symbolic definition of Geertz (Durkheim 1964; Bellah 1964; Geertz 1999). These definitions emphasise the social function of religion, while the substantive approaches, such as the understanding of religion as sui generis (Otto 1958; Eliade 1987), understand religion from the level of the individual, as belief in a supernatural power. To overcome some of the difficulties, some scholars have worked on the distinction between institutionalised religion and the understanding of religion as it is lived in everyday life. The latter approach, now commonly known as “lived religion”, has been used, for example, by Robert Orsi (Orsi 1997), Leonard Primiano (Primiano 1995), Meredith McGuire (McGuire 2008), and Nancy Ammerman (Ammerman 2021). Each scholar has a slightly different take on the concept (see, for example, a detailed article on the subject by Knibbe and Kupari 2020). Orsi, for instance, distinguishes between “official” and “folk” understandings of religion, while Primiano (1995, 44), who defines vernacular religion “as it is lived: as human beings encounter, understand, interpret and practice
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