Drawing on recent advances in mediatisation theory, the article presents a theoretical framework for understanding the increased interplay between religion and media. The media have become an ...important, if not primary, source of information about religious issues, and religious information and experiences become moulded according to the demands of popular media genres. As a cultural and social environment, the media have taken over many of the cultural and social functions of the institutionalised religions and provide spiritual guidance, moral orientation, ritual passages and a sense of community and belonging. Furthermore, the article considers the relationship between mediatisation and secularisation at three levels: society, organisation and individual. At the level of society, mediatisation is an integral part of secularisation. At the level of organisation and the individual, mediatisation may both encourage secular practices and beliefs and invite religious imaginations typically of a more subjectivised nature.
This essay argues that essentialist models of modernity are always ideological, and that Britain's dominant ideology of modernity was transformed from the mid-1950s, with revolutionary consequences ...for British Christianity and secularisation. Before the mid-1950s Britain's predominant 'civilisation' ideology portrayed Christianity as more advanced than secularity. The mid-1950s global crisis, however, created widespread belief in a radical break between 'tradition' and 'the modern world'. This perception rapidly legitimated the further belief, promoted by radical Christians, that 'the modern world' is inherently 'secular'. Once accepted by the national media, the ideological belief that modernity is secular made possible the 1960s 'secular revolution'.
This article explores ceremonial design of independent celebrant-led wedding ceremonies in England and Wales. It draws on a qualitative study which involved focus groups with celebrants and ...interviews with individuals who have had an independent celebrant-led wedding ceremony. Six factors are described which influenced how couples translated and tweaked traditions or innovated ceremonial elements: faith, heritage, values, kin, informality, and temporality. In line with a bricolage process, it is suggested that the keeping of and minor adaption of traditions through the personalisation offered by independent celebrant-led wedding ceremonies may support inclusion of relationship practices such as interfaith couplings and blended families. Examples of kinship display-work and self-display-work were found throughout participant accounts of their wedding ceremonies. It is proposed that both may act as an important means by which the needs of individuals for whom a religious or belief framework is not prioritised over other contexts of identification can be met in a wedding ceremony. Further research is needed to explore the transferability of these findings to larger samples, as well as specific sub-populations.
Freud completed his last book, on Moses and Monotheism, in 1939, while in his London exile. Its publication was deemed untimely, as its two main theses could be construed as a form of Jewish ...self-hatred. The first claim questions Moses’ Jewish origins and contends that the founder of the Jews was in fact an Egyptian; the second suggests that the Jews killed Moses and then created his myth as a coping mechanism for concealing their terrible deed. In this article, I contend that Moses and Monotheism can be read as Freud’s intervention in debates on the ‘Jewish Question’. After revisiting Freud’s original argument (I), I assess its reception among leading Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century (II). I then use Freud’s arguments to look at the two key themes of the Jewish Question: understanding the defining features of Jewish identity (III) and the pervasiveness of antisemitism in Western culture (IV).
Scholarship on religious belonging has overwhelmingly labelled believers’ religion in very broad and superficial terms, presuming that individual practices and beliefs are congruent with religious ...doctrines and official discourses. By splitting up religious socialisation into two crucial phases, the adoption and the adaption of religion, this article offers a more procedural understanding to investigating how young believers develop their own sense of religious belonging. Based on biographical narrative interviews with Viennese believers (aged 16–25) from 7 religious groups, we observe that the adoption of a certain religion is primarily bound to family ties. The adaption phase serves to develop personal approaches towards religion based on two major rationales: adapting one’s own religiosity by engaging with religious doctrine and community itself, and negotiating religion within society. We argue that adaption is closely tied to social relations within and across religions and to (secular) society at large.
