Showing papers on "Secularization published in 2019"

Religions as brands? Religion and spirituality in consumer society

Abstract: This article gives an interdisciplinary account of the societal causes as well as individual and organizational effects of religious consumer society. It integrates and systematizes contributions from economics of religion, marketing, and sociology of religion. The article presents the causes of religious consumer society and the most frequent individual adaptations (quality expectations, religious shopping, syncretism) and organizational responses (marketing and branding strategies). Findings are that (1) in the religious consumer society, individuals are free not to be religious or spiritual, putting religious associations in competition with secular organizations, and possibly leading to secularization, (2) it is exaggerated to speak of shopping and consuming as the “new religions” of Western societies, and (3) religious marketing and branding face important limitations, some internal and some external to religious and spiritual organizations, due to the dilemma between marketing practices and ...

'Most of Today's Teen-agers Laugh about God': Youth, Secularization, and the Sixties in British Columbia

Abstract: This article explores how, why, and to what extent British Columbia youth turned away from organized religion, and religious belief, between the late 1950s and the mid-1970s, an era often referred to as the long sixties. Drawing on quantitative materials, newspapers, archival records, and oral interviews, it shows that British Columbia’s robust counterculture and comparative secularity fueled the questioning of, and departure from, established religion among youth in the province. During the long sixties, large numbers of young British Columbians abruptly rejected churches they saw as hypocritical, patriarchal, and irrelevant, often deliberately framing such rejection in terms of generational opposition. Journeys away from religious belief were, by contrast, more gradual, less certain, and framed by a silence and stigma around unbelief that persisted even in Canada’s most secular province. Many people did not become open or affirmed nonbelievers until later in life, when cultural and family pressures to believe had diminished. In their abrupt rejection of organized religion and their more gradual drift from religious belief, British Columbia youth were at the forefront of wider trends of dechristianization and secularization in postwar Canada.

Dangerous Liaisons between the Catholic Church and State: the religious and political alliance of the nationalist right with the conservative Church in Poland

Abstract: This article describes the history of relations between the Catholic Church and the Polish state in the period from the 1990s to the present. The authors defend a thesis that, although political el...

The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging

Abstract: How religious beliefs and practices can influence the wealth of nations Which countries grow faster economically-those with strong beliefs in heaven and hell or those with weak beliefs in them? Does religious participation matter? Why do some countries experience secularization while others are religiously vibrant? In The Wealth of Religions, Rachel McCleary and Robert Barro draw on their long record of pioneering research to examine these and many other aspects of the economics of religion. Places with firm beliefs in heaven and hell measured relative to the time spent in religious activities tend to be more productive and experience faster growth. Going further, there are two directions of causation: religiosity influences economic performance and economic development affects religiosity. Dimensions of economic development-such as urbanization, education, health, and fertility-matter too, interacting differently with religiosity. State regulation and subsidization of religion also play a role. The Wealth of Religions addresses the effects of religious beliefs on character traits such as work ethic, thrift, and honesty; the Protestant Reformation and its long-term effects on education and religious competition; Communism's suppression of and competition with religion; the effects of Islamic laws and regulations on the functioning of markets and, hence, on the long-term development of Muslim countries; why some countries have state religions; analogies between religious groups and terrorist organizations; the violent origins of the Dalai Lama's brand of Tibetan Buddhism; and the use by the Catholic Church of saint-making as a way to compete against the rise of Protestant Evangelicals. Timely and incisive, The Wealth of Religions provides fresh insights into the vital interplay between religion, markets, and economic development.

Democratic Solidarity in a Secular Age? Habermas and the “Linguistification of the Sacred”

Abstract: Secularization, according to Max Weber’s classic theory, shatters social cohesion. But if this is so, what are the prospects for democratic solidarity in a secular age? In this article, I examine t...

