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Christian Religion in the West: Privatization or Public Revitalization?
... De sociale en publieke betekenis van new age die samenhangt met een dergelijke 'essentially spiritual approach to life' (idem: 38) is met name zichtbaar in de belangrijke rol die new age speelt in human resource management en zakelijk leiderschap Costea et al., 2007). Dit geldt ook voor het evangelicalisme: de ervaring van Gods voortdurende aanwezigheid in het persoonlijke leven gaat gepaard met een gerichtheid op goddelijke leiding in alle aspecten van iemands leven -of het nu gaat om het contact met anderen, de keuze voor een geliefde, een bepaalde opleiding of carrière, de wijze waarop je in je werk staat, enzovoort (Roeland, 2009 berg et al., 2009), in het bijzonder onder de jongere generaties (Roeland et al., 2010). Alhoewel nog aangetoond dient te worden of deze trend toe te schrijven is aan de evangelicalen onder de jonge protestanten is duidelijk dat het juist deze jongeren zijn die minder dan andere en oudere christenen geneigd zijn om 'the secularist truce' (Achterberg et al., 2009) te accepteren: het secularistische 'contract' dat religieuze vrijheid garandeert, maar religie uit de publieke sfeer verbant en tot de private sfeer beperkt. ...
Er bestaat een opvallende overeenkomst tussen jonge new-agers, evangelicalen en moslims: kritiek op de in hun ogen ‘geperverteerde’ en ‘onechte’ religieuze tradities en instituties brengt hen tot een zoektocht naar de zuivere, authentieke kern van religie. Het anti-institutionalistische sentiment onder deze jongeren leidt hen dus niet tot een seculiere positie (de secularisatiethese van Berger), noch tot een geprivatiseerde en oppervlakkige religiositeit (de privatiseringsthese van Luckmann). De zoektocht onder jongeren naar authentieke religiositeit die er ‘echt toe doet’ wijst eerder op een proces van purificatie.
... As argued above, it is possible that the older cohorts in our study grew up in a period of time with more anti-religious attitudes compared to later periods (Ribberink et al. 2013). Following the deprivatization of religion in society with an opposition against religion in culture and politics it is stressed that the process of an increased privatized form of religion cannot be rejected (Roeland et al. 2011). Thus, older religious people with high view of life enrichment may be experiencing both a rejection from the majority at the societal level and a de-socialization/deprivation within the group of religious people since religiousness is becoming increasingly privatized. ...
Previous research has shown that religiousness is related to social support, but most studies on this subject have been conducted in highly religious contexts. In the secular culture of Norway, we investigated the level of perceived social support among religious and non-religious individuals using the scale from the Medical Outcomes Study Social Support Survey. Of the 3,000 randomly selected persons aged 18-75 years, 653 (22 %) participated in this cross-sectional postal questionnaire study in 2009. The results showed that the association between religiousness and social support differed by age, and was moderated by gender and by one's view of life enrichment. Among older adults (60-75 years), non-religious people reported higher levels on all five dimensions of social support compared to religious people, and for affectionate support, positive social interaction and tangible support this relationship depended on high view of life enrichment. In contrast, no differences in social support were seen among middle aged adults (40-59 years). Gender differences in social support were found in the younger adults (18-39 years), as religious men reported more tangible and emotional support compared to non-religious men, while the opposite was found for women. Results are discussed based on previous empirical findings on religiousness and social support, as well as the role of religiousness in society.
"... one of those rare edited volumes that advances social thought as it provides substantive religious and media ethnography that is good to think with." -- Dale Eickelman, Dartmouth College Increasingly, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and indigenous movements all over the world make use of a great variety of modern mass media, both print and electronic. Through religious booklets, radio broadcasts, cassette tapes, television talk-shows, soap operas, and documentary film these movements address multiple publics and offer alternative forms of belonging, often in competition with the postcolonial nation-state. How have new practices of religious mediation transformed the public sphere? How has the adoption of new media impinged on religious experiences and notions of religious authority? Has neo-liberalism engendered a blurring of the boundaries between religion and entertainment? The vivid essays in this interdisciplinary volume combine rich empirical detail with theoretical reflection, offering new perspectives on a variety of media, genres, and religions.