Abstract
Steve Bruce's and Karel Dobbelaere's secularisation theses - that industrialisation, urbanisation, societalisation, and rationalisation erode religion on macro-, meso- and micro-levels - can ...be challenged by reference to the growth and vitality of Christianity in China and South Korea. Christianity propelled economic growth and political change in South Korea at the end of the twentieth century, and has recognised potential in China. Religious institutions play critical roles in contemporary South Korean and Chinese communities. Although in an economically dynamic age permeated by scientific thinking, Christianity thrives in the private sphere in China. The plateauing of the growth rate of South Korean Christianity in recent decades coincides with widespread stability and prosperity in the country, which may have reduced the psychological and practical needs for religion. Thus, the Secularisation Thesis ought to be recast: social stability and prosperity better explain religious decline than industrialisation, urbanisation, societalisation, and rationalisation.
This work traces the experiences spontaneously expressed by travellers who stop at convents throughout Spain to admire their cultural heritage and also to taste their typical pastries. The aim of ...this study is to analyse the dialectical relationship between the sacred and the profane in heritage and its tourism context, through content analysis and the narrative generated in a social network for tourists. The initial hypothesis is based on possible cultural differences in the characterisation of the experience of visiting these sacred spaces where pastries have been consumed and in the existence of a differentiated pattern association between different levels: values, types of content, narration of events and activation of cultural heritage. The results show the possibilities of the dialectic relationship with gastronomy through which sacred-touristic-heritage sites (nunneries) can be re-adapted to the twenty-first century without losing an iota of spiritual efficiency and emphasising their sustainability.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the reformulation of the place and role of religion in Spanish public institutions after the constitutional disestablishment of the Catholic Church and religious ...diversification of society. Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork in six Spanish prisons, we argue that there is a process of the realignment of forces between the religious groups that provide services in such institutions, the Catholic Church adopting an attitude in between adaptation and subtle resistance to the loss of a number of its previous prerogatives. This incomplete demonopolisation of public organisations can be explained as the result of two opposing forces: (a) convergence towards the European standards of accommodation of religious diversity; and (b) Catholic resistance to the loss of established advantages.
Recent theoretical advancements in geographies of religion have reconceptualised secularisation as a multi‐scaled, grounded process of place‐making that reconciles the “agent‐in‐place” with large, ...institutional differentiation and fragmentation. This paper contributes to this re‐theorisation by examining the context of urban regeneration in which macro‐ and meso‐scaled secularisation is performed, negotiated and contested at the scale of the local community. The empirical research focuses on state‐enforced secularisation imposed on the ancestral temple of a lineage village during the urban regeneration project in Guangzhou, China. This paper considers the resistance conducted by local villagers to defend the sacredness and authority of their ancestral temple and to reclaim their own space from the totalising party‐state. We suggest that the effect of secularisation at the micro‐scale implies the formation of new religiosities as new legitimising religious thoughts and discourses of the sacred arose within villagers’ embodied practices of resistance. This paper therefore highlights both secularisation and re‐sacralisation as scalar constructs that mutually interact at different scales.
This paper examines how secularisation and re‐sacralisation manifest at different scales through a case study of China's ancestral temple in Guangzhou. It highlights the contested and hybrid nature of secularisation and re‐sacralisation and regards them both as multi‐scalar and situated constructs.
In research dealing with religious affiliation, generic nonreligious categories - 'no religion', 'not religious', 'nonreligious', 'nones' - are frequently used to measure secularity and ...secularisation processes. Analysis of these categories is, however, problematic because they have not received dedicated methodological attention. Using qualitative research conducted in the UK, this article investigates what nonreligious categories measure and, specifically, whether they indicate non-identification or disaffiliation as assumed or an alternative form of cultural affiliation. Findings suggest that generic nonreligious categories are sometimes used to express substantive positions and public identities, and that these are diverse. These findings flatten distinctions between religious and nonreligious categories as 'positive' and 'negative' respectively and indicate problems therefore in using nonreligious identification to measure secularity and secularisation. They suggest nonreligious identification is, however, a useful indicator of the advance of nonreligious cultures and the 'nonreligionisation' of societies.
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