From a Christian World Community to a Christian America: Ecumenical Protestant Internationalism as a Source of Christian Nationalist Renewal

Abstract: Christian nationalism in the United States has neither been singular nor stable. The country has seen several Christian nationalist ventures come and go throughout its history. Historians are currently busy documenting the plurality of Christian nationalisms, understanding them more as deliberate projects rather than as components of a suprahistorical secularization process. This essay joins in that work. Its focus is the World War II and early Cold War era, one of the heydays of Christian nationalist enthusiasm in America—and the one that shaped our ongoing culture wars between “evangelical” conservatives and “godless” liberals. One forgotten and admittedly paradoxical pathway to wartime Christian nationalism was the world ecumenical movement (“ecumenical” here meaning intra-Protestant). Protestant ecumenism curated the transformation of 1920s and 1930s Christian internationalism into wartime Christian Americanism. They involved many political and intellectual elites along the way. In pioneering many of the geopolitical concerns of Cold War evangelicals, ecumenical Protestants aided and abetted the Christian conservative ascendancy that wields power even into the present.

The Rise in Support for Gender Egalitarianism in the Netherlands, 1979-2006: The Roles of Educational Expansion, Secularization, and Female Labor Force Participation

Abstract: Since the 1960s, public support for gender egalitarianism has risen substantially in many western countries. Although earlier research proposed that structural and cultural developments, such as educational expansion, declining religiosity, and the rise of women’s employment may explain this upward trend, these theoretical speculations have not yet been thoroughly tested. In the present research, we aim to contribute to the existing literature by empirically analyzing the influence of educational expansion, secularization, and the rise of women’s labor force participation on support for gender egalitarianism in the Netherlands and to explore to what extent these influences differ for men and women. We use repeated cross-sectional survey data from the Netherlands involving 12,146 men and 13,858 women. To capture cohort and period effects, we include historical and contemporary contextual measures of educational expansion, secularization, and female labor force participation obtained from population censuses and labor force surveys, covering about 100 birth cohorts and 25 survey years. Of these three indicators, educational expansion contributed most to the rise in men’s, and particularly women’s, support for gender egalitarianism by changing the normative societal climate in which men and women have grown up and live. Promoting educational levels may therefore have far-reaching benefits for gender equality.

Faith, society and the post-secular: Private and public religion in law and theology

Abstract: The South African National Research Foundation and of the School of Ministry, Theology and Culture, Tabor College, Adelaide.

Patterns of Political Secularism in Italy and Turkey: The Vatican and the Diyanet to the Test of Politics

Abstract: For centuries, Rome and Istanbul have been representing and epitomizing two empires and two entities with both significant spiritual and temporal power: the Papacy and the Caliphate. During the 19th and the 20th centuries, these institutions underwent significant changes in a context of state secularization: in the case of the Papacy, there was a loss of temporal power and its “reduction” to a mainly moral authority; the Caliphate, on the other hand, was abolished after World War I, succeeded by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), a bureaucratic body under state control, founded in the era of Kemalist secularism. Despite these changes, today both institutions still play a significant role in the public life and public policies of the Italian and the Turkish republics. While the Vatican is able to influence the Italian public sphere and public discourse through both its influence on common people and its lobbying activities in relation to political decision-makers, in Turkey the Diyanet has become the main tool in the reshaping of Turkish society (both by the Kemalists and, later, by Erdogan's AKP). This paper will analyze their influence on the two countries’ public policies in relation to religious pluralism and to family-related issues, to show how different ideas of secularism, institutional arrangements, and historical paths have led to a very different role of the two institutions in the Italian and Turkish political systems.

Critiquing Atomistic Individualism in Law: Rosenzweig's Beloved Soul as Open and Relational Subject

Abstract: Positioned as a critique of rights-based justice, this project critically rethinks the American system of law by rooting its failures in its philosophical anthropology of atomistic individualism grounded in Locke, and recommends replacing that anthropology with an anthropology inspired by Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. In particular, the project explores how Rosenzweig’s “beloved soul” invites us to understand human individuality as open and relational, which might help pivot the law away from its current myopic focus on rights-based justice and the often unjust zerosum modality that rights-based justice produces. Rooting law in open and relational individuality rather than Lockean atomism and abstractions changes the goals of law, encouraging it to embrace complexity and devise more complicated rulings that better reflect the complexity of human diversity within a pluralist democracy. I argue that this move from zero-sum to complicated (even messy) rulings, rooted in a shift in the philosophical anthropology that roots our legal system, is the best and only path forward to increased equity for minoritized and marginalized persons and groups. To illustrate the difference this shift might make, I reconsider the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop. The rights-based approach frames and adjudicates

The Religious and Social Significance of Individualized Religion: Practice Communities and Networks of Transmission in Hebden Bridge

