Contemporary Religion

6 Key excerpts on "Contemporary Religion"

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  Religion and Everyday Life

  • Stephen Hunt(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  Contemporary Religion

  CHANGING DEFINITIONS

   

  DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION

  The matter of the nature and significance of religion in contemporary Western societies, and debates regarding possible decline or resurgence, open up broader questions regarding its definition which, in turn, relate to on-going ideological debates as to the merits or otherwise of religious life. In terms of definitions, the sociology of religion faces a unique set of conceptual difficulties which are enhanced by the increasing variety and ever-changing expressions of religiosity, especially their apparent increasing reduction to the individual and privatized level. Thus, only when it is defined can religion be delimited in terms of the subject matter, the trajectories of its transformation understood, and the conjecture that certain forms are experiencing growth, be put in rightful perspective. This is an important endeavour, especially in relation to current sociological theorizing which departs so radically from the conventional secularization thesis.

  To be sure, the human capacity for belief is seemingly endless, and in Western societies today there would appear to be a vast range of belief systems, some very loosely articulated. Alongside mainstream Christianity are the world religions or a particular tradition of them as embraced by many ethnic groups, one variety or another of fundamentalism, New Religious Movements and those not so new, and the diverse New Age phenomenon and related forms of spirituality. To these might be added the ‘implicit’ or ‘quasi’ religions — those social phenomena which are ‘like’ religions in some way but which may not include all the usual attributes and perhaps may not even be accepted as a ‘religion’ by participating social actors. Such diversity renders a discussion of religion, especially at the level of everyday life, a demanding challenge. To some extent this is because it is virtually impossible to differentiate between what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’, that which can correctly be called religion and that which cannot. This is compounded by the problem of measuring the impact of religiosity at the everyday level — a problem further accentuated by the changing cultural perception of the word ‘religion’ itself. Put succinctly, the term appears to have gone out of vogue, with ‘spirituality’ often being preferred, not least of all by those who themselves seek to indulge in new forms.

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  Religion: The Basics

  • Malory Nye(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1 —that is, the summary of the main issues in the study of religion and culture. These I will briefly recap as follows:

  • religion is a human activity and a part of culture;
  • to study religion requires us to explore what humans do, through a variety of methodologies, including studies of texts, societies, history, and cultures;
  • exploring the ways in which religion is done involves looking at issues such as gender, ethnicity, politics, and other social aspects of difference;
  • to understand the contemporary world, we need to try to understand how religion is significant to many people—in some way or other, religion is a key element of many cultural and political issues which may be one of a number of significant causes or products of particular social and historical developments.

  In this book I have explored some of the ways in which these issues have been taken forward by recent and classical writers in the field of the study of religion and culture, and tried to give a taster of some of the basic issues that are coming out of this field of study. The field is still very much in the process of development, and of course has very significant relevance to the world in which we live today. This study of religion is something that should be part of the education of every student in the twenty-first century—not only for the religious, but for anyone needing to understand a little better the complexities of human religious activities.

  SUMMARY

  • Contemporary religious traditions are embedded within the processes of modernity. All religions are shaped by forces such as post-colonialism, multiculturalism, globalisation, nationalism, ethnicity, and transnationalism.
  • To study any particular religion we must look at both the local and the global level, to see how particular processes in a region or country may be affected by global issues such as the movement of people and international communications and travel. Post-colonial economic and political inequality may also produce both global and local responses.

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  Sociology

  • Anthony Giddens, Philip W. Sutton(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  The sociology of religion places special demands on our sociological imagination as we look to understand the diversity of beliefs and rituals found in human societies. This means we have to be sensitive to the ideals that inspire profound conviction in believers, yet at the same time we must be relatively detached from our personal beliefs. Sociologists confront ideas that seek the eternal, while recognizing that religious groups also pursue very mundane goals, such as acquiring finance or gaining followers. We also need to recognize the diversity of religious beliefs and modes of conduct and to probe into the nature of religion as a general social phenomenon.

  What is religion?

  Defining religion seems to be such a simple task as to merit no deep thought. Religions are commonly defined by a belief in God or gods and perhaps an afterlife, but they also involve worship in religious buildings – temples, churches, synagogues or mosques – and doing ‘religious things’ such as praying and eating or not eating certain foods. For sociologists trying to set limits to their field of study, reaching general agreement on such a basic matter has proved extraordinarily difficult. Indeed, Aldridge (2013: 22) argues that ‘We cannot expect to agree on a definition and then debate matters of substance, since matters of substance are built into any definition. There is not, and never will be, a universally agreed definition of religion.’

  One reason for this is that sociology contains numerous theoretical perspectives, and these differ in how they construe the nature of social reality. As a consequence, they also disagree about how that reality can and should be studied. For example, many macro-level studies adopt a realist view which sees religion as a fundamental social institution that transmits values, a moral code and norms of behaviour across generations. Hence ‘religion’ exists objectively and has real effects on individuals. Alternatively, several other micro-level studies are rooted in a more social constructionist position, which focuses on the ways in which what constitutes ‘religion’ is continually reproduced and changed in everyday interaction processes.

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  Foundations and Futures in the Sociology of Religion

  • Luke Doggett, Alp Arat(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part IV

  Religious dimensions of social life

  Passage contains an image

  10 Researching the religious dimensions of social life

  The sacred and the social uses of moral meaning in contemporary society

  Gordon Lynch

  As the earlier sections of this book demonstrate, research in the sociology of religion has much to contribute to our understanding of important structures and processes in religious institutions and individual religiosity, as well forms of interaction between religious organisations and other fields of social life. The aim of this chapter is to delineate an area of research within the contemporary sociology of religion that has arguably been less well-developed than this work on the religious lives of individuals and organisations, but which constitutes an important area for future work.