‘Believing without belonging’ has become the catchphrase of much European work on religion in the past decade. The thesis that religious belief is fairly robust even if churchgoing is declining is examined using data from the British Household Panel Survey and the British Social Attitudes surveys. The evidence suggests that belief has in fact eroded in Britain at the same rate as two key aspects of belonging: religious affiliation and attendance. Levels of belief are lower than those of nominal belonging. The roles of period, cohort and age effects on religious change are considered; the conclusion is that decline is generational. In relation to the rates at which religion is transmitted from parents to children, the results suggest that only about half of parental religiosity is successfully transmitted, while absence of religion is almost always passed on. Transmission is just as weak for believing as for belonging.
This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self-understanding, self-examination and 'self-work', and through which the 'self qua self' is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as 'excellence', 'total quality', 'performance', 'knowledge', 'play at work' and 'wellness' in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of 'human resourcefulness' as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management's wider historical-cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term 'derecognition of finitude'. It is the modern synthesis – with the 'self' at the centre of its system of values – that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organisations use 'work' to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self-expression. Management itself thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self-expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realised identity.
This article argues that New Age spirituality is substantially less unambiguously individualistic and more socially and publicly significant than today's sociological consensus acknowledges. Firstly, an uncontested doctrine of self-spirituality, characterised by sacralisation of the self and demonisation of social institutions, provides the spiritual milieu with ideological coherence and paradoxically accounts for its overwhelming diversity. Secondly, participants undergo a process of socialisation, gradually adopting this doctrine of self-spirituality and eventually reinforcing it by means of standardised legitimations. Thirdly, spirituality has entered the public sphere of work, aiming at a reduction of employees' alienation to increase both their happiness and organisational effectiveness. A radical 'sociologisation' of New Age research is called for to document how the doctrinal ideal of self-spirituality is socially constructed, transmitted, and reinforced and critically to deconstruct rather than reproduce sociologically naive New Age rhetoric about the primacy of personal authenticity.
How much does a nation's religious environment affect the religious beliefs of its citizens? Do religious nations differ from secular nations in how beliefs are passed on from generation to generation? To find out, we use data from the 1991 International Social Survey Programme collected in 15 nations from 19,815 respondents. We use diagonal reference models estimated by nonlinear regression to control for a nation's level of economic development and exposure to Communism, and for the individual's denomination, age, gender, and education. We find that (1) people living in religious nations will, in proportion to the religiosity of their fellow-citizens, acquire more orthodox beliefs than otherwise similar people living in secular nations; (2) in relatively secular nations, family religiosity strongly shapes children's religious beliefs while the influence of national religious context is small; (3) in relatively religious nations family religiosity, although important, has less effect on children's beliefs than does national context. These three patterns hold in rich nations and in poor nations, in formerly Communist nations and in established democracies, and among old and young, men and women, the well-educated and the poorly educated, and for Catholics and Protestants. Findings on the link between belief and church attendance are inconsistent with the influential "supply-side" analysis of differences between nations.
Research from the Netherlands has pointed out that the increased popularity of New Age since the 1960s by no means compensates for the dramatic decline of the Christian churches. From a theoretical point of view, however, it is more important to study why those remarkably divergent developments have occurred in the first place. This article does this by analyzing survey data collected among the Dutch population at large in 1998, focusing on a comparison of the young and the elderly. It is concluded, first, that there are no indications that the decline of the Christian tradition has been caused by a process of rationalization. Second, the decline of the Christian tradition and the growth of nonreligiosity as well as New Age are caused by increased levels of moral individualism (individualization). Implications for the sociological analysis of cultural and religious change are discussed.
Analysis of International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data collected in 18 Western countries in 1998 demonstrates that Christian desires for a public role of religion are strongest in countries where Christian religiosity is numerically most marginal. Moreover, Dutch data covering the period 1970–1996 confirm that the decline of the number of Christians in the Netherlands has been coincided by a strengthening of the call for public religion among the remaining faithful and by increased polarization about this with the nonreligious. Religious decline and religious privatization, two of the most crucial dimensions of secularization (Casanova 1994), hence develop dialectically: as the number of Christians declines, the remaining faithful seem increasingly unwilling to accept the “secularist truce”—the secularist contract that guarantees religious freedom yet bans religion from the public sphere by relegating it to the private realm.
To what extent does the national religious context affect volunteering? Does a religious environment affect the relation between religiosity and volunteering? To answer these questions, this study specifies individual level, contextual level, and cross-level interaction hypotheses. The authors test the hypotheses by simultaneously studying the impact of religiosity of individuals, the national religious context, and their interplay on volunteering while controlling for possible confounding factors both at individual and contextual levels. Based on multilevel analyses on data from 53 countries, frequent churchgoers are more active in volunteer work and a devout national context has an additional positive effect. However, the difference between secular and religious people is substantially smaller in devout countries than in secular countries. Church attendance is hardly relevant for volunteering in devout countries. Furthermore, religious volunteering has a strong spillover effect, implying that religious citizens also volunteer more for secular organizations. This spillover effect is stronger for Catholics than for Protestants, non-Christians and nonreligious individuals.