Abstract: Alongside the decline of traditional religious institutions in Britain, there has been increasing evidence of a move towards more personal expressions of religion. Secularization theorists argue religious practice without hierarchical institutions is structurally unsuited to having social significance and to sustaining itself over time. This thesis reports on ethnographic research conducted into forms of association and transmission among non-institutional and semi-institutional religious practitioners in and around Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. Hebden Bridge is a former industrial town with a history of religious nonconformism and social activism. Its character has been informed by waves of countercultural and alternative incomers since the 1970s, and it is now known as a centre of creativity and alternative culture. The subjects of this research claim a variety of religious identities and practices, and are highly suspicious of religious institutions, hierarchies, rules and dogmas. Yet they participate together actively in an overlapping and cross-linking informal network of loose practice communities and other informal associations. Their engagement propagates and sustains a core ideology that prioritizes subjectivity, locates authority at the level of the individual, and yet also predicates itself on ideals of sharing, mutuality and community. In this context religious activity tends to represent one aspect of a wider sphere of activity that can also include (for example) artistic creativity, experiments in alternative living, and environmental and political activism. While propagation and dissemination in this milieu do not occur in the same way as in institutional or hierarchical settings, the combination of informal structures and practices at play do provide a potentially viable basis for socially significant religious activity and for ongoing propagation over time.

Hayek’s vicarious secularization of providential theology:

Abstract: Friedrich Hayek’s defense of neoliberal free market capitalism hinges on the distinction between economies and catallaxies. The former are orders instituted via planning, whereas the latter are spo...

Good on paper: sociological critique, pragmatism, and secularization theory

Abstract: Recent years have seen numerous sociological disagreements devolve into heated debates, with scholars openly accusing their peers of being both empirically wrong and morally misguided. While social scientists routinely reflect on the ethical implications of certain research assumptions and data collection methods, the sociology of knowledge production has said little about how moral debates over scholarship shape subsequent research trajectories. Drawing on the new French pragmatic sociology, this article examines how sociologists respond to criticisms of the moral worth of their research. The article outlines three typical responses: (1) accepting the criticism and changing direction completely; (2) accepting the criticism but changing discursive framing to incorporate existing research without being subject to critique; and (3) navigating through the debate by devising new research directions that do not trigger such criticism. To demonstrate, the article looks at how sociologists of religion responded, in their published scholarship, to criticisms of secularization theory as depreciating religious people and spiritual experience. Across the responses, we show that sociologists have included moral considerations in their empirical investigations, and have switched among several diverse moral justifications to address—and also avoid—criticism. We conclude by demonstrating that this model can be extended to other domains of sociological inquiry, including the study of gender-based wage inequality and methodological nationalism. The article highlights the importance of mapping the moral frameworks sociologists use for the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of morality.

Strong Religion in a Secular Society : The Case of Orthodox Reformed Schools in The Netherlands

Abstract: In the Netherlands, state and religious schools are equally financed by the government. Parents are free to choose a school that optimally fits their moral values as well as their idea of a good education. As a result, there is a huge variety of schools, which include those orthodox Reformed schools that form part of the so-called Bible Belt culture. We elaborate on the complex relation between this religious culture and liberal, secular society by focusing on education. Occasionally, there is severe criticism of schools based on a strong religious identity (so-called strong religious schools), especially when it comes to their allegedly inadequate contribution to citizenship education. In order to add a historical perspective and a reflection on the arguments to the debate, our central research question is: ‘How can the founding and existence of orthodox Reformed schools in the Dutch liberal and secular society be explained and justified?’ Starting with a historical explanation of why the orthodox Reformed founded their own schools in the 1920s, we elaborate on philosophical arguments that can justify the existence of orthodox Reformed schools in a liberal, secular society.

