In different ways classical social thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century all thought

that religion would either disappear or become progressively attenuated with the expansion of
modern institutions, resulting in a "secularization thesis" aptly captured in the title of Freud's
famous The Future of an Illusion (see Durkheim, 1912/1965; Freud, 1957; Marx and Engels,
1848/1858; Tylor, 1871; Weber, 1904/1958:182; and Giddens, 1990:207). The evidence is
pervasive and clear, however, that religion has disappeared nowhere but changed everywhere.
For those expecting its attenuation to accompany modernization, religion remains surprisingly
vibrant and socially salient. This is particularly true in America, but in much of the rest of the
world as well, where religion continues to be a potent factor in the emerging global order and its
conflicts. It is in parts of Western Europe where individual religiosity has been radically
transformed that the secularization thesis seems to work the best.
In the United States pollsters and scholars have found
evidence
that the vast majority of Americans continue to
" In the United States
believe in supernatural forces, identify themselves in religious
pollsters and scholars
have found evidence that terms, and hunger for a spiritually enhanced life. Regarding the
later, there is clear evidence that many Americans participate
the vast majority of
regularly in religious and spiritual small groups and form a
Americans continue to
large market for religious/spiritual books, tapes, music, and
believe in supernatural
paraphernalia. Religion is a significant factor in voting
forces, identify themselves patterns, ideology about public policy, and political careers.
in religious terms, and
But pervasive evidence also exists for changes that many
observers see as religious decline: declining membership,
hunger for a spiritually
particularly among liberal/mainline Protestant denominations,
enhanced life."
and declining participation in religious services and traditional
forms of piety like prayer and Bible reading. Tolerance of
"other religions" grows along with declines in specific confessional and denominational loyalties
(i.e., commitment to "brand name religion") (Barna, 1996; Princeton Religious Research Center,
1996, 1997a, 1997b; Hoge, Johnson, and Luidens, 1994; Roof and McKinney, 1987; Bellah and
others, 1985.; Roof, 1993; Wuthnow, 1988, 1997; Marquand, 1996; The Economist, 1998:65).
Responding to religious persistence as well as perceived declines, social scientists have
created neosecularization perspectives, ostensibly faithful to contemporary facts as well as
classical theory. They understand modernization not to involve the actual disappearance of

religion, but perhaps as attenuation and certainly as changing religious forms in relation to other
institutions. From the (assumed) benchmark of unitary religion in medieval Europe, scholars
have argued variously that secularization involved the differentiation of religion from other
institutional realms, the privatization of religious belief and experience, desacralization and the
declining scope of religious authority, and the "liberalization" of religious doctrine (See
Dobbleare, 1981; Chaves, 1994; Hadden, 1987; Hammond, 1985, Wald, 1997; and Wilson,
1966). Secularization theory, including its amended forms, has yielded many fruitful
observations, and the secularization debate continues with great vigor about both the reality and
the usefulness of its perspectives (see, for instance, Lechner, 1996; Stark and Iaconne, 1996,
Yamane, 1997). While we do not disparage its usefulness, we think that contested issues have
narrowed so that, increasingly, facts are less in question as much as are definitional,
methodological, and epistemological issues (or perhaps attachment to received social science
traditions).
In this paper we consider the relationship between social change and religion using
perspectives other than secularization. Specifically, we utilize perspectives from (1) broad
currents of world-historical change, (2) communication and media studies, and (3)
postmodernism. We assume that like other institutional realms, religion is embedded in a broad
process of sociocultural change, and that in this process religion is not passive, as so often
depicted in secularization or modernization theory. Like other spheres, it is a partly autonomous
force, reflexively shaping and being shaped by that large-scale transformation. This paper does
not offer either new empirical observations or different causal explanations of large-scale change
patterns. Rather it uses contemporary analytic frameworks to develop a broad overview of
religious change, while suggesting parallel changes in other social spheres that are all embedded
in the large-scale sociocultural transformation now occurring.
THE LONG VIEW: THREE SOCIOCULTURAL EPOCHS AND LARGE
TRANSFORMATIONS
Consider a trichotomy of fundamental sociocultural transformations to understand worldhistorical change in large analytic categories (Following Meyrowitz [1997]; Olsen [1991:256280], and many others). These include: (1) the Neolithic Revolution that transformed huntergatherer groups into agrarian, traditional, or pre-modern sociocultural systems; (2) the
transformation to industrial modernity in post-feudal Europe, the world-wide diffusion of which
was virtually complete by the middle of the 20th century; and (3) the transformation currently in
process. We are more interested in the last part of this trichotomy, even though its contours,
salient features, and the very terms to describe it are less clear (e. g., postmodernism, high or late
modernity, post-industrial societies, late capitalism, information society).
Pre-modern Traditional societies
Spanning most of human history (from roughly 8,000 B.C.E. to post Feudal Europe), village
and kinship communities dominated pre-modern sociocultural systems, in which production was
overwhelmingly for consumption rather than for commodities exchange. Such local communities
tightly bound space and time to particular places. In relatively self-contained communities,
knowledge and beliefs were transmitted by oral traditions and strongly rooted in personal and

