Modern Religiosity Research Paper

1. Contrasting Modern Religiosity And Modern Religion

Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Emile Durkheim drew a distinction between ‘a religion handed down by tradition, formulated for a whole group and which it is obligatory to practice’ and ‘a free, private, optional religion, fashioned according to one’s own needs and understanding’ (cited in Pickering 1975, p. 96). With modifications, this contrast provides the basis for distinguishing between ‘modern religion’ and ‘modern religiosity.’

1.1 Modern Religion

To begin with the more familiar term, modern religions provide tradition-informed, institutionalized forms of religious activity: the church, chapel, monastery, mosque, or temple. Unlike more insulated premodern religions, however, few modern religions are ‘formulated for a whole group’ or are ‘obligatory to practice’ (as Durkheim puts it). For with modernity, information and population flows have greatly increased, this meaning that globalizing and pluralizing processes have provided most people, in most cultures, with a whole range of religions from which to select. This said, however, modern religions strive (to varying degrees and with varying degrees of success) to ensure that participants remain faithful to the tradition on offer. Participants, that is to say, are instructed in a particular, clearly articulated, path to salvation. Examples include long-established forms of tradition (such as Catholicism) as well as more recent developments (such as those new religious movements dating from the nineteenth century, the Mormons providing an illustration, or those organizations that have developed during the later twentieth century, the Japanese ‘new new religions’ here serving to illustrate).

1.2 Modern Religiosity

Generally speaking, modern religiosity flourishes in realms beyond the institutionalized and traditionalized territories occupied by modern religions. Rather than going to church, chapel, or temple, at least to any significant degree, those involved draw on widely available cultural resources—books and magazines, films and videos—to develop their own religiosities. Or those involved resource themselves by way of ‘new spiritual outlets,’ turning to practitioners who provide spirituality (healings, meditations, empowerments) in a relatively informal, weakly institutionalized and nondirective fashion. Then again, there are those who exercise their imaginations to conclude that there must be ‘something’ more to life that the merely mundane.

Reliance on cultural resources and detraditionalized new spiritual outlets goes together with the fact that a key characteristic of modern religiosity is that those involved think of themselves as exercising their own authority to develop their own religiosities (or spiritualities). As Robert Wuthnow (1989) makes the point with regard to North America, ‘the religion practiced by an increasing number of Americans may be entirely of their own manufacture’ (p. 164). In order to resource their lives, individuals might draw on magical, occult, or esoteric teachings and practices; New Age themes to do with the sacralization of the Self or the importance of connecting to the spirituality of nature; the mysterious forces of ‘X-file’ culture; notions such as ‘spirituality,’ ‘vital force,’ ‘higher power,’ ‘life force’ or ‘soul,’ and even ‘angels’; or the ‘inner wisdom’ of religious traditions. In addition, individual religiosities can include the not-so-obviously religious in the quest for finding meaning in life, self-fulfillment or well-being: a point also made by Wuthnow when he writes of the growing popularity of meaning systems which involve, for example, an ‘eclectic synthesis of Christianity, popular psychology, Reader’s Digest folklore, and personal superstitions, all wrapped in the anecdotes of the individual’s biography’ (Wuthnow 1989, p. 164).

Although the term ‘modern religiosity’ can be taken to include vague ‘there must be something more’ beliefs, which have little direct bearing on the lives of those concerned, modern religiosity primarily dwells on what it is to be ‘alive.’ Durkheim ([1915] 1971) thought that the future lay with ‘a religion which will consist entirely in internal and subjecti e states, and which would be constructed freely by each of us’ (p. 47, my emphasis). What Durkheim is referring to is clearly very much to do with personal life: all those subjectivities which comprise ‘being alive.’ Now in the words of Wuthnow (1991), who is explaining what he means by the ‘subjective’ or ‘lived realities’ dimension of the religious: ‘by ‘‘subjective’’, I mean an understanding of religion that privileges its connection to the individual, its location within the inner part of the individual (beliefs, outlooks, felt needs, emotions, inner experiences), and its role within the individual’s personality (providing meaning, wholeness, comfort, psychological compensations, even a sense of attachment or belonging)’ (p. 272).

Religiosities (or spiritualities) of life are most obviously in evidence among those who are not involved in strong—obeying the Other—traditionalized modern religion. For whereas traditionalized religious institutions serve to liberate people from their ‘merely’ human lives—as ‘fallen,’ or, in many Eastern traditions, as contaminated by ‘attachments’—in favor of what lies beyond, modern religiosity concerns the autonomous subject, liberated from the demands of tradition and intent on exploring and developing what it is to be alive. This said, however, modern religiosity is by no means absent within less strongly traditionalized forms of modern religion. Peter Berger (1969), for example, in his discussion of liberal Christian teachings, notes that ‘religious ‘‘realities’’ are increasingly ‘‘translated’’ from a frame of reference of facticities external to the individual consciousness to a frame of reference that locates them within consciousness’ (p. 166). And to the extent that subjectivization or internalization is taking place within modern religions, so too does the divide between modern religion and modern religiosity become undermined.