Is Prose Poetry a Conspiracy Against the Noble Qur'an? Poetics, Humans, and God in Contemporary Egypt

Abstract: »Ist Prosadichtung eine Verschwörung gegen den heiligen Koran? Poetik, Menschen und Gott im zeitgenössischen Ägypten«. There is a peculiar relationship between contemporary poetry and perspectives that are deemed to be heretical by conservative audiences. This relationship is not fully accounted for by current anthropological theories of the secular. The field of literature has been successfully studied as a secular institution – both in the sense of the differentiation of institutions as well as in the sense of the subordination of the religious to the political. Such secularity appears as a rather safe, less controversial way to claim the power of some human entities in relation to God. Some poetry, by contrast, may be accused of heresy or unbelief even when written with pious intention. This suggests a dimension to being secular that is more offensive to conservative societal sensibilities, as it contrasts with deeply-held views on the proper form of the God-human relationship and the associated imaginaries, languages, and aesthetics. Based on a combination of ethnographic research in historical context and a theoretical focus on aesthetics and imagination of divine power as a constituent of human lives, it is proposed in this article that in addition to looking at state power, institutions, and the creation of a secular aesthetic normality, it is also necessary to look more closely at issues of faith, including heretical faith.

The «Long 1960s» in a Global Arena of Contention: Re-defining Assumptions of Self, Morality, Race, Gender and Justice, and Questioning Education

Abstract: I argue that the global dissent of the 1960s is part of a political cultural constellation with many fronts, political conjonctures and religious intersections, in addition to a new sense of being that informed subjectivities and desires. The configurational components examined in this article include secularization, Vatican II, and the emergence of liberation theology in Latin America, as well as the New Left, the Cuban Revolution and the context of the Cold War; the legacy of the civil rights movement and its impact; second wave feminism and a new understanding of gender relations; art as a vehicle for ideas and agendas; the global dissension conveyed in the students’ insurrection and repercussions; and education as a tool for change. The article identifies relevant connections between the events and processes that challenged the social and political order across space, and explores the emergence of a contesting ethical framework.

Islamic civilization as an aspect of secularization in Turkish Islamic thought

Abstract: The idea of an “Islamic civilization” emerged in the very late period of the Ottoman Empire in the context of complex and multi-dimensional modernization and secularization processes. Enunciated by the Young Ottomans in the 1870s and gaining prominence in the time of Sultan Abdulhamid II, Islamic civilization was conceived, at least in part, as a counter-point to European and other civilizations. Although both its proponents and opponents assume that the religion of Islam lies at its heart, the paper will show that the idea of an Islamic civilization is a secular idea or, more precisely, one that bears the imprint of secularization. Using the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, among others, the argument will draw on a conception of religion as a reified category, which entails that, as such, religion is conducive to secularization. It will build on and extend on this conception of religion by proposing that Islamic civilization, also a reified concept, is a further step in the direction of secularization. The paper will show this by analyzing Turkish Islamic thought, focusing particularly on Necip Fazil Kisakurek, an Islamic thinker of the early Republican era, and the more recent figure of Ahmet Davutoglu. The material presented here will challenge the conventional understanding of “religion” and “secularity” by highlighting that the boundaries between the two are constantly shifting and evolving.

The Sacred as Secular: State Control and Mosques Neutrality in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia

Abstract: How are the characteristics of state–religion relations defined? The following paper provides a critical response to the competition perspective in studies on secularization, secularism, and mobilized religion. It argues that actors differ in how religion and state should relate to public life, not the extent that they should be integral or separate from each other. This paper substantiates its argument by exploring how in Tunisia––in a context of revolutionary, social and political instability––a variety of positions were articulated regarding the preferred position of Islam in relation to, first, national identity and, second, state authority. This is done in direct reference to one particular contentious issue: State control over mosques in name of ensuring the partisan neutrality of religious spaces in the country. This paper builds on multiple fieldwork visits to Tunisia and specifically Sfax, during which 32 individuals were interviewed. In addition, this paper builds on hundreds of primary and secondary sources.

The Symbolic Efficacy of Pope Francis’s Religious Capital and the Agency of the Poor:

Abstract: This article explores the paradox between Pope Francis’s success as a critic of global markets and the limitations of his religious capital in his home country of Argentina. While for some observer...

Education and religious decline: evidence from the Canadian compulsory schooling laws

Abstract: The present study assesses how education impacts religiosity. Education is instrumented using the changes in the Canadian school leaving age laws. The data are from the Canadian General Social Surv...

