Returning to the Sacred Spring? Spas, Wellness, and Nonreligious Spirituality

‘No religion’ is the fastest growing ‘religious’ demographic in Australia: burgeoning from 6.7% in 1971 to 38.9% in 2021. It is also the least understood. Prevailing histories equate secularisation with spiritual disenchantment and atheism. Yet we now know that a majority of people who cease, or have never held, religious affiliation still see themselves as spiritual beings (Beyer, 2015; Singleton et al, 2021). These spiritual, but not religious, (SBNR) people are seeking new forms of pastoral support. They often engage in diverse holistic health and wellness practices to facilitate existential meaning-making, belonging, and ‘care of the soul’ (Suvák, 2019), a sector that is now worth $5.6 trillion globally (Global Wellness Institute, 2023). We know almost nothing about the changing practices of nonreligious spiritual health care in modern Australia, however, because historians of religion and secularisation have ignored nonreligious spiritual experience (Jones, 2013; Jones, 2021). Low levels of knowledge about Australian nonreligion and spirituality have left policy makers ill-equipped to regulate the provision of holistic health care. A large and fast growing religious demographic thus remains vulnerable to commercial exploitation, substandard care, and to unregulated, sometimes dangerous, holistic practices.

Historians are only just beginning to conceptualise histories of nonreligion (Alexander, 2021). As yet, no one has provided an historical account of nonreligious spirituality or spiritual health care. Religious history remains dominated by the framework of secularisation, which studies loss of faith rather than the formation of new worldviews (Bouma et al, 2022; Guest, 2022; Newheiser, 2022; Singleton, 2015). Studies of Self-Help Movements, New Religious Movements and New Age Spirituality, as well as the histories of atheism, civic and postsecular religion, anticipate this history of nonreligion (Bellanta 2010; Brett 2003; Brown 2017; Jones, 2013; Jones, 2021; Jones & Wright, 2019; Scates, 2013). Yet they have too narrow a field of vision to adequately engage with the experiences or histories of SBNR people and their diverse worldviews. The history of nonreligious spirituality thus remains underexamined. There is some research into aspects of the history of holistic and allied health care (Collyer 2012; Porter, 1989; White, 2012). However, wellness’ history has not been subject to critical investigation. The historical conditions and processes through which wellness industries began to make claims about spiritual health care, and cultivate and exploit the spiritual appetites of (non)religious consumers, requires further investigation.

This paper will investigate the history of one sector of the contemporary wellness industry – the Mineral Spring and Spa sector – to construct the beginnings of a history of nonreligious spiritual experience and spiritual care in Australia. While wellness industries frequently claim authentic connections to ancient health traditions, pilot research (author, 2024) has traced Australian wellness industries’ modern beginnings to the 1850s. Using archival and oral history research methods, the wider project from which this paper arises will recover the historical relationship between wellness industries and nonreligious spirituality in modern Australia. Moving beyond existing scholarship that critiques wellness industries for cultural appropriation, exploitation and dis/misinformation (Halafoff et al, 2022; Purser, 2019; Ward & Voas, 2011), the project will draw on Foucault’s (2021) concerns with governmentality and the operations of pastoral power to analyse and illuminate the long history of nonreligious spiritual care that wellness industries have delivered and the diverse spiritual desires, practices and care needs of nonreligious Australians.

This paper takes spas and mineral springs, which constitute major sectors of the contemporary global wellness economy, as a case study. This history of Australian spas and mineral spring use challenges many assumptions about wellness culture and spirituality. The industry, media and its critics emphasise ‘wellness’ as both holistic health care and pampering self-care. Wellness culture has often been critiqued as a form neoliberal exploitation, particularly of wealthy, middle class, white women. Its spiritual dimensions are often figured as either window dressing, gestural, or more substantively as the spirituality of neoliberalism. The history of mineral spring and spa treatments in Australia tells a different story. Spa, water cures and mineral springs in Australia have been remarkable democratic. They have been accessible across class divisions, focussed on meeting neglected health needs, and instrumental in the development of environmental protections. Spa culture in Australia has been relatively free of spiritual window dressing, instead emphasising scientific rationales for water treatments. When spiritual dimensions of aquatic wellness came to be foregrounded in the 1990s, they were often preoccupied with a nonreligious settler colonial spiritual condition, addressing settler’s experiences of spiritual alienation in the colonised environment.

The paper will analyse the spiritual dimensions of spa and mineral spring use in Australia from two perspectives. Foucault’s (1986) conceptualisation of heterotopia and heterochronia are useful in thinking about the internal experiences of nonreligious people as they engage in water based wellness practices – drawing other times and spaces into the mind. Water rituals are some of the oldest documented human spiritual practices, with archaeological evidence testifying to a continuity that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Unlike Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s (1993/2000) analysis of the functionality of religion as a chain of memory, nonreligion spiritual practices have very weak reference to the authority of tradition. Nonreligious spiritual practice is less in continuity and conformity with community and tradition, but rather an agentic assemblage of spiritual significances from other times and places in which the nonreligious spiritual practitioner sees themselves. We could thus, perhaps, understand nonreligious spirituality functioning as a chain of mirrors.