local experience (Innis, 1950; Ong, 1977). Such communities were highly aware of being
surrounded by very different "others" in different villages and other places.
People understood that human life and nature were ruled by powerful natural and supernatural
external forces, but spheres of social life like religion were still relatively fused and unitary, as
were other institutional spheres like the family, work, medicine, or politics. The masses of
ordinary villagers only dimly recognized religion or much else as distinct from a seamless web
of personal and social life. Religio-magical ceremonies, ritual, and practice were personally
conducted between, and strongly identified with, known and intimate others. Indeed, there is
little evidence that abstract somethings called religion, religious faith, or different religions
existed as words or ideas before the 1600s. Historical research suggests that people in traditional
societies rarely understood themselves as participating in something that scholars of later
centuries would label as religion, and particularly not as Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism
(Smith, 1963:39-49). To ask pre-moderns about most of the sociocultural forms we associate
with religion today would simply be an unintelligible question.
Much of the usual history of traditional societies is written about their integrative systems of
empire, where legitimacy was conferred by oral vows of loyalty, and about their differentiated
panoply of dynastic rulers, soldiers, scribes, priests, merchants, and sorcerers. In retrospect,
however, these look more like a significant but thin upper strata living in relatively small urban
nodes within a virtual sea of peasants in dispersed villages, 90% by most estimates (Weeks,
1994). This controlling layer maintained itself by coercively expropriating the wealth of rural
village communities, but otherwise left the inhabitants of these villages free to control their daily
lives and to participate directly in their more immediate political, sociocultural, and religious
spheres.
Early modernity
Modern sociocultural systems originated in post Feudal Europe in the commercial and
industrial revolutions, when centers of economic production gradually shifted from the
countryside to burgeoning cities. Separate pre-modern communities began to form broader
integrated market systems, as competitive production for commodity exchange gradually
replaced production for consumption. Industrial capitalism, driven by trade and colonialism,
began its slow world-wide diffusion. Mid-20th century social theory described emergent
modernity in terms of the progressive growth in scale and differentiation of social institutions
and the compartmentalization and specialization of the social roles of persons (Parsons, 1963;
Smelser, 1966)--also the touchstones of neosecularization theory. More recent analyses of
modernity emphasize: (1) the progressive separation of time and space, with particular places
becoming much less important; and (2) the disembedding of social relationships, whereby they
are lifted out of local contexts and re-articulated across indefinite tracts of time and space. Two
pervasive mechanisms drove these processes: (1) abstract symbolic tokens or standardized media
of exchange that operate in a variety of contexts, like money or votes; and (2) reliance on expert
systems of knowledge and the services of experts and specialists of all sorts. Expert systems
reflected the central ethos of the European Enlightenment, that scientific knowledge and
rationality would tame the natural world and overcome the dogmas of tradition (Giddens,
1991:14-21, 28).

Organizations became the emblematic social forms of modernizing systems, particularly the
nation state, as face-to-face feudal relations gave way to nationalism, changing the boundaries of
"us" and "others." Political leadership became more distant, inaccessible, and delegated.
Machiavelli's book, The Prince, functioned as the first public relations manual for such
inaccessible political leaders. Over several hundred years, organizations proliferated and became
more distinct, and, as Foucault observed, the boundaries (or "membranes") around prisons,
hospitals, military barracks, factories, and schools thickened (1977). People were increasingly
separated from households into groups with homogenous purposes and identities. Print
communication, later augmented by electronic media like radio and television, fostered far
broader solidarity than could the oral media of traditional societies. Printed texts increasingly
shaped intellectual worldviews and national myths, as printed constitutions and laws literally
helped constitute nations, laws, and national myths (Meyrowitz, 1997: 63-65).
Like learning and work, worship and religious devotion became increasingly separate and
distinct. Religion in larger organizations was distinguished from the shared worship with those
one could see, hear, and touch, as in more traditional orders. People increasingly understood
religion as activities, organizations, and beliefs as distinct from other institutional spheres, and
by the 14th or 15th century it was possible for many Europeans to speak of my religion, religion
in general, and other religions (Smith, 1963; Meyrowitz, 1997: 64). As with other institutions in
modern systems, organizations or organized religion, as constituted by churches, denominations,
and sects, provided the context in which to understand religious belief and practice. Modern
religious organizations could unify people across broader spans of time and space utilizing
printed holy texts of religious literature and doctrine, or expert systems of special religious
knowledge created by theologians, clergy, and bishops. Religious belonging increasingly became
a matter of accepting formalized religious doctrines, creeds, and confessional statements (e.g.,
the Apostle's Creed, the Augsburg Confession, or the Baltimore Catechism). These creeds
defined religious identity, related to national, ethnic, or social class characteristics, and provided
a basis for distinguishing one's religion from that of others.
Our point is that much of the current controversy concerning religion is about changes in the
on-going fates of the predominant social forms of religion, that emerged in modern societies as
late in human history as the 1500s.
Late or High Modernity
Early modernity carried the seeds of its own transformation. In our view such large-scale
transformations are typically gradual and continuous with the past, rather than discontinuous,
sudden, apocalyptic, or revolutionary. For that reason, we prefer Giddens's (1991) terms "high"
or "late" modernity to the more widely used "postmodernity," but we have no commitment to
these terms and would prefer to simply speak of the third large-scale sociocultural transformation
that is now on-going, were it not so awkward to do so.
To note the obvious, globalization has been integrating the world's economic and political
systems into vast, abstract relations that have dramatically altered the economies, politics, and
the cultures of the world's relatively separate nations since the middle of the 20th century.
Electronic communication media continues to augment print, thereby facilitating globalization

