Born without religion, in a secular society, when we want meaning or moral teaching, it is a yoga teacher with her 200-hour teacher-training certificate that is providing it. Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP

In my local yoga studio is a flyer for a program that is rapidly filling up: six weeks of daily yoga, meditation, journaling and weekly meetings that are part tutorial on mindfulness and part group therapy. The program promises an exciting transformation will occur. Its not just the body that will be transformed. In the yoga world, it is almost considered base to ask if all this exercise will lead to weight loss. No, this is all about the soul that invisible organ, the contested ground, the divine essence only found in humans that Christian religions have for centuries staked their reputations on trying to save.

Poet Philip Larkin wrote in Church Going:

someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious

And so it is here.

These yoga programs promise to help restore equilibrium to body, mind and spirit, achieving a sense of wholeness, that in our society with our attention fractured by technology and our perpetual fatigue is highly prized but elusive.

I did a six-week intensive yoga program last year while researching my book on the wellness industry, Wellmania. In the daily yoga class, the thing that stood out the most was not how strong my arms got or how repetitive and boring it could be or how well I later slept but the pseudo-spiritual mood that permeated the class.

There we would be, a class full of (mostly) women sweating, holding some uncomfortable posture designed to open the heart space while the teacher would read a passage from Rumi or talk about a time in her life when she forgave herself and her enemies and her heart opened like a flower.

Sometimes at this point in the class people would start to cry. Talking to classmates later, they would say that the teacher speaking in this way (who speaks like that these days?), combined with, say, a hip-opening pose, caused the tears to flow. This is what spirituality looked like for me in 2016. It was weird.

Australia is as secular as its ever been. According to a report in Guardian Australian, the census results show across all denominations, the total number of self-identified Christians has fallen from 13.1 million (61%) to 12.2 million (52%) in the past five years, with nearly 600,000 fewer Anglicans and nearly 147,500 fewer Catholics reported in 2016 compared with 2011. In the 1911 census, 96% of Australians recorded themselves as Christian.

It was only the more demonstrative and lively Pentecostal churches that bucked this downward trends.

But increasing numbers of young people (particularly women), who maybe inherited no or a very weak spiritual tradition from their baby-boomer parents are not doing secularism in a particularly secular way. They are not sitting around in cafes reading Hitchens and Dawkins or watching Sam Harris debates on YouTube. Well, maybe they are. But its not that clear-cut. Many are flocking to pseudo-spiritual practices such as yoga that fill a god-shaped hole the longing many have for something more than the corporeal, the hunger to be more serious.

Roy Morgan Research from 2016 found one in 10 Australians aged 14 and over now do yoga, up from one in 20 in 2008 when aerobics ruled. Today, more than twice as many people do yoga than aerobics. Yoga is also more popular than table tennis, ten-pin bowling, darts, dancing, soccer, cricket, tennis and golf. The proportion of women doing yoga has almost doubled over the period, from 8% to 15%.

The trend is global. According to a Yoga Journal report, 20.4 million people practice yoga in the US, up from 15.8 million in 2008. The yoga market is now worth $30bn in the US and $80bn globally. In 2015 yoga was a $1bn industry in Australia, employing around 12,000 people in 3,000 studios. Many studios now resemble upmarket day spas and cost upwards of $30 for a drop-in class. They also have a spiritual education component, with instructors inserting life lessons or moral teachings throughout the class.

The wellness industry is a billion-dollar behemoth that has sprung up at around the same time our appetite for traditional religion has dropped. The wellness industry which includes retreats, yoga and practices that might once have been the domain of the worlds great religions such as fasting (or given its wellness parlance, detoxing) has found a way of monetising elements of spiritual practice from a variety of different traditions. Mindfulness classes, subscriptions to meditation apps, yoga studios and luxury spiritual retreats in the jungles of south-east Asia are booming.

Born without religion, in a secular society, when we want meaning or moral teaching, it is a yoga teacher with her 200-hour teacher-training certificate that is providing it. There is a gap in the God market, and when there is a gap, capitalism will provide.

Doctors express frustration with what New York magazine this week called the shady, shallow science behind the wellness industry. The doctors enemies include the supplement and vitamin peddlers, the Goop! content writers, the purveyors of herbal detox remedies.

But what of this other side: the yoga courses that promise spiritual transformation? Is that harmful too? I think not. But its popularity is instructive. Were hard-wired to find meaning from somewhere, and its normal to crave the sort of community that might once have been found in a parish or local church its not a coincidence that in many of their marketing materials, big yoga studios emphasise their community. And its natural in times of anxiety and confusion to seek nuggets of truth in the sermon we get in yoga classes or the memes on Instagram of the wellness gurus.

If people want to get their spirituality from the wellness spiritual industrial complex say in a yoga class, via their meditation app, or on retreat thats fine. Its not hurting anyone and an old, primitive need is being filled. But the census result saying that Australia is secular shouldnt be the last word on Australias spiritual health. Just because were not going to church doesnt mean theres not a new sort of religion to hold us in its thrall.

Brigid Delaneys book Wellmania is out now.

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The census shows there's a gap in the spirituality market. Is yoga filling it? - The Guardian