Public Religions in the Modern World

Required reading for final class discussion in Religion & Globalization seminar.

Bibliographic

 * Casanova, Jose. Public Religions in the Modern World. University of Chicago Press. Chicago & London. 1994.

Secularization, Enlightenment and Modern Religion

 * abandonment of secularization theory (11)
 * among many definitions, secularization was used to describe the transfer of landholdings of churches and monasteries to the state (13) -> transfer from religious sphere to secular sphere
 * conceptions of division of the world: religious vs. secular, but also heaven & earth then religious and secular
 * Weber's image of breaking the walls of the monastery as the act of secularization (15)
 * Secularization theory almost completely uncontested (17)
 * "main fallacy in the theory of secularization ... is the confusion of historical processes of secularization proper with the alleged and anticipated consequences which those processes were supposed to have on religion" (19)
 * assumption that religion in the modern world was declining towards zero (25)

Private and Public Religions

 * "religion was progressively forced to withdraw from the modern secular state and the modern capitalist economy and to find refuge in the newly found private sphere" (40)
 * but also simultaneously a "depriviatization" as well (41)
 * " individual mysticism vs. denominationalism" (52)

Spain: From State Church to Disestablishment

 * Historical arc from RECONQUISTA to Franco winning over anti-religion modernists in the Spanish Civil War
 * victory of "catholic" spain over "other spain"
 * but with fall of Franco and national reconciliation, Church loses power and "modern" finally re-enters (89-91)

Poland: From Church of the Nation to Civil Society

 * Catholic vs. communist
 * nation & identity

Brazil: From Oligarchic Church to People's Church

 * From catholic church to "quasi-Catholic" popular religiosity autonomously from clerical control (115)

Evangelical Protestantism: From Civil Religion to Fundamentalist Sect to New Christian Right

 * Secularization of the State

Catholicism in the United States

 * Not much new here

Deprivation of Modern Religion

 * "the thesis of religious decline had its origins in the enlightenment critique of religion" (214)
 * "it very simple terms it could be said that the more religions resist the process of modern differentiation, that is, secularization in the first sense, the more they will tend in the long run to suffer religious decline, that is, secularization in the second sense" (214)


 * Typologies of Public Religion (218-219)
 * 1) Established State Churches -> Catholic Church in Spain
 * 2) political -> mobilization of Spanish Catholicism against liberal revolution
 * 3) civil society intervention -> anti-abortion in the US


 * Religions as "public" (219)
 * 1) premodern medieval sense of "representative publicness" -> state leader as religion leader (UK)
 * 2) administrative appendage of state -> lutherans in scandinavia
 * 3) take over of state by religion -> shi'ite


 * "Western modernity is at a crossroads. If it does not enter into a creative dialogue with the other, with those traditions that are challenging its identity, it will most likely triumph. But it may end up being devoured by the inflexible, inhuman logic of its own creations. It would be profoundly ironic if, after all the beatings it has received from modernity, religion could somehow unintentionally help modernity save itself." (234)

From readings At Cambridge