by making all nations and regions informationally permeable (e.g. TVs, satellite communication,
personal computers, and web pages) (Meyrowitz, 1997:65). Giddens contends that globalization
is inherent in the fundamental social processes of modernism. The emergence of global-scale
economies and institutional connections, however rational to those enterprises themselves, vastly
increase the separation of time and space and the disembedding of social relations, often
rendering social life incomprehensible to ordinary persons (1991).
Even though a variety of expert systems dominate the production of knowledge and policy in
modern societies, the dream of the Enlightenment, to replace irrational dogmas and superstitions
of traditional societies with rational certainty, has failed abysmally. Because expert knowledge,
including that of theologians, becomes more specified but about less and less, comprehending
and living life becomes more and more difficult. Both larger systems and personal life become
infused with uncertainty. Traditional life was more objectively hazardous and risky than life in
the modern world but, ironically, expert knowledge and abstract systems have increased the
awareness of uncertainties and risks. In late-modernity reflexivity is fundamental to both
individuals' selves and institutions, including religion. Matters are continually open to change
and doubt, and have probabilistic outcomes. Ulrich Beck therefore characterized modern
societies as "risk societies," in which individual action and organizational policy are driven not
by a sense of certainty or fate but by calculating the odds. What are some basic social change
processes of the transformation to late modernity? (1986).
EARLY TO LATE MODERNITY CHANGE PROCESSES
At the same time that growth and globalization produce relations that are more abstract, such
relations are experienced as problematic, leading to a revival of the importance of relatively
small-scale relations and identifications. Thus dual processes, both integrating and fractionating,
shape the current sociocultural transformation. These are analytic categories that express and
summarize the cumulative effects of other diverse factors and processes. Integrating processes
have their sources in the rise of new information technologies and in sociotechnical forces that
facilitate the spatial spread of ideas, money, products, and human problems of many kinds. For
particular organizations, integration is often accelerated by threats from a broader competitive
climate and the necessity of organizations to protect their viability (or profitability) by growth,
mergers, or alliances. These processes are associated with the emergence of broad but abstract
cultural themes that may threaten particular other ones. In the transition to late-modernism, these
forces effect organizations of all kinds: religious, political, economic, and civic. Fractionating
processes intensify in relation to integrating ones, because they often transcend the capability of
persons to meaningfully identify with them and may threaten people's particular historic
commitments. Everyday life becomes more ambiguous or hollowed out, and growing
contingencies lead people to withdraw commitments and legitimacy from large systems.
Integrating processes may also threaten the everyday life of persons as organizations seek to
survive by the efficiency of removing the costs of labor. Thus, there is often a congruence among
consciousness, ambiguity, and practical necessity that amplifies attempts to preserve, revive, or
reconstitute relatively micro, private, local, or subnational spheres of both personal and social
life (Feathersone, and Lasch, 1995:2-3; Beyer, 1990, 373-76; Meyerowitz, 1997;66-68). Next,
we illustrate these processes with particular emphasis on religious change. We rely heavily on

American evidence and case materials, but we think that the substance of our argument has wider
implications.
Integrating processes.
Growing large-scale relations in many spheres of social life began by the 1850s, perhaps
earlier. They accelerated and became more visible after World War II, understood as
globalization by the 1960s (Robertson, 1990:26-28). Illustrations include the emergence of a
world market system, multinational corporations, a world network of national governments and
treaty organizations like N.A.T.O., N.A.F.T.A., the Group of 7 industrial nations, the United
Nations with its multitude of agencies, and the World Bank. The growth of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), is less obvious, because many are highly specialized, such
as the International Tin Council, the Tug of War International Federation, the Pan American
Association of Ophthalmology, and the International Catholic Child Bureau. Only a few are well
known, such as the International Red Cross, the Olympic Committee, Amnesty International, and
the World Wildlife Fund. Of the known population of INGOs, the vast majority were founded
after World War II. Most of these are not religiously connected, but some are (Boli and Thomas,
1997: 176).
Illustrating similar processes that elaborate broad religious structures across previously
existing boundaries is not hard. Ecumenical ventures, like the National Council of Churches,
represent a unifying effort, even it at times resorted to out of weakness. Such ventures, however,
result in limited cross-boundary ties--given the extraordinary diversity of religious culture and
doctrine in the United States. Organic mergers, such as that which gave rise to the United Church
of Christ, have occurred, but are rare and usually viable only among organizations having
common or compatible religious histories or cultures. Consultations, cooperation, and
communion on practical, humanitarian, and even political matters--like the Christian Coalition-are more common, to which we would add new religious or quasi-religious enterprises like
Promise Keepers and the Marriage Encounter Movement, which also transcend denominational
boundaries. Wuthnow has documented the increasing organization and mobilization of religious
resources across denominational lines, along with declining denominational conflicts and
prejudices.
Moving beyond the U.S., we note the extension of historic
religious formations beyond their national or regional bases,
"Even though formally
apolitical, Pentecostalism, their becoming become truly international in important ways.
Catholicism comes most easily to mind, and observers have
like other transnational
noted both the strengthening of Papal supremacy, and the
Christian conservative
internationalization of Catholicism, so that it has not only "a
movements, is neither
structure centered on Rome, but also a remarkable increase in
escapist nor passive. "
transnational Catholic networks and exchanges of all kinds that
criss-cross nations and world regions, often bypassing Rome"
(Cassanova, 1996; see also Della Cava, 1992). In the shadow niches of Catholicism, both
liberation theology base communities as well as Pentecostalism have become truly international,
the one associated with radical politics and the other more apolitical (Thomas, 1996:296). Even
though formally apolitical, Pentecostalism, like other transnational Christian conservative

