Resurgimiento De La Religion

THE RESURGENCE OF RELIGION
-- A CHALLENGE FOR A SECULAR SELF-INTERPRETATION OF MODERNITY?


I. What does the resurgence of religionreligión mean for a largely secularized society?

(1) Fromthe time of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, the thesis that there is a close interrelation between the advancing modernizations of society and a expanding secularization of the consciusness of thepopulation long remained uncontroversial. This thesis rest on three considerations:
First, progress is science and technology promotes an anthropocentric understanding of the ‘disenchanted’ world becausethe totally of empirical states and events can be causally explained; and the corresponding humanism cannot be easily reconciled with theorcentric and cosmocentric worldviews. Second, with thefunctional differenciation of social subsystems, the churches and other religious organizations lose their control over law, politics, public welfare, culture, education and sciencie; they restrictthemselves to their proper function af administering the means of salvation, make the exercise of religion into a private affair and in general, lose public influence and relevance. Finally, the developmentfrom agrarian through industrial to postindustrial societies leads to higher levels of welfare and greater social security; and with the easing risks, and thus a growing existential security, there is adecrease in the deep-seated need for a practice that promises to cope with uncontrolled contingencies through fatih in a ‘higher’ or cosmic power. In fact, the religious ties of citizens in theaffluent European societies and in Canada, Australia and New Zealand have come gradually – and sice the end Wolrd War II, dramatically – weaker.
Among the expert community of sociologists, however, thesecularization thesis has become a topic controversy over the past two decades or more. This thesis opene to the suspicion that it merely transformed the cultural commonplaces of the Western...