Free the Children as a ‘new secular spiritual movement’: a case study on the conceptual boundaries between ‘spirituality’, ‘the sacred’, and ‘new religious movements’
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The movement under study, Free the Children (FtC), is a youth empowerment organization that was founded in 1995 by a Canadian teenager, who, twenty years on, remains its leader today. Though it does not define itself as either a religion or an alternative to religion, it frequently uses the language of ‘spirituality’. Moreover, it meets all five criteria proposed by Lorne Dawson [2006. “New Religious Movements.” In The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, edited by Robert A. Segal, 269–284. Malden: Blackwell, 374] to define a new religious movement (NRM). It likewise demonstrates a valuation of certain principles (belonging, community, compassion, and caring) as set apart and inviolable: what Kim Knott [2013. “The Secular Sacred: In-between or Both/And?” In Social Identities between the Sacred and the Secular, edited by Abby Day, Giselle Vincett and Christopher R. Cotter, 145–160. Farnham: Ashgate] characterizes as ‘the secular sacred’. Trying to situate FtC in the post-war ‘seeking culture’ in which so many NRMs and ‘alternative spiritualities’ arose [Clarke, Peter B. 2006. New Religions in Global Perspective: A Study of Religious Change in the Modern World. New York: Routledge] reveals a major conceptual problem: ‘spirituality’, ‘the sacred’, and ‘NRMs’ have been operationally defined in many pieces of religious studies literature in relation to ‘religion’ and other terms, but never systematically in relation to each other. This is what our project proposes to do, provisionally offering the term ‘new secular spiritual movement’ (NSSM) as a heuristic.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it