movements, is neither escapist nor passive. Pentecostals use their religion to actively organize
modern life and push for cultural transformations. In Latin America, for instance, while typically
patriarchal, Pentecostalism stands staunchly against machismo culture. A man is to be rational,
moral, and responsible, and the family's spiritual leader; in practice he is to be sober, present, and
nurturing (Ammerman, 1994).
Turning to the non-Christian world, it is difficult to understand Islam as anything other than
transnational. It dominates much of the world between Morocco and Mindinao, and it is the
fastest growing religious affiliation in North America, perhaps in the world. We also note the
enormous popularity of Buddhism in the West, particularly among American intellectuals, among
whom it resonates culturally with the renaissance of mystical religiosity and spirituality. Of the
world religions, Hinduism and perhaps Judaism, are the remaining ones with distinct, though
greatly contested, national bases.
Truly cross boundary ecumenical relations also exist among formations within historic world
religions, if not between them. There are, for instance, the loosely connected World Council of
(Protestant) Churches, and other Christian ecumenical efforts: Lutheran-Catholic conversations,
Catholic Anglican conversations, and ecumenical conversations between the Orthodox and
Western Catholic Church. Roman Catholics and Protestants regularly send official observers to
each other's important gatherings. But there are still deep divisions between, for instance,
evangelical and liberal Protestants, Sunni and Shia Muslims, and Mahayana and Hinayana
Buddhists.
We argue in this article that as religions become truely transnational, there is, with notable
exceptions, a process of disestablishment, whereby religions relinquish the most particularistic
claims to legitimacy and privilege, and mobilize to protect universal human rights and
democratic civil society (Casanova, 1996). Witness, for example, the warm reception of the Dali
Lama and the Tibetan cause by both secular and religious leaders around the world, or the
expansion of humanitarian or environmental INGOs that are not explicitly religious (e.g.,
Amnesty International, Greenpeace), but that nonethless have dense network ties within religious
organizations. We expect these processes to continue. Just as European nations developed with
the help of printing of the vernaculars, new electronic communication technologies now facilitate
the rise of what Meyrowitz calls neo-feudal alliances on a global scale (1997:66).
Fractionating processes
Integrating processes are accompanied by equally pervasive processes, that revive or
reconstitute local relations and make personal and communal identity more important and
coherent. Such local relations and identities are certainly not new. But as modernity emerged in
the 19th century, nation-states came to possess the power and technologies of social control to
increasingly subjugate and assimilate them into national hegemonic structures. Evolving
globalization, particularly after the Cold War, revived and renewed ethnogenesis and the
indigenization of subnational groups. Paradoxically, proliferating state structures exerted less and
less control over loyalties, and subnational groups around the world began to reconstitute
themselves by becoming more visible, self conscious, and politically contentious. This is true in
the U.S. with the contemporary Mohawks, Delawares, Sioux, Navaho, Latinos, and Miami

Haitians, as elsewhere among Canadian and Mexican indigenous communities, Scotch

nationalists, East Timorians, Kurds, Basques, Berbers, Tamils, Sikhs, and others. They view
themselves as inhabiting larger states and cultures that are not their own. In the contemporary
world, war and political violence is more likely to be between subnational groups within states
than between nation states.
Turning to economic and political spheres, we note that while large oligopolistic firms and
multinationals receive the most public attention and visibility, small and entrepreneurial firms
never really disappeared. From the 1970s on they proliferated greatly, in part because of
downsizing and the decreasing labor intensity of economic production. Collectively, small firms
account for a significant part of America's net economic assets and employment. The large
Fortune 500 companies accounted for 20% of the total U.S. economy in the 1970s, and 10% of it
by the mid 1990s (Naisbett, 1994:7).
Both the American and the world economies are becoming bi-modal, economies of "elephants
and a multitude of ants." Looking closely at large and multinational firms, reveals not only
monstrous hierarchical bureaucratic organizations, but, increasingly, global firms constituted by
horizontally connected enterprise networks of consultants, brokers, subcontractors, and
subsidiary firms (Naisbett, 1994; Reich, 1991:87). In the sphere of electoral politics in the United
States, the decline in party loyalty and the rise of independent voters have been well documented
(Lowie and Ginsberg, 1994).
Americans have always been comparatively individualistic. Yet in the 1980s all national
surveys showed an increasing preoccupation with the self, and commentators noted (and often
bemoaned) excessive individualism and lack of commitment to organized religion, employers,
community, and the nation (Yankelovich, 1981:5; Bellah et al., 1985; Wuthnow, 1988). Growing
voluntarism meant that Americans felt increasingly free to choose among commitments of all
sorts, relational, familial, political, and religious. These fractionating processes reflect widely
recognized characteristics of religious change. They are read negatively as religious
privatization, but they can also be read as an increasing religious subjectivity and antinomian
spirituality that transcends organizational loyalties, doctrines, and barriers.
We earlier noted pervasive evidence of the growing openness to mystical religiosity and
contemplative styles, the popularity of religious and self-help books, tapes, religious music, and
the more recent fascination with angels (direct emissaries from the divine not requiring ecclesial
sanction). In America the retail market for religious/spiritual paraphernalia grew to $3 billion by
the 1990s, and religious fiction was the fastest growing genre of fiction (The Economist,
1998:65). Growing subjectivity, however, is not experienced or practiced in isolation, connected
only by market structures which exploit it. Wuthnow found that a significant number of
Americans participate regularly in small groups of all sorts, many of them religious in nature
(1994, see also Gallop and Brezilla, 1996). Even conservative religious groups that have the
most buoyant growth or staying power, according to poll data, adopt individualistic themes and
styles. Megachurches and most thriving religious organizations do so, almost irrespective of
doctrines, because they provide small groups aimed at niches for individual interests, problems,
and journeys (Thomas, 1996:293).

