ABSTRACT
Although noted by various studies, the prevalence of the urban-industrial professional classes within contemporary non-mainstream and alternative religiosities has remained relatively undeveloped.1 This chapter goes some way to rectifying this oversight by drawing upon research with non-mainstream religions and alternative spiritualities in Brazil, Europe, and North America.2 While so doing, this chapter also engages a problematic which concerns the manner and extent to which theories and concepts used to explicate social (and, by extension, religious) change in one part of the world might be considered relevant to elucidating socioreligious transformations in other regions of the globe. As will be evident in what follows, my response to this issue is qualifiedly positive, assuming that one speaks only of particular (here, ‘modern’) regions which, by virtue of their shared (‘entangled’) modernities, allow theories and concepts originating in one sociocultural domain to be applied to other areas of the world.
