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

TLDR

Modernity produces four main religious effects: decline, adaptation, conservative reaction, and innovation. The article proposes a general model analyzing the relationship between religion and modernity, treating modernity as a new axial age. The model identifies secularization and new religious forms—such as worldliness, dehierarchization, self‑spirituality, parascientificity, pluralism, and mobility—and distinguishes two secularization thresholds: autonomization from religious authority and abandonment of symbols. The study finds that the first secularization threshold has largely been crossed, while the second remains largely unmet except in specific domains, owing to religious adaptation, fundamentalist reactions, and the spread of new religious forms.

Abstract

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.