It is possible to understand the declining fates of Protestant mainline denominations as their

relative failure to provide such small groups and niches, rather than more conventionally in terms
of doctrinal deficiencies. And even within the vast multiplex world of American Roman
Catholicism, people now shop around for suitable parishes, priests, spiritual directors, and church
auxiliary organizations or movements. Research has documented growing mobilization of people
between religious groups, declines in interdenominational prejudice, and weakening internal
denominational ties (Wuthnow, 1988). What these processes mean, we think, are that
organizational forms and doctrinal content are becoming ever more secondary in terms of the
ways that religion is experienced and practiced. This may mean the decline of denominational
organizations, but not of the principle of denominationalism which emphasizes non-exclusivness
and voluntarism (Cassanova, 1994:54).
Institutional de-differentiation
If differentiation was a hallmark of early modernity, in later modernity the process in some
senses has reversed. Institutions and institutional culture are becoming less distinct, particularly
at macro levels. At elite levels, the global system is being organized and extended by
bureaucrats, technologists, political and business managers, marketers, strategic planners,
scientists, INGO mobilizers, and notable "public citizens" (e.g., Jimmy Carter or Mikhail
Gorbachev), who share common outlooks and strategic network connections--almost irrespective
of nationality or professional training.
Studies of occupational differentiation within the U.S. have reported similar declining social
significance of occupation per se (Sullivan, 1990). Whether one is a lawyer or not is still a
significant social fact, but it increasingly makes a difference whether one is a lawyer in a large
Pacific Rim investment firm in Los Angeles, or in a small town bank in Oklahoma. Or, to take a
more pertinent example, whether one is a sociologist working at a national research institution in
Washington and living on grants, or teaching at a community college in Pocatello! Similarly,
after several decades of understanding the differentiation of work and the family as a sine qua
non of emerging modernity, theorists and family sociologists have recently noted growing
reintegration and blurring boundaries between work and family. Hochschild, for instance, argues
that work is becoming a more family-like refuge, while maintaining families becomes more like
work (1997).
The thickening boundaries of social spheres and institutions that Foucault described in
emerging early modernity now seem to be thinning. In both popular consciousness and scholarly
discourse, awareness grows that spheres which used to be understood in separate institutional
"buckets," are increasingly connected and interpenetrating: politics and economics, church and
state relations, religion and health, family and media, religion and sports, and so on. Connections
grow and are more visible across social spheres, categories and cultures. Nevertheless, we are
aware of an interpretive problem: Is the situation actually changing, or are the limits of
differentiation now only more clear, both to people and social theory? We think both image and
reality are changing. To illustrate the latter, consider the public emergence of cross-sectoral
actors and organizations. The plethora of politically sanctioned PACs surely qualify, created in
the 1970s to replace lobbies that always had a shadowy and covert existence in the previous legal
environment emphasizing the separation of spheres.

Illustrations of more structurally dense and culturally sanctioned religion-polity cross-sectoral

links abound. In 1950 there were 16 major religious lobbies in Washington, D.C.; by 1985 there
were at least 80 (Herzke, 1988:5). Consider the pietistic and quietist 1950s, when all religious
judicatories entered into the public arena with great awkwardness and delicacy, and candidates
for office like John Kennedy had to explain why his religion would not be a problem. Then came
the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the presidential candidacies of Pat Buchannan
and Pat Robertson, the born-again Carter presidency, the religious base of the Reagan
Revolution, and the emergence of religious conservatives as a visible and publicly acknowledged
component of Republican Party electoral politics. On the other side of the religious and political
spectrum, consider the public advocacy of Jim Wallis, Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson.
The Integration of Idiosyncrasy
The most curious and seemingly paradoxical aspect of these dual processes is that across
whole units such as national institutions, social categories, and societies, the world and human
experience is becoming more alike, shared, and homogenous. But at the same time, members of
small-scale units or parts, like families, neighborhoods, or organizational departments, grow to
be more heterogeneous, idiosyncratic, and contentious. Macro worlds are becoming more
homogenous and shared, while in micro worlds persons experience more choice, variety, and
conflict. It becomes more difficult to predict behaviors based on place, demographics, class, or
gender categories, because the current sociocultural transformation integrates the members of all
groups into a relatively common sphere of experiential options--while providing a new
recognition of the special needs and idiosyncrasies of individuals. The world geo-political system
exhibits movement toward unification across national boundaries but splintering and retribalization within. Consider that:

in academia, while multidisciplinary perspectives and exchanges mushroom and

spread rapidly, communication between members of the same disciplines and
departments break down over squabbles about method, theory, and ideology;

Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics do not spend much time or energy
fighting with each other anymore; they are both too preoccupied with intense
internal conflicts;

most mainline Protestant denominations seem rent with schisms along

geographical (North-South) and theological (evangelical-liberal) fault lines;

the former Soviet republics engage in fratricidal prejudices and conflicts while
seeking union and rapprochement with the West;

in the traditional Palestinian-Jewish conflict, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin

bridged a huge gulf to start the peace process, but they were unable to deliver the
support of those people they represent, who remain splintered into many factions
(Meyrowitz, 1997:65-67).

In traditional and early modern social orders, conflicts between whole units (between
kingdoms, governments, churches, classes, and ethnic groups) took on relatively greater
importance and visibility. By contrast, in the late modern world the familiar become strange and
threatening, while the strange become more familiar and often friendly. Nothing more clearly
demonstrates the interacting character of the dual processes of intergation and fractionation.
Public religion and civil society
It is difficult to imagine macro and micro social formations without intervening middle-range
structural and cultural connections, such as those illustrated above as cross-sectoral links.
Vigorous and vital public religion is to be found not only among Protestant Evangelicals in the
U.S. and in the American Roman Catholic Conference of Bishops, but also among the national
Catholic conferences in Poland, Brazil, and Spain (Casanova, 1994). Outside of the Western
world, public religion is manifest certainly in India, where electoral politics was recently
dominated by a Hindu party; in Sri Lanka, where religious hostility is an axis of civil war; and
Japan, where the Sokka Gakki "Clean Government Party" never polls a majority but is always an
essential parliamentary coalition partner. Even more obvious is the revitalized public religion
sweeping the Islamic world (regarding the latter, see Moaddel, 1996).
In the West, however, if God is gaining political voice, it is a God who must speak in
nonsectarian and non-doctrinal language--as neosecularization theorists properly note (Yamane,
1997:118-119). Religious judicatories enter public and political life with greater vigor, voice, and
public sanction for doing so, but they succeed only by de-emphasizing the hallmark of religion as
it was understood in the early modern period: organizational exclusiveness and doctrinal
distinctiveness based on specifically religious beliefs. These early modern emphases enabled the
differentiation of bureaucratically organized religions (driven by expert knowledge) to become
distinct from other institutional spheres and competing religious judicatories.
But if the voice of religious actors and judicatories is not distinctively religious when they
enter public life with such vigor, how do they speak today? In a telling example, a Moral
Majority lobbyist reported to a researcher: "We can't afford to say, 'God settled it, that's it'"
(Hertzke, 1988:196). Furthermore, while Catholic laity largely approve of a politically engaged
American Bishops' conference and hierarchy, it is also abundantly clear that the hierarchy does
not control laity's social consciences. Laity resoundingly reject religious teachings on sexual
morality, particularly as embodied in the 1968 Humanae Vitae encyclical, and are not only ready
to disobey church doctrines, but demonstrate that in good conscience as Catholics they can
dissent while remaining faithful (D'Antonio et al., 1989; Casanova, 1994:205). More generally,
public religion has learned to prefer "rights talk" to "God talk" (Yamane 1997:118).
We noted above that transnationalization and public mobilization in civil society comes often
at the price of disestablishment, whereby religions relinquish claims to particularistic privilege.
Certainly, religious political mobilization is directed at containing the influence of strictly stateoriented secularist movements and parties. As Casanova suggests, however, speaking of
Catholicism: "The final Catholic recognition of the principle of religious freedom, together with
the Church's change of attitude towards the modern secular environment, has led to a
fundamental transformation of the Catholic churches. They have ceased being or aspiring to

