Reshaping the Sociology of Religion: Globalisation,Spirituality and the Erosion of the Social

Introduction – the age of the handbook

Handbooks, Companions and Readers have come to dominate much of the mainstream academic and commercial activity of the major publishing houses. As students depend more and more on the Internet as the preferred tool of study, the academic monograph struggles to survive, whereas it is assumed that handbooks and companions will at least achieve reasonable library sales. The modern publishing market is now if anything over-supplied by the substantial, multi-authored, comprehensive handbook and therefore the Sage Handbook of the Sociology of Religion competes for example with The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion (2001) which offered full coverage of the classical tradition with wide-ranging chapters by Bryan Wilson, David Martin, Richard Fenn, and Thomas Luckmann. It also covered much of the important work being done in contemporary sociology by James Beckford, Steve Bruce, Roger O'Toole, Grace Davie and others.

In this competitive market, what should a handbook of the sociology of religion attempt to achieve? First it should attempt to convey the principal achievements of a field which involves a delicate choice between established topics and issues that may in the long run turn out to be merely fashionable. Second it needs to strike a balance between the dominant American tradition which is often inward looking and the rest of the world where many of the important changes in religion are taking place such as the religious revivals in post-Communist societies. Third it needs to establish some interdisciplinary parameters since many of the innovative theoretical developments in the study of religion are taking place in philosophy, history and anthropology. Finally, it needs to address problems in both epistemology and methods in the study of religion and religions. These four tasks or objectives should establish why the sociology of religion has a distinctive contribution to make over and against for example anthropology, religious studies and history.

The Sage Handbook goes a long way to fulfilling these criteria. In this review article I propose to consider the history of the handbook of the sociology of religion as a guide to the intellectual status of the discipline of sociology before coming to a more concentrated and critical assessment of the Sage Handbook. The point of this exercise is to note both the decline of the subfield of the study of religion from its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s and its contemporary but problematic revival today as sociologists come to reject the secularisation thesis, paying more attention to the comparative study of religion. Unsurprisingly Islam, fundamentalism, political religion and religious nationalism have become dominant topics of this intellectual revival.

The Sociology of Religion – general issues

Handbooks in the sociology of religion typically appear to assume that the sociology of religion is distinctive and that a sharp and unambiguous division exists between it and the anthropology of religion, but such a division appears to be especially inappropriate here. Where would Durkheim have been without The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (Spencer and Gillen, 1997 [1904])? Where would the sociology of religion be without Clifford Geertz, Ernest Gellner and Mary Douglas? To take a contemporary example, one of the most influential commentaries on modern Christianity has been undertaken from a decisively anthropological perspective to understand Christian belief as the belief of the Other (Asad, 1991). An evaluation of the status of a sociology handbook, at least in the field of the study of religion, has to consider this strange separation of disciplines in the modern university and in these terms we should compare the Sage Handbook with the excellent A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion (Lambeck, 2002). While most handbooks of the sociology of religion tend to be rich in the treatment of Weber, Durkheim and Simmel, I seriously doubt that one can grasp the nature of religion as a generic topic of inquiry without taking seriously the legacy of Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz or Melford Spiro. The absence of anthropology from both the Sage Handbook and the Blackwell Companion contrasts sharply with the approach of Roland Robertson who, in his Penguin readings in Sociology of Religion (1969), managed to incorporate Mary Douglas, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Ernest Gellner, Clifford Geertz, Peter Worsley, J.W. Fernandez and G. Lienhardt.

I doubt also that one can study the sociology of religion without some engagement with both theology and philosophy. To take some prominent examples, the study of secularization is seriously impoverished when separated from recent philosophical debate about the intellectual authority of religious belief systems in for example Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo's Religion (1998). The recent work of philosophers and theologians as illustrated in Radical Orthodoxy (Milbank, Pickstock and Ward, 1999) should also be seriously discussed by sociologists of religion.

