The A — Z Of The Metamorphoses Of Religious Beliefs

There are still thirty years, almost everyone bet on the end of religious beliefs. If religious institutions have suffered a sharp decline, religion has rebounded in new forms. At the dawn of the third millennium, the collective experience of the sacred and the religious imagination is taking new paths.

• Secularization. For Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and most sociologists of the turn of the century, the decline of religion promised to be irreversible. Until the mid-1960s, it was on this great paradigm of secularization that religious sociology was built. In France, for example, religious sociologists such as Gabriel Le Bras have extensively studied the decline in religious beliefs and the social hold of Catholicism. What are the elements that characterize secularization?

1. An irresistible movement of rationalization of social life and of "disenchantment with the world" (M. Weber). The social shrinkage of religion and the decline of great religious institutions and religious beliefs are the reverse of the process of the expansion of science.
2. The differentiation of institutions, that is to say, the clear separation of the political, economic, and religious spheres. In France in particular, the law of separation of Church and State of 1905 accompanied the rise of secularism. Societies have "come out of religion" in so far as the spheres of human activity are now independent of religious norms and codes (1).
3. A process of "worldliness", a term that designates the diversion of spiritual concerns for material concerns. The gradual disappearance of the clergy accompanies the regular erosion of practices. 60% of French people continue to declare themselves Catholic (against 80% twenty years ago), but this is more a connection to a common cultural fund than a personal involvement: only 2% of French people under 25 years old go to Sunday mass regularly. Sociologists have noted the shift from "confessing Christianity" (regular practice, adherence to the Creed) towards "cultural Christianity" (general common Christian heritage) and secular humanism.

Established religions continue to lose their influence. They have become incapable of controlling behavior and of regulating the religious field. Secularization is indeed a major trend, which was accentuated at the end of the 1960s (2).

• Redial. However, secularization does not mean the end of religiosity, quite the contrary, because religion resurfaces in deregulated forms. The Paradox of modernity: in societies "out of religion", beliefs proliferate. The disqualification of the great instituted religions leads to a recomposition of the feeling of the religious beliefs. Religiosity becomes free, fluid, and diffuse. It spreads "in disorder".

Researchers have therefore dissociated the question of the decline of the great religions from the new place of beliefs in societies. As an object of scientific investigation, religion has been rehabilitated. Contemporary research crosses sociological and anthropological approaches. Analyzes of religion focus above all on the modalities of believing rather than on the content of beliefs.

The striking phenomenon of religious modernity resides in the emergence, from the end of the 1960s, of new religious movements (NMR), linked in part to the movement of counter-culture. These effervescent religious phenomena, these "parallel" beliefs, and practices form a vast "mystical-esoteric nebula" (Françoise Champion): astrology, clairvoyance, reincarnation, telepathy, near-death experience, spiritualist practices, syncretic groups of oriental origin (neo -Buddhism, neo-Hinduism), New Age, etc. These movements juxtapose or combine spiritual, magical, therapeutic, psychological, or personal, or professional development registers. Modernity is experiencing the resurgence of emotional sources that were believed to have disappeared (sects and NMR), but also the re-mobilization of belief in the great historical religions, with for example the rapid expansion of charismatic, Pentecostal, or evangelical movements. We are also witnessing the radicalization of certain religious movements: a return to the Torah for Judaism, Muslim fundamentalism, etc.

Is the sacred now embodied everywhere: football matches, political movements, rave parties…? To identify what is religious and what does not, Danièle Hervieu-Léger insists, for example, on the relationship between religion and memory, on the awareness of belonging to a believing lineage (3).

The individualization and subjectivization of beliefs and practices are the salient features of this religious modernity. Today’s societies are dominated by individualism. More and more, it is the experience and wishes of the actors that produce a religious identity. "Truth" is a personal and religious initiative that belongs to individuals. We now speak of "demand", "quest", "spiritual research", religion functioning as a "great personal story". Stakeholders are increasingly rejecting restrictive systems set up outside of them. Religion is experienced as a means of personal development. It allows one to construct oneself as a subject of one’s existence (Alain Touraine). Some authors note a decline in the level of transcendence: contemporary religious beliefs are increasingly oriented towards the world below.

In the organization of religious groups and networks, personal charisma seems to prevail over functional charisma: a new group is formed around a leader offering an innovative religious good (like Taisen Deshimaru, at the origin of the establishment of Zen Buddhism in Europe). Long-term obedience to a single authority (guru, charismatic priest, pastor) becomes improbable. Religion no longer works on an exclusive basis but an alternative basis. There is the versatility of religious beliefs and obedience, increased mobility. The "autonomous believing subjects", the "wandering believers" circulate from one affiliation to another, deviate from the old model of the faithful, become "spiritual consumers" (4).

Everyone can therefore find spiritual shoes to suit them. It is enough to draw on a symbolic stock, in various traditions, then to recycle elements of it. This personal "tinkering" leads to an "à la carte" religious beliefs to a "minimum creed", sometimes to a "pocket religion" (term used for the New Age). Anthropologists have also identified new forms of ritual creativity: either the ex nihilo invention of rites of passage responding to deficiencies (mourning rites for patients who have died of AIDS in California), or the adaptation of existing rituals, often in the fashion customization of the ritual, leaving free recourse to the creativity of the officiants.

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