Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
Summary
This book begins at the point where my Religion and Advanced Industrial Societies (1989) ended. My main argument there was that religion had been at the very centre of the first generation of sociological and anthropological classics but that, over the course of the twentieth century, it had moved into a marginal position. I offered two explanations of the processes that led to religion's insulation against, and isolation from, the principal currents of social scientific thinking. The first explanation was based on some aspects of the ways in which religion had been conceptualised as an object of study. The second relied on changes that had taken place in what counted as religion. My conclusion was that
Religion has come adrift from its former points of anchorage but is no less potentially powerful as a result. It remains a potent cultural resource or form which may act as the vehicle of change, challenge, or conservation. Consequently, religion has become less predictable. The capacity to mobilize people and material resources remains strong, but it is likely to be mobilized in unexpected places and in ways which may be in tension with ‘establishment’ practices and public policy … The deregulation of religion is one of the hidden ironies of secularization. It helps to make religion sociologically problematic in ways which are virtually inconceivable in the terms of the sociological classics.
(Beckford 1989: 170, 172)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social Theory and Religion , pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003