  A central assumption of much work in the sociology of religion over the past forty years is that it most naturally focuses on beliefs, practices, organisations and social structures and processes that relate to human engagement with supra-human beings or forces.1 This substantive understanding of religion under-writes the continued interest in the sociological study of major religious traditions as well, in recent decades, as the discipline’s interest in new religious movements and the ‘new age.’ The emergence of the study of ‘nonreligion’ as an important area for attention more recently has not necessarily troubled this assumption in instances where this work focuses on organisations or forms of living that are defined as being distinct from those oriented towards such supra-human powers.

  The aim of this chapter is not to declaim this centre of gravity for our discipline in any way. This working assumption about its field of study, and the avoidance of protracted debates about disciplinary focus and identity, has provided a valuable basis for researchers to develop our understanding of contemporary religious life across a range of traditions and contexts. The intellectual, ethical and political significance of resourcing more nuanced academic and public understandings of religion cannot be understated.

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  Religion in the Context of Globalization

  • Peter Beyer(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Religion in the Context of Globalization A developing theoretical perspective

  This book brings together ten previously published pieces which focus on the institutional forms and concept of religion in the context of globalizing and modern society. The guiding theme that they all share is the theoretical proposition that religion and globalization are historically, conceptually, and institutionally related. What has come to constitute religion socially and what social roles religion plays are not manifestations of a timeless essence, a stable analytic category, or even a requirement of human societies. In concept and institutional form, socially religion is a contingent expression of the historical process of globalization, above all during modern centuries; what religion has become is one of the outcomes of the successive transformations and developments that have brought about contemporary global society.

  The different chapters share this theme, but each of them also treats different aspects of the overall issue. Together, it is hoped, they present a reasonably complete picture of a theoretical perspective that I have tried to develop since the early 1990s and even to some extent before. That said, it is important to situate the collection with reference to other of my own work on the same theme, and in temporal terms as steps along the way of an ongoing theoretical effort. I attend to each of these in turn.

  The pieces that provide the content of the following ten chapters were published originally between 1998 (Chapter 8 ) and 2010 (Chapter 12). The earliest summary attempts to present the basic position with regard to religion, religions, and globalization appeared in publications right at the beginning of this period (see Beyer, 1998a, 1998b), and these, in turn, grew out of conference papers delivered in the four preceding years. The fact that these efforts occurred after the publication of Religion and Globalization in 1994 (Beyer, 1994) points to a process of ongoing theoretical development. That book, in spite of its title, dealt with only certain aspects of the larger question, mainly those concerning the possibilities for “public (usually political) influence” for religion under conditions of globalization. It dealt very little with religion as religion. It was to this latter issue that I subsequently turned, to a large extent in the form of the chapters included in this book. This continuity of theme manifests itself in the fact that there is a degree of overlap in these chapters, and this even after most of the evident repetition was removed in the process of editing them for this collection. There is in that regard also a close relation between the present work and the 2006 volume, Religions in Global Society (Beyer, 2006), the purpose of which was quite similar to the present one. The main difference between the two is that there are aspects treated in one that are not or only sparsely treated in the other; but above all the 2006 book placed a very heavy emphasis on the development and presentation of a theoretical frame which included very centrally the adaptation of some of Niklas Luhmann’s theories for this enterprise.1

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  Introduction to the Study of Religion

  • Hillary P. Rodrigues, John S. Harding(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Religionswissen-schaft) and so on, in which the scientific method is applied with varying degrees of rigor. More significantly, many of the early studies display a negative disposition towards religion, which is seen as an aberrant human activity, deriving from perceived weaknesses in the human constitution, such as ignorance, fear, or fantasy. Such pejorative attitudes still persist among a cohort of scientists and social scientists. Religion exists and persists because people misunderstand the laws of nature and how human societies operate (which scientific study will reveal), because they fear the unknown (and there is nothing to fear but fear itself), or because they escape into illusions of their own designs in order to cope with harsh reality. While these explanations and many others certainly hold true in many instances and do contribute to our understanding of religion, most religious studies scholars understand that they do not adequately account for the human religious response. They are therefore regarded as reductionist explanations, since they reduce the complexity of the phenomenon of religion in human societies to overly simplified causes, functions, or effects. It would seem strange, if not absurd, if one were to propose simplistic dismissive rationales for why human beings make music or produce art, why we philosophize, or work. However, religious authorities or attitudes have often stood in the way of scientific endeavors (Galileo’s trial by the Catholic Church, and the ongoing evolution versus creationism debates, are telling examples), occasionally triggering a response in kind by the scientific community.

  Contemporary sociological approaches

  The contemporary period entertains, for the most part, a much more nuanced and embracing approach to the study of religion among social scientists. Attempts at grand theory and universal explanations of causes and functions have yielded to efforts to offer more limited perspectives and insights into religion. To some extent this seeming humility derives from a shifting scientific paradigm and the contributions of postmodern theories in the social sciences. Each scientific observer is “situated,” observing phenomena from a particular vantage point. Their perspectives are not the only, correct, and true ones. Just as relativity theory demonstrates that even a measurement of time by a stationary observer will differ from a measurement by one who is moving, postmodernism suggests that our appraisals about life, the human predicament, and so on are always colored by the particulars of our own conditions. Does this mean that men cannot adequately, and thus should not, study women? Or that Muslims should not study Buddhists? Or that atheists should avoid the study of religion? Of course not! However, it does mean that each study provides only a partial perspective, offering its own valuable, but limited, viewpoints on the items examined. The structure of this text is designed to highlight such an orientation toward the study of religion, introducing students to a variety of perspectives, and implicitly suggesting that exposure to the widest array of disciplinary approaches will enable us to better understand the phenomenon of religion.

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