The purpose of this book is to provide a detailed statistical guide to the government and politics of the 24 OECD countries, together with social and economic background information. The aim is to present material of a factual nature in a form which meets the needs of professional politicians, administrators, journalists, teachers, political scientists and the interested citizen. The resulting compilation may be used for casual reference or for more systematic comparisons of 24 of the more advanced political systems of the Western world.
The onset of a new millennium has given renewed impetus to the study of religion and its place in the secular world. Religion and Mass Electoral Behaviour in Europe is an innovative, cutting-edge study, which focuses on the question of whether - and how - religion continues to influence and shape electoral behaviour across Europe.
With exceptional detail, this book presents empirical data drawn from a range of country case studies to provide examples of different religious experiences and relationships.
In recent years, the sociology of religion has been consumed by a debate over secularization that pits advocates of a new, rational-choice paradigm (the so-called religious economies model) against defenders of classical secularization theory. According to the old paradigm, the Western world has become increasingly secular since the Middle Ages; according to the new paradigm, it has become increasingly religious. I put these two images of religious development to the test through a detailed examination of religious life in Western Europe before and after the Reformation. I conclude that the changes in social structure and religious experience that occurred during this period were considerably more complex than either the old or new paradigms suggest and, indeed, that the two paradigms are neither so opposed nor so irreconcilable as many of their defenders contend. It is possible, indeed probable, that Western society has become more secular without becoming less religious. I discuss the limitations of the two competing paradigms and sketch the outlines of a more adequate theory of religious change.
The theory of secularization is a product of the social and cultural milieu from which it emerged. The expectation of receding
religious influence fits well the evolutionary model of modernization. Critical reexamination reveals secularization to be
an orienting concept grounded in an ideological preference rather than a systematic theory. This paper examines the historical
context which permitted the idea of secularization to go unchallenged for so long, and then develops four discrete types of
evidence to account for the present challenge to the theory.
Seminal nineteenth-century thinkers predicted that religion would gradually fade in importance with the emergence of industrial society. The belief that religion was dying became the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century. The traditional secularization thesis needs updating, however, religion has not disappeared and is unlikely to do so. Nevertheless, the concept of secularization captures an important part of what is going on. This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the theory and provides new and updated evidence from a broad perspective and in a wide range of countries. This confirms that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values, and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.
This article examines the main charges against secularization theory and finds them wanting. Contrary to the recent arguments
of various critics, there is a reasonably solid body of secularization theory with valid historical content; secularization
cannot be explained away as either institutionalization or transformation; it is neither a selflimiting process nor reversed
by fundamentalist movements; and while secularization theory may be of limited use in current macrosociological research on
global change, it is as yet far from irrelevant. Until it is more solidly refuted, secularization theory remains a valuable
part of the theoretical arsenal of the sociology of religion.
In Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship Paul J. Weithman asks whether citizens in a liberal democracy may base their votes and their public political arguments on their religious beliefs. Drawing on empirical studies of how religion actually functions in politics, he challenges the standard view that citizens who rely on religious reasons must be prepared to make good their arguments by appealing to reasons that are 'accessible' to others. He contends that churches contribute to democracy by enriching political debate and by facilitating political participation, especially among the poor and minorities, and as a consequence, citizens acquire religiously based political views and diverse views of their own citizenship. He concludes that the philosophical view which most defensibly accommodates this diversity is one that allows ordinary citizens to draw on the views their churches have formed when voting and offering public arguments for their political positions.
English
Assuming that religion is socially relevant to the extent that it has influence on action, the article invites reconsideration of secularization not as a long-term historical process but as a property of action: any action, or a whole domain of action (economy, warfare, art, nutrition, sex, etc.), is therefore secularized if in carrying it out people are not influenced by religious doctrines or feelings about the way it should be done, and if it is not justified on this same basis. This definition, rooted in Weber's work, is intended to be operative for qualitative research and attentive to differences and interactions between groups and individuals, even within a single nation. Traditional accounts of secularization as overall decline of religion are not discussed. Nonetheless it is stressed that these theories are employed as resources in the activity of religious groups, or, in other words, that the perceived decline of religion has implications for social change.
