Abstract
Even in the most 'secular' of western societies it has become clearer in the 21st century that religion plays a role in public life, and cannot simply be described as 'privatised'. But how should this public role be conceived and analysed? This paper presents a framework for such analysis which takes seriously the diverse roles of different kinds of religion in the differentiated spheres of modern societies (education, law, welfare etc.). In other words, it works with a number of variables: What kind of religion? What religious-secular relation? In which social sphere(s)? What kinds of role does religion play? In what relations to class, gender, ethnicity and other bases of inequality? This differentiated model depends upon a critique of existing approaches to public religion (exemplified by Bryan Wilson and José Casanova respectively), and of their underlying assumptions, including a constriction to the national, a conflation of social differentiation and privatisation, and a narrow church- or congregation-focused view of religion. The result is an analytical tool which is better designed to take account of the diverse forms of public religion to be found at local, national and trans-national level in late-modern consumer societies.
| Original language | Undefined/Unknown |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 5-20 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift |
| Issue number | 58 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2012 |
Keywords
- Churches
- Privatization
- Public religion
- Religion
- Secularisation
- Secularism
- Social differentiation
