 Central to adherents' faith is a belief that spirits of the dead communicate with the living usually through a medium.The word also takes on specific alternative meanings in various differing fields of academia, see below.Spiritualism is used in English to mean either;

"Modern Spiritualism", or "Modern American Spiritualism" is used to refer to an Anglo-American religious movement having its golden age between the 1840s and 1920s but which continues on to this day.