French
Partant de l’idée que la religion est socialement relevante dans la mesure ou` elle influence l’action, l’article invite à repenser la sécularisation non plus comme un processus historique de long cours, mais comme une propriété de l’action: une action (ou un domaine d’action comme l’économie, la guerre, l’art, l’alimentation, la sexualité) serait alors sécularisée si les acteurs ne sont pas influencés par une doctrine ou un sentiment religieux et s’ils n’en donnent pas une justification religieuse. Cette définition, d’origine wébérienne, devrait ětre opérationnelle pour la recherche qualitative et prěter attention aux différences et aux interactions entre groupes et individus, měme au sein d’une měme nation. Les définitions de sécularisation comme déclin général de la religion ne sont pas discutées ici. Pourtant, l’auteur souligne que ces théories sont aussi des ressources pour l’activité de groupes religieux, autrement dit que la perception du déclin de la religion a elle-měme des conséquences pour le changement social.
Theorists of "secularization" have for two centuries been saying that religion must inevitably decline in the modern world. But today, much of the world is as religious as ever. This volume challenges the belief that the modern world is increasingly secular, showing instead that modernization more often strengthens religion. Seven leading cultural observers examine several regions and several religions and explain the resurgence of religion in world politics.Peter L. Bergeropens with a global overview. The other six writers deal with particular aspects of the religious scene: George Weigel, with Roman Catholicism;David Martin, with the evangelical Protestant upsurge not only in the Western world but also in Latin America, Africa, the Pacific rim, China, and Eastern Europe;Jonathan Sacks, with Jews and politics in the modern world;Abdullahi A. An-Na'im, with political Islam in national politics and international relations;Grace Davie, with Europe as perhaps the exception to the desecularization thesis; andTu Weiming, with religion in the People's Republic of China. "
The “new conventional wisdom” of a waning impact of social divisions on political choices has been subject to debate in recent years. This paper addresses the debate by assessing the relevance of parties' political positions, using a novel approach to analysing it comparatively, based on a combination of data from the Eurobarometer with data of the Comparative Manifestos Project. The findings of this paper lend support to the claim that the decline in the relation between social divisions and voting behaviour, so far as it can be observed at all, is attributable to parties' changing political positions. Once these changes are taken into account, the diagnosis of a persistent impact of social divisions prevails.
This article uses data from the World Values Survey to study the spread of post-Christian spirituality (“New Age”) in 14 Western countries (1981–2000, N = 61,352). It demonstrates that this type of spirituality, characterized by a sacralization of the self, has become more widespread during the period 1981–2000 in most of these countries. It has advanced farthest in France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden. This spiritual turn proves a byproduct of the decline of traditional moral values and hence driven by cohort replacement. Spirituality's popularity among the well educated also emerges from the latter's low levels of traditionalism. These findings confirm the theory of detraditionalization, according to which a weakening of the grip of tradition on individual selves stimulates a spiritual turn to the deeper layers of the self.
Secularization is most productively understood not as declining religion, but as the declining scope of religious authority.
A focus on religious authority (1) is more consistent with recent developments in social theory than is a preoccupation with
religion; (2) draws on and develops what is best in the secularization literature; and (3) reclaims a neglected Weberian insight
concerning the sociological analysis of religion. Several descriptive and theoretical “pay-offs” of this conceptual innervation
are discussed: new hypotheses concerning the relationship between religion and social movements; the enhanced capacity to
conceptually apprehend and empirically investigate secularization among societies, organizations, and individuals; and clearer
theoretical connections between secularization and other sociological literatures. Ironically, these connections may indeed
spell the end of secularization theory as a distinct body of theory, but in a different way than previously appreciated.
In a sweeping reconsideration of the relation between religion and modernity, Jose Casanova surveys the roles that religions may play in the public sphere of modern societies. During the 1980s, religious traditions around the world, from Islamic fundamentalism to Catholic liberation theology, began making their way, often forcefully, out of the private sphere and into public life, causing the "deprivatization" of religion in contemporary life. No longer content merely to administer pastoral care to individual souls, religious institutions are challenging dominant political and social forces, raising questions about the claims of entities such as nations and markets to be "value neutral", and straining the traditional connections of private and public morality. Casanova looks at five cases from two religious traditions (Catholicism and Protestantism) in four countries (Spain, Poland, Brazil, and the United States). These cases challenge postwarâand indeed post-Enlightenmentâassumptions about the role of modernity and secularization in religious movements throughout the world. This book expands our understanding of the increasingly significant role religion plays in the ongoing construction of the modern world.
