The strange world of world religion Tom Smith

For those of us of a certain age, it is hard not to believe that the world is getting more and more secular and eventually everybody will be some sort of progressive atheist.  I would sometimes tease LWJ by calling this "the global  matriarchal termite society of the future." Now sociological evidence suggests secularization is not triumphant after all.  In terms of global numbers, the world seems to be getting more religious and more Christian as well.  The sort of Christianity that is spreading is conservative, supernaturalist, often evangelical. If I read this blog post by Peter Berger correctly, he says Africa is now a majority Christian continent, which I find shocking.  Christianity is now strongly weighted to the global South, presenting the prospect of a reevangelization of the North by the South, which you can already see happening in parts of San Diego.

It seems like there is some sort of Great Awakening going on in Africa.  It's being "burned over" as they used to say about the parts of the US through which revivals swept in the nineteenth century.

On a somewhat related note . . . MRI study suggests Apple products manage to activate same areas of brain in fans that religious images do in the religious.

Comments

[Dan Simon]

I think of this another way: religion has traditionally served as a kind of social glue, binding communities of both fervent and indifferent believers with its rituals and traditions. In the modern world, however, this function has become much less important, as technology and political institutions have provided the means to bind people of different faiths and even different cultures sufficiently for economic, social and cultural life to flourish. The result is that religion itself has become far more "pure": its adherents are (limited to) true believers, and its practices center more on affirmation of belief than on, say, community solidarity or cultural continuity.

The parallel resurgences of Evangelical Protestantism, Salafist Islam and Haredi Judaism are all examples of this shift from religion-as-social-institution to religion-as-passionate-belief-system. All of these movements are marked not just by intense, personal belief, but also by a kind of hostility to the secular world and its compromises. I predict that the tensions and polarizations between religious and secular factions will only increase as time goes on, and the more communitarian, tradition-oriented religious movements (Catholicism, Sufi Islam, and mainstream Orthodox Judaism) continue to decline.

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