This article looks at the contribution of secularisation debates to a critical theory of society. As the relations between the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ aspects of modern life grow more vexing, it ...argues critical theory must eschew its previous secularisation-as-progress metanarrative. Instead, processes of secularisation are better understood as those relationships between public and private beliefs and practices that take place at the boundaries between modern society’s commitment to procedural institutions and substantive value commitments. The article then revisits four different understandings of secularisation that, coming from a variety of intellectual traditions, help us redefine it beyond an exclusive focus on institutional religions: normative questions on the rise and decline of autonomous values; temporal questions on the self-positing of modernity as an historical epoch; political questions on the desacralisation of modern sovereignty and practical questions on the non-technological dimensions of technology. This framework is put to the test in relation to the procedural challenge of democratic fallibility and the substantive challenge of planetary survival.
Requests for personal funeral rituals increase with growing secularization and the individualization of death. Based on interviews, this article discusses four women's experiences of independently ...planning and conducting secular memorials and ash disposals. I discuss the role of improvisation in the processes surrounding these rituals. Imagination, invention, improvisation, independence and inspiration emerge as characteristic aspects of their accounts. Due to the atheist beliefs of the deceased, the families have actively distanced themselves from the Church's funeral ritual, and undertakers were not considered helpful. To amend this, the relatives assumed responsibility for planning the secular funerals rather than leaving responsibility to the dominant authorities of death. Arranging memorials and burials without previous experience made the mourners feel insecure, but they also took pleasure in the creativity of the process, through which they created meaningful and deeply personal memorials and ash disposals. The study shows how rituals were (re)created by combining personal details with already established funeral ritual elements, as the mourners both mimicked and actively distanced themselves from existing ritual forms.
Are religions like everything else in the world, subject to permanent change? Or are they perhaps the only stable element for people in a world of permanent change? Within the wide field of this ...discourse, five authors – Rowan Williams, Judith Wolfe, Guy G. Stroumsa, Vassilis Saroglou and Azza Karam – illuminate the relation of religion and change in its diverse aspects.
While the electoral decline of Social democracy has received considerable attention in the literature, much less is known about how the structural changes experienced by advanced capitalist societies ...in the past decades have affected support for the mainstream right. In order to fill this gap, this article examines the relationship between secularisation, educational expansion and support for Conservative and Christian democratic parties in 18 West European democracies since the 1960s. The analysis reveals that secularisation is negatively associated with support for the mainstream right, but the effect is only significant for Christian democratic parties. Moreover, the findings support the expectation that social conservatism tends to damage the electoral prospects of mainstream right parties in highly educated societies. This suggests that, although engaging in cultural wars might sometimes seem like a winning strategy in the short term, it is unlikely to produce long-term positive electoral returns for the centre-right in post-industrial contexts.
Did early modern European states make themselves sacred? The historian Paolo Prodi insisted that they did, whereas for the philosopher Giorgio Agamben sacred and secular power were so ...indistinguishable that the question was moot. This group of articles seeks to explain and explore the approaches of these two accomplished Italian scholars to the problem of early modern sacralisation. This introduction reviews the context in which Prodi and Agamben worked, sketches brief biographies, and describes the arguments that they advanced which are most relevant to early modern history. Their work emerged from the debate on secularisation in the German-speaking lands, the confessionalisation thesis as it was advanced by German historians of Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Catholic Reform, and twentieth-century Catholic thought about the relationship between religion and totalitarian states. Both Prodi and Agamben belonged to traditions that sat at an angle to the liberalism that underpins historical and philosophical thought in the English-speaking world.
The dynamic secularisation of Polish young people and the fact that many of them are opting out of religious classes prompts a critical analysis of the current model of Religious Education and the ...development of proposals that respond to contemporary socio-cultural challenges. In others words this article will seek to outline potential directions for modifying the current Religious Education model intended for secondary school students in Poland. This paper attempts to provide a synthetic answer to the following questions: Why is Religious Education in secondary schools today not leading to the expected results? What elements of it are inadequate for contemporary conditions? What should the model of Religious Education for young people look like in the context of a decline in religiousness? Where and how should catechesis be provided? This paper contributes to the discussion on the shape of Religious Education for young people in a changing society.
This article offers a new solution to a theoretical problem facing scholars attempting to interpret religion and secularisation in light of biological evolution. Some scholars argue that the ...diversity of religious beliefs and rituals in contemporary societies is compatible with secularisation or even facilitates it by weakening the plausibility structures of any one religion. Other scholars argue that religious diversity is not evidence of a decrease in interest in religion but rather shows the ingenuity of religious entrepreneurs. Here we extend the former school of thought by outlining a theory of the vestigilisation of religion. We describe three key characteristics of vestigial structures (increasing variability, decreasing costliness and the appearance of novel functions) and identify shifts in these characteristics in some religious traits. We argue that this supports the idea that religious diversity is a predictable effect of secularisation.
This article compares the development of primary education in Ireland and Norway, from its establishment in the nineteenth century until present time. The aim of the article is to discuss how and to ...what degree nation-state formation after independence in Ireland (1922) and Norway (1905) created fundamental and persistent structures for the development of primary schooling, as well as the role that religion and nation-building played in this. Previous research on the development of Irish and Norwegian schooling and official documents and reports makes up the research material. The article demonstrates that, despite institutional secularisation around the world from the nineteenth century onwards, religious and national peculiarities in the establishment of primary education in Ireland and Norway continue to characterise, and to some extent explain, the differences in Irish and Norwegian education today.
This article deals with the paradoxical relationship between the nineteenth-century Evangelical Revival and secularization. It is argued here that the revival and its worldview played a role in ...increasing pluralism and choice in the nineteenth century – a process often related to secularization. The Evangelical movement both attempted to oppose modernity and rationalism and emphasized religious freedom, voluntarism, and individualism. It therefore induced and popularized self-reflection, doubt, and deconversion. It also favoured religious democracy in opposition to a state-imposed religious monopoly (at least in northern Europe). Furthermore, by dividing people into believers and nonbelievers, it emphasized religious polarization. This contributed to an undermining of established religious structures, fragmenting and pluralizing the religious landscape and giving people the option to abstain completely from religious commitment. The Swedish confessional (inner mission) revivalist denomination Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen (EFS – approx. the Swedish Evangelical Mission Society), founded in 1856, is used as a case. The popular literature they published and distributed manifested an evangelical worldview. In this article four themes, based on the popular literature, are used to study empirically the changing role of religion in relation to nineteenth-century revivalism: ‘the dualistic worldview’; ‘conversion’; ‘activism’; and ‘self-reflection’.
In recent years religion has come to occupy an increasingly central place in both popular and scholarly debates concerning citizenship in Québec. In order to understand and begin to contend with the ...challenges that religion poses for citizenship both conceptually and practically, it is necessary to engage with discourses and practices of secularisation in their historical specificity. To facilitate this, this article proceeds on two fronts. First, it distinguishes between what it refers to as three moments of secularisation in the history of Québec, arguing that we are presently witnessing a distinct third moment of secularisation. Second, the article offers an alternative approach to questions of citizenship and religion that is not grounded in the notion of secularisation as a singular transhistorical process. Such a perspective provides an opening for rethinking the possible forms of mediation between citizenship and religion.