Thesis (doctoral)--Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, 2004.
Over fifty percent of all people are a member of at least one association and about one-third say to be volunteering. Although these figures suggest that voluntary association involvement is an important aspect of many people's lives, some people are highly engaged whereas others belong to no association at all. Who joins and who does not? This book adopts a comprehensive perspective to answer this question. The first part includes two empirical studies on cross-national differences and one on the dynamics of involvement (i.e., becoming involved and ending involvement). Using a multilevel framework, the first empirical study shows that voluntary association involvement is affected by individual religiosity, the national religious context, and their interplay. The second study focuses on the explanatory role of conditions experienced when growing up (e.g., absence of television, war). Results show that it is important to incorporate such cohort explanations. The third empirical study zooms in on the Netherlands and looks at involvement from a dynamic perspective. It shows that the religious context does affect who becomes involved but it does not influence whether people quit associations. The second part of this book answers an important follow-up question. Are there any socioeconomic consequences of voluntary association involvement? With unique life course data from the Netherlands the study shows that voluntary association involvement indeed helps people getting better jobs.
One way of measuring religious affiliation is to look at rites of initiation such as baptism. English statistics show that for the first time since the Church of England was founded, less than half the nation is Anglican on this criterion. The pattern of formal religious transmission changed during the Second World War. Previously christening was quasi-universal, and the Church of England was the preferred provider. By the end of the war baptism was evidently optional, and chosen principally by parents whose religious identities matched. Further analysis suggests that affiliation now tends to be lost following marriage to someone from a different religious background, though the USA differs from Europe in this respect. A demographic theory of advanced secularization is outlined that specifies a proximal cause for declining religious affiliation, and provides tools for predicting the changes to be expected over future decades. The theory also helps to explain why affiliation may fall most quickly where there is most religious diversity.
This paper explores the relationships between values in the religious domain and values in other societal spheres. Starting from the general idea that the impact of religion on other domains in life has decreased, we assume 1) a differential impact of religion on the private and public domains; 2) that the impact varies between countries dependent upon the degree of secularization and the speed of secularization. Several more specific hypotheses concerning the interrelati-onships are developed and empirically tested using the data from the European Values Studies. The hypotheses are partially confirmed, but demonstrate that indeed the relationship between religion and the private domain (e.g. family) has developed differently from the relations between religion and the public areas.
Religious voting in Europe: A preliminary analysis. Paper presented at Research Committee on Political Sociology, RC18, The enduring impact of class and religion in contemporary party politics
- Ignacio Lago
- Jose Ramon Montero
- Hector Cebolla
Lago, Ignacio, Jose Ramon Montero, and Hector Cebolla. Religious voting in Europe: A
preliminary analysis. Paper presented at Research Committee on Political Sociology, RC18,
The enduring impact of class and religion in contemporary party politics, First ISA Forum of
Sociology, Barcelona, Spain, September 5-8, 2008.
Het christelijk godsdienstig en kerkelijk leven
- Gerard Dekker
Dekker, Gerard. 2007. Het christelijk godsdienstig en kerkelijk leven. In God in Nederland 1996
-2006, eds. Ton Bernts, Gerard Dekker and Joep de Hart, 12-73. Kampen: Ten Have.
The spiritual revolution: Why religion is giving way to spirituality
- Paul Heelas
- Linda Woodhead
Heelas, Paul, and Linda Woodhead. 2005. The spiritual revolution: Why religion is giving way
to spirituality. Malden, MA [etc.]: Blackwell.
- Rodney Stark
Stark, Rodney. 1999. Secularization, R.I.P. Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3: 249-273.
Infinite Human Resourcefulness": a Commentary on the "Therapeutic Habitus
- Bogdan Costea
- Norman Crump
- Kostas Amiridis
Costea, Bogdan, Norman Crump, and Kostas Amiridis. 2007. Managerialism and "Infinite
Human Resourcefulness": a Commentary on the "Therapeutic Habitus", "Derecognition of
and the Modern Sense of Self
- Finitude
Finitude" and the Modern Sense of Self. Journal for Cultural Research 11, no. 3: 245-264.
The religious factor in contemporary society: The differential impact of religion on the private and public sphere in comparative perspective
- Loek Halman
- Thorleif Petterson
- Johan Verweij
Halman, Loek, Thorleif Petterson, and Johan Verweij. 1999. The religious factor in
contemporary society: The differential impact of religion on the private and public sphere
in comparative perspective. International Journal of Comparative Sociology 40, no. 1: 141-159.