become state compulsory institutions and have become free religious institutions of civil
society....As national Catholic churches transfer the defense of their particularist privileges to the
human person, "Catholicism becomes mobilized again, this time to defend modern universal
rights and the very right of a democratic civil society to exist" (Casanova, 1966:366). There are
large parts of the world where this disestablishment process seems not to apply: in Kabul or other
strongholds of Shia Islam, in Jersulaem, or in New Dehli, to the extent that conservative religious
parties maintain political and cultural hegemony. But we think these cases are hard to maintain
faced with the emergence of the late modern world order. The last two cases are particularly
problematic.
In the study of INGOs cited earlier, Boli and Thomas examined the emergence of a global
culture and particular values embodied in the multitude of existing INGOs. What they found
more analytically defines, we think, the contours of the voices of public religion, at least in the
West. These themes include: (1) universalism, (2) individualism, (3) rational voluntaristic
authority, (4) human purposes of rationalizing progress, and (5) world citizenship (Boli and
Thomas, 1997:180).
Observers of religious change often see it as part of
"Religion in America, and globalization processes or as the reconstitution of spirituality,
subjectivity, and small groups. Some miss or misunderstand the
perhaps much of the
reinvigorated forms of national public religion often
world, is not in a state of
connecting macro and micro processes. But others have
general decline or public
examined these in the U.S. and around the world with great
evisceration."
clarity (see Wald, 1997; Casanova, 1994). While vigorous reshaped forms of national public religion exist that utilize
churches and religious authorities, they speak with a curiously ambiguous and ambivalent voice.
They appeal to secular values and eschew much of the "God talk" that defined the social forms
and doctrines characteristic of confessional religion in the early modern period. To some
observers (e.g., Carter, 1993) this ambivalence is prima face evidence of the more general
decline or evisceration of public religion in America. We think they mistake transformation for
decline.
IN CONCLUSION
Religion in America, and perhaps much of the world, is not in a state of general decline or
public evisceration. Rather, those forms and structures identified most specifically with early
modernity are all being reshaped, challenged, and in some senses threatened by the processes of
emerging late modernity. These include bureaucracies in general, but more specifically nationstates, denominational and confessional religion, national corporations and cities, and distinct
scholarly disciplines. Nation-states, for example, find their sovereignty is being challenged both
from below and above, by pervasive alienation from the political process, new courtship rituals,
scientific advances that challenge authority, global scientific and cultural exchanges, and
international banking and money flows, as well their growing inability to control information and
secrecy due to the media and new communication technologies.

As Giddens succinctly observes, "in circumstance of accelerating global integration, the

nation-state has become too small for the big problems and too big for the small problems of
life" (1990:65). The same, we argue, could be said of the other systems emblematic of early
modernity, and specifically of its religious sociocultural forms. We have summarized
schematically parallel elements of the current transition by social sphere and levels of analysis in
Table 1.

TABLE 1: LARGE-SCALE SOCIOCULTURAL-CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS, by levels of

analysis and social spheres
Levels of Analysis
REVIVAL, RENEWAL
AND RECONSTITUTION.
Increasingly significant
MICRO relations and
subjective experience

AMBIVALENCE AND
TRANSFORMATION.
Declining effectiveness and
loyalty to NATIONAL level
organizations and culture

EMERGENCE AND
ABSTRACTION. Growing
significant and important
global and cross-boundary
MACRO relations

Economics. Increasing self

employment,
entrepreneurialism, strategic
networks

Relative weakening and

disadvantage of national
corporations, markets, labor
and capital

Growing dominance of
multinational and global
corporations, business
networks, and markets

Politics. Increasingly
independent voters, and
contention for power by subnational groups

Compromised effectiveness
of the nation-state and
political parties, growing
privatization of public
functions. Declining trust in
the nation-state

Increasingly important
global and regional
networks of nations and
multilateral organizations

Community and culture

Growing importance and
visibility of local
community and civic
organizations,
New ethnogenesis,
proliferation of civil society
organizations, and small
group participation

Religion. Growing
privatization of experience,

Growing power and

Relatively weakening power hegemony of world cities.
of communities and urban
Emergence of global culture
areas with national ties and and social movements
markets,
Growing importance and
Declining legitimacy and
visibility of international
trust in most national-level
non governmental
institutions, and increasing
organizations (INGOs), and
conservatism
growing global and "crossboundary" culture
Weakening loyalty to
denominations, traditional

emphasis on spiritually and

mysticism, selectivity,
voluntarism, and
participation in small "niche
groups," even within larger
organizations
Religious conflict
increasingly salient when
connected to sub-national
group conflicts.

religious practices, and

belief in distinctive
theologies and confessional
statements,

Public religion is mobilized

and vigorous, but expressed
in terms of secular values

Growing ecumenism,
intergroup tolerance, and
mobilization across
boundaries.

Growing communion and

confessional relations
between denominations;
global religious INGOs.

Thus, denominational, bureaucratic, and confessional religion appears to weaken. In sum, it

seems to us that religion is being revitalized and re-constituted at the micro level, new and
historically unprecedented phenomena are emergent at the most macro (global) levels, while the
connecting (national, new "mid-range") forms and structures continue to be important, but are
being significantly re-shaped and transformed in ways that some take as decline. Change on
these three levels interacts and proceeds at a very slow rate; the sociocultural equivalent of
glacial change. These processes will inexorably end much of religion as we know it, but not
religion.

REFERENCES

Ammerman, Nancy
1994 "Accounting for Chistian Fundamentalisms: Social Dynamics and Rhetorical Strategies." in
Martin Marty and Scott Appleby (eds.) Accounting for Fundamentalisms. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.

Barna, George
1996 The Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators. Dallas, TX: Word Publishing.

Beck , Ulrich
1986 Risikogesellshaft: Auf dem Web in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Bellah, Robert, Richard Marsden, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton
1985 Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.

Beyer, Peter F.
1990 "Privatization and the Public Influence of Relgion and global Society." Pp 373- 376 in
Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture. London: Sage.

Boli, John, and George M. Thomas

1997 "World Cultures in the World Polity: A Century of International Non-governmental
Organization." American Sociological Review 62: 171-190.

