Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the modern world, religion, contrary to the conventional understanding of modernization as secularization, continues to play a major role in politics, society and culture. Indeed that role appears if anything to be increasing rather than decreasing and hence in recent years that has been a flurry of academic activity around such ideas as “political religion,” “religious nationalism,” and “post-secular society.” In broad terms, religion appears to be increasingly an important component of public culture rather than a matter of private belief and practice ( Casanova 1994 ). Of course the salience of religion in modern culture depends a great deal on which society we are looking at. Religion-in the form of Pentecostalism, fundamentalism, charismatic movements, and revivalism-appears to be flourishing in much of South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Religions are also reviving under the somewhat more liberal government policies of contemporary China and Vietnam. However in Europe and North America the growth of diasporic communities with large religious minorities is also changing the cultural map of what were thought to be predominantly secular societies. There is naturally the temptation to think that after 9/11 and the terrorist bombings in London, Madrid, and elsewhere that the revival of interest in religion is in fact a function of the political importance of understanding ... log in or subscribe to read full text