Neoliberalism as Religion: Sacralization of the Market and Post-Truth Politics

Abstract: In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, depictions of neoliberalism as religion, system of belief, and “kind of faith” have multiplied in an attempt to explain neoliberalism’s remarkable power and resilience. These accounts, however, have remained largely impressionistic. In this article, I interrogate the meanings, implications, and value of conceptualizing neoliberalism as religion and advance two main claims. First, the power of neoliberalism stems from being a rationality of government that continuously evokes religious meanings and significations. Neoliberalism displaces and redraws the boundary between secular and religious, and appropriates an aura of sacredness while concealing itself behind an authoritative secular rational facade. Second, one of the outcomes of the neoliberal “sacralization” of the market has been the emergence of so-called “post-truth politics.” The latter, I contend, can be conceptualized as a neoliberal “truth market” of news production, circulation, and consumption that is governed simultaneously by logics of commodification and belief. This analysis aims to contribute to existing debates on secularization, on neoliberalism’s resilience, and on post-truth politics by showing their interconnectedness through a critical approach that focuses on the disarticulation, rearticulation, and deployment of the categories of the secular/profane and sacred/religious in neoliberal regimes of power and knowledge.

The Picture of Artificial Intelligence and the Secularization of Thought

Abstract: This article offers a critical interpretation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a philosophical notion which exemplifies a secular conception of thinking. One way in which AI notably differs from ...

Islamophobia or Threat to Secularization? Lost Letter Experiments on the Discrimination Against Muslims in an Urban Area of Switzerland

Abstract: Two explanations for discrimination against Muslims in Switzerland are threat to secularization and xenophobia. We conducted lost letter experiments and find that distinctively religious Muslim groups are indeed discriminated against, although not to a larger degree than Christian sects. Moreover, discrimination against Muslims decreases when there is no reference to religiousness. In sum, the discrimination against Muslims seems mainly to be a result of distinctive religious characteristics attributed to this group.

A Sportful History of Christianity : The Case of Twentieth-Century Sweden

Abstract: The sport movement was consolidated in Sweden during the first years of the twentieth century and grew rapidly from the 1920s and onward. Preceding and during these events, the Church of Sweden – the Lutheran state church – was losing its axiomatic position within Swedish society and church attendance was decreasing. In this situation, many perceived the sports movement as a rival to the church or even saw sport as a new religion. However, as the sport movement grew, prominent representatives within the Church of Sweden and other Christian denominations adopted a more pragmatic view of the sports movement in order to appeal to people outside the ranks of the church, especially male youth. The sport field soon became a missionary field. The aim of the current essay is to account for the collaborative as well as the sceptical voices not only in the Church of Sweden, but also within the substantial Swedish revival movements, i.e. the Pentecostal movement and the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden. Further, these events will be analyzed from a gender perspective, discussing what was simultaneously perceived as a secularization and feminization of Swedish Christianity. (Less)

From the Natural Self-Orgnizaton of Religion to the Modern Magical Realism of the Religious Experience

Abstract: Religion is a powerful phenomenon arising in and from society. Various efforts have been done to understand religion as a natural phenomenon, which could be framed in the language of science. In this paper, I forward a sui generis approach to the naturality of religion, where religion is explained as one of the next stages in broader natural processes of self-organization. Furthermore, having framed like this the naturality of the religious experience, the paper explores the contemporary debate of current religious expressions. It is suggested that the arrival of science and the modern society have changed some expressions of religious experiences; while, nonetheless, keeping their capacity to self-organize societies. The magical realist society, as the society capable of disguising the magic of religion within the realism of the scientific ethos, is presented and discussed as a modern secular expression of religion, capable to cope with the challenges of science through the dynamics of modernity and capitalism.

The Metaphysics of Race: Revisiting Nazism and Religion

Abstract: This article redresses the interpretative lacunae of historians’ conceptions of Nazi racism by overcoming their attempts to comprehend it from either a secular/scientific or a religious/theological perspective. Drawing on a variety of anthropological, philosophical, and political-theoretical works, the article illustrates how Nazi racial ideas were formulated not only in accordance with the latest discoveries in the field of human heredity, but also in correspondence to contemporary debates over secularization, value-free science, and biological determinism. It argues that the Nazi conception of race constituted a new form of religiosity, which did not draw on supernatural beliefs or theological narratives, but rather on vitalist-oriented metaphysics, shifting the object of faith from the transcendent realm of God to the immanent sphere of racial inwardness. Redefining faith in vitalist-existentialist terms corresponded with the Nazi aspiration to overcome the fragmentation of modernity, overturn the nihilistic threat posed by materialist society, and carry out a spiritual renaissance built upon immanent-biological foundations.