2. Modern Religiosity And Peoples’ Lives

Turning to how religiosities can serve peoples’ lives, four main life focuses can be briefly summarized. The first concerns the life of the individual person. What matters in this regard lies with finding religiosity spirituality within on-self. What matters is addressing personal ‘growth,’ divorce, illness, ageing, by engaging with what one’s own spirituality has to offer. The second concerns the life of the relationship. Religiosity is here put to work to enhance personal relationships, or to operate in therapeutic fashion. The third concerns relationships with nature. The emphasis here is on living in terms of the life of the natural; that life which informs nature from trees to species to the cosmic. And the fourth concerns what life has to do with work, increasing attention being paid in countries like the USA to exploring ways of bringing ‘life back to work’ by way of religiosity or spirituality.

3. The Growth Of Modern Religiosity

Not enough research has been done to provide anything approaching a clear picture as to how modern religiosity is faring on a global scale. It is probably true to say, however, that in much of the world, where religious traditions—Islam, Hinduism, ‘popular’ Buddhism—remain strong, modern religiosity is relatively unimportant. But even in Islamic countries like Bangladesh, its role should not be neglected: many people could well combine components of Islam with folk beliefs and practices to do with improving the quality of personal life; and Tagore, the great figurehead of the nation, taught a ‘religion of humanity’ which is a powerfully relational form of life spiritualitity.

The one thing that is reasonably clear is that modern religiosity is well in evidence in countries where various processes of modernity—rationalization, differentiation (between the religious realm and the political, for example), democratization, pluralization, consumerization, and materialization—have weakened the hold of religious traditions. Indeed, in such countries modern religiosity could well be expanding. The reason is simple. More people are ceasing to participate in institutionalized, traditional religion than are becoming atheists or agnostics, it following that the number of those who are ‘somehow’ religious without being significantly involved with institutionalized religion has increased.

Northern Europe would appear to provide a major site for growth of this kind. In Britain, for example, the number of those regularly attending institutionalized religion dropped by 30 percent between 1950 and 1990, but the numbers of those becoming atheists or agnositics only increased by some 10 percent (entailing that there has been an increase of some 20 percent in those who are somehow religious without attending). It is true that many of these nonattenders might still be involved with modern religion, reading their Bibles at home, for example. But there are distinct signs that religiosity is growing: belief that ‘there is some sort of spirit or vital force which controls life’ has now overtaken the (traditional) ‘There is a personal God’ (Bruce 1996, p. 270), and New Age spiritualities of life are expanding (see Heelas, 1996). Or consider Finland: 15 percent are regular church attenders, with the figure in decline, while 63 percent believe that the ‘best way to get in touch with God’ is by being ‘in’ nature, such beliefs apparently gaining in numerical siginificance (Heino, 1997, p. 21).

Turning to the USA, research by Roof and Gesch (1995) provides convincing evidence of growth. Concentrating on the baby-boom generation, namely those 75 million (or so) people born between 1946 and 1964, by the 1990s approximately half were involved with traditional religion. Of the remainder, namely the ‘religious individualists,’ approximately half have turned to ‘a deeply mystical conception of the Deity,’ having little if anything to do with ‘organized religion’ (p. 141). As for elsewhere, it is highly likely that much the same picture of growth applies to countries like Canada and Australia, or to cities like Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. Finally, on the question of growth, it is important to note that modern religiosity is also developing within modern religion: see, for example, Donald Miller’s (1997) discussion of the (rapidly expanding) ‘postdenominational churches’ of North America with their strong emphasis on being alive in the right kind of way: ‘purity of heart is more important than purity of doctrine’ (pp. 127–8).

4. Explaining The Turn To Religiosity

Of the many factors that have contributed to the growth of religiosity, attention is paid here to what is called ‘the cultural turn to life.’ The key to the argument is that modernity has resulted in very high value indeed being ascribed to life. In the words of Georg Simmel ([1918] 1997), ‘this emotional reality— which we can only call life—makes itself increasingly felt in its formless strength as the true meaning or value of our existence’ (p. 24). And given its value, life has quite naturally come to serve as the ‘home’ for religiosity for many of those who remain religious without participating in modern religion.

Looking at this argument in somewhat greater detail, Simmel and Max Weber, then Arnold Gehlen, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann, have claimed that modernity has resulted in significant numbers becoming disillusioned with what the ‘primary’ institutions of society have to offer. From modern religion (loss of faith seen in secularization) to political ideologies, to the nuclear family, to the workplace (Weber’s ‘iron cage’), the claim is that the institutional order no longer succeeds in providing adequate sources of identity, purpose, or value in life. Accordingly, so the argument goes, people have been ‘thrown back’ on themselves as the key source of significance. With little to have faith in beyond themselves, what matters becomes a matter of what lies within: one’s psychology, one’s personal ethicality (‘being true to oneself’), the quality of one’s emotions, the importance of being authentic, the value of finding out what one truly is and capable of becoming; becoming ‘whole’ or healing oneself.

It is but a short step to explain the growth (in certain sociocultural contexts) of religiosities or spiritualities of life. Other than atheists and agnostics, those who have come to have ‘ultimate’ faith in what their interior or personal lives have to offer are going to seek out those forms of the religious which sacralize experiences of what it is to be alive.

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