Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms?

This article proposes a general model of analysis of the relations between religion and modernity, where modernity is conceived as a new axial age. Modernity appears to have four principal types of religious effects: decline, adaptation and reinterpretation, conservative reaction, and innovation. It...

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Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Lambert, Yves (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
Vérifier la disponibilité: HBZ Gateway
Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Publié: 1999
Dans: Sociology of religion
Année: 1999, Volume: 60, Numéro: 3, Pages: 303-333
Accès en ligne: Volltext (JSTOR)
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Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
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Résumé:This article proposes a general model of analysis of the relations between religion and modernity, where modernity is conceived as a new axial age. Modernity appears to have four principal types of religious effects: decline, adaptation and reinterpretation, conservative reaction, and innovation. It produces secularization as well as new religious forms, in particular: worldliness, dehierarchization of the human and the divine, self-spirituality, parascientificity, pluralism, and mobility. Two thresholds of secularization are distinguished: (1) autonomization in relation to a religious authority and (2) abandonment of any religious symbol. I conclude that the first threshold has largely been crossed, but not the second one, except in some domains (science, economics) or for only a minority of the population. This is because of the adaptation of the great religions to modernity, of fundamentalist reactions, and of the spread of new religious forms.
ISSN:1759-8818
Contient:Enthalten in: Sociology of religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.2307/3711939