Religious collectivities remain important even as religion becomes more individualized and people's ties to institutions shift. Research in Quebec on smaller, marginal spiritualities attracting native-born Québécois, who often keep some connection to the Catholic Church, shows that while spiritualities are individualized and hybrid, religious sociality is still essential for maximizing the effectiveness of spiritual practice, providing apprenticeship frameworks, supporting altered states of consciousness, and validating participants' authenticity. In mainstream congregations like Catholic and Pentecostal, communality's religious elements are sometimes obscured, but examining marginal currents reveals the enduring power of religious sociality.
Academic publications on psilocybin are concentrated in medical and scientific fields, while those on ayahuasca come mainly from the humanities and social sciences. The use of both substances is undergoing secularization—moving away from traditional cultural roots—but to different degrees: psilocybin is more secularized and medicalized, whereas ayahuasca retains stronger ties to religious institutions and indigenous organizations. Ayahuasca also exhibits a form of 'guardianship,' with groups actively maintaining cultural authority over its practices. Clinical trials for psilocybin carefully attend to setting, but this does not necessarily emphasize traditional mushroom-use contexts.
In contemporary Japanese youth culture, the boundary between religious and non-religious practices is blurring, shaped by three key concepts: 'practicing belonging', 'vicarious spirituality', and 'gendered fetishism'. These are illustrated through the phenomenon of 'tulpa'—created paranormal beings derived from Tibetan Buddhism—along with other examples. The article argues that what may appear religious to Japanese scholars might not be viewed as such by Western scholars, and that factors transforming religiousness in Japan affect not only spiritual but also secular settings, leading to parallel phenomena.