Free the Children as a ‘new secular spiritual movement’: a case study on the conceptual boundaries between ‘spirituality’, ‘the sacred’, and ‘new religious movements’
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".