Carter, Stephen
1993 The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics trivialize Devotion . New York:
Basic Books.

Casanova, Jose

1994 Public Religions and the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chaves, Mark
1994 "Secularization as declining religious authority." Social Forces 72:749-74.

D'Antonio, William, James Davidson, Dean Hoge, and Ruth Wallace

1989 American Catholic Laity in a Changing Church. Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward.

Della Cava, Ralph

1992 "Vatican Policy, 1978-1990: An Updated Overview," Social Research 59 (1): 169-199.

Dobbelaere, Karel
1989 "The secularization of society? Some methodological suggestions" Pp 27-43 in Hadden and
Shupe (eds.) Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsidered. New York: Paragon House.

Durkheim, Emile
1912/1965 Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.

The Economist
1998 "Christian Retailing: Made in Heaven." The Economist. May 23-29: 65.

Feathersone, Mike, and Scott Lasch

1995 "Globalization, Modernity, and the Spatialization of Social Theory." Pp. 1-24 in
Featherston, Lasch and Robertson (eds.), Global Modernities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Foucault, Michael
1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. translated by Alan Sheridan. New York:
Pantheon.

Freud, Sigmund
1957 The Future of an Illusion.Garden City, NY: Anchor.

Gallup, George, Jr., and Robert Bezilla

1996 "Small groups enhance religious experience," Nebraska Messenger, a Publication of the
Nebraska United Methodist Conference. 35, 9:1.

Giddens, Anthony
1990 The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
1991 Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.

Hadden, Jeffrey
1987 "Toward desacralizing secularization theory." Social Forces 65:587-611.

Hammond, Phillip (ed.)

1985 The Sacred in a Secular Age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Hertzke, Allen
1988 Representing God in Washington: The role of religious lobbies in the American polity.
Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.

Hocschild, Arlie R.
1997 The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York:
Metropolitan books.

Hoge, Dean, Benton Johnson, and Donald Luidens

1994 Vanishing Boundaries. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press.

Innis, Harold
1950 Empire and Communications. Oxford University Press.

Lechner, Frank J.
1996 "Secularization in the Netherlands?" Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35: 252264.

Lowie, Theodore J., and Benjamin Ginsberg,

1994 American Government: Freedom and Power. 3rd edition. New York: W. W. Norton.

Marquand, Robert
1996 "Worship shift: American Seek Feeling of 'Awe' ," Christian Science Monitor. May 26: 1.

Marx, Karl, and Fredrick Engels

1848/1955 The Communist Manifesto (S. Beer, Ed.). New York: Appleton Century- Crofts.

Meyrowitz, Joshua
1997 "Shifting Worlds of Strangers: Medium Theory and Changes in 'Them' versus 'Us' ."
Sociological Inquiry 67: 59-71.
1991 The Changing Global Landscape. Atlanta, GA: Quest.

Moaddel, Mansoor
1996 "The Social Bases and Discursive Context of the Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism: The
Cases of Iran and Syria." Sociological Inquiry 66:330-355.

Naisbett, John
1994 Global Paradox. New York: Avon Books.

Olsen, Marvin E.
1991 Societal Dynamics: Exploring Macrosociology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Ong, Walter J.
1977 Interfaces of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Parsons, Talcott
1963 "Christainity and Modern Industrial Society," Pp. 233-270 in Edward Tiryakian (ed.),
Sociological theory, Values, and Sociocultural Change. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

Princeton Religion Research Center

1988 The Unchurched American....Ten Years Later.
1996 Religion in America: 1996 Report.
1997a Emerging Trends. 21 (April).
1997b Emerging Trends. 21 (May).

Reich, Robert B.
1991 The Work of Nations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Robertson, Roland
1990 "Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept" Theory, Culture
and Society 7: 15-30.

Roof, Wade Clark

1993 A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation. New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Roof, Wade Clark, and William McKinney

1987 American Mainline Religion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Smelser, Neil J.
1966 "The Modernization of Social Relations." Pp. 110-121 in Weiner (ed.), Modernization: The
Dynamics of Growth. New York: Basis Books

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell

1963 The Meaning and end of Religion. New York: New American Library.

Stark, Rodney, and Laurence R. Iannaccone

1996 "Response to Lechner." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35:265- 271.

Sullivan, Teresa
1990 "The Decline of Occupations: Redefining the Labor Force." in Hallinan, Klein, and Glass
(eds.), Change in Societal Institutions. New York: Plenum Press.

Thomas, George M.
1996 "Cultural Analysis of Religious Change." Sociological Inquiry 66:285-302.

Tylor, Edward B.
1871 Primitive Culture. London: John Murray.

Wald, Kenneth D.
1997 Religion and Politics in the United States (3rd edition). Washington, D.C.: Congressional
Quarterly Press.

Weber, Max
1905/1958 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribners.

Weeks, John R.
1994 Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Wilson, Bryan
1966 Religion in SecularSociety. London: Watts.

Wuthnow, Robert
1988 The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
----------1994 Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America's New Quest for
Community. New York: Free Press.

Yankelovich, Daniel
1981 New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down. New York:
Random House.

Yamane, David
1997 "Secularization on Trial." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36: 109- 122.