Organized Religions in Our Global Modernity

Extract

Social scientists and political philosophers who assumed that modernity would become progressively secular may have got it wrong. Current history shows us that modern societies, including states, do not inevitably grow more secular. Nor are organized religions inevitably confined to narrower and narrower domains as modernity proceeds. In fact, the current period makes legible the variability of the spaces (institutional, ideational, tactical) of organized religions over time and their expansion into domains once off-limits to religion, domains as diverse as the liberal state, global finance, and cosmopolitanism. Indeed, new types of globality and cosmopolitanism are becoming visible in, and arising from, organized religions. They can coexist with regressive forces in those religions, signaling the complexity of the religions' organizational architecture.