The themes of contemporary sociology of religion include resacralisation, fundamentalism, and religious revivalism as illustrated not only by Islam but by Pentecostalism and charismatic movements. As a result the study of religion, like the study of society more generally, has abandoned the idea of a unitary process of modernisation by accepting the idea of ‘multiple modernities’ and by stressing the survival of local cultures against the juggernaut of globalisation (Eisenstadt, 2000). The idea that secularization is an inevitable outcome of modernisation has been challenged by contemporary research and criticism (Smith, 2008). We might argue that a unitary theory of modernization has been replaced by a macro-theory of globalization which in the concept of ‘glocalisation’ at least recognises the diverse and divergent interactions between the global and the local (Niezen, 2004). However, one major weakness of much modern sociology of religion, including the usual range of textbooks, is the strange neglect of globalization. One obvious exception was The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions by Mark Juergensmeyer (2006). While Juergensmeyer's Handbook was in many ways comprehensive, it failed to deal adequately with the history of Christian missions from the late eighteenth century onwards and the collection did not engage with political religions, nationalism and the clash of civilizations. In this regard, James Beckford's Social Theory & Religion (2003) made an important contribution to the field, providing an entire chapter on ‘Globalisation and Religion’ and in the introduction to the Sage Handbook he correctly notes that since the mid-1980s religion ‘presents major challenges and opportunities to social scientific explorations of globalisation’ (Beckford and Demerath, 2007: 7).

Modern handbooks illustrate an important development in the sociology of religion from a concentration on institutions such as the church-sect typology (Wilson, 1967) to a focus on so-called de-institutionalised or post-institutional forms of popular religion which have been variously described as ‘implicit’ (Bailey, 1990) or ‘new age’ (Heelas, 1996). The preferred term that has recently pre-occupied sociologists of religion is ‘spirituality’ in which individuals ‘pick and mix’ their religious beliefs and practices in a manner that is perfectly consistent with the fluid subjectivities of modern society. There is said therefore to be a divorce, especially in contemporary America, between religion and spirituality (Cimino and Lattin, 1998; Fuller, 2001). The result has been much attention to this new movement and to youth cultures (Bender, 2003) rather than to religious organizations. Modern spirituality illustrates an argument about the de-institutionalized character of contemporary religion put forward originally by Grace Davie (1994) that religiosity involves ‘believing without belonging’.

Because the church-sect typology from Ernst Troeltsch onwards reflected the history of Christianity, it was not particularly useful in the analysis of non-western religions and hence the departure from organisational analysis has also been associated with a greater emphasis on the comparative sociology of religion. This trend has been reinforced by the contemporary focus on Islam – a religion in which there has been historically greater emphasis on local consensus and devolved authority rather than a centralised system of religious power. The crisis of authority in modern Islam is therefore all the more critical (Reid and Gilsenan, 2007; Volpi and Turner, 2007). Furthermore, the distinction between church and state or the Augustinian separation of the two cities was not characteristic of early Islam in which the caliphate combined the religious and the secular as a defence against communal feuding. In the Sage Handbook, there is no particularly strong emphasis on the comparative sociology of religion, but Beckford and Demerath have successfully avoided too much concentration on the whole legacy of research on denominationalism that at one stage preoccupied both American and British sociologists.

A perennial problem for handbooks of the sociology of religion has been how to incorporate a comprehensive analysis of religion in the United States without ignoring the rest of the world. American religiosity has been a persistent focus of the sociology of religion for various reasons. First, as a matter of fact contemporary sociology of religion has been dominated by American sociologists – William Bainbridge, Robert Bellah, Peter L. Berger, Charles Glock, Gerhard Lenski, Talcott Parsons, W. Clark Roof, Rodney Stark, Guy E. Swanson and J. Milton Yinger. Second, American society has provided an important contrast to northern Europe since the time of Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom. With the separation of church and state, American religious denominations flourished and hence there is an important argument regarding ‘American exceptionalism’. Third, a number of influential theories of modern religion have emerged from this specifically American experience of religion and religious organizations such as the civil religion debate which is closely associated with Bellah and explored supremely well in The Robert Bellah Reader (Bellah and Tipton, 2006), the idea of spiritual market places (Berger and Roof), the economic models of religious behaviour (Bainbridge, Stark and Iannaccone) and finally the idea of new spiritualities (Roof and others). The recent publication of Parsons's American Society (2007) served to remind us of the centrality of religion to the sociological understanding of American society as such.

The Sage Handbook – a critical assessment

Given the dominance of American sociology in the field of the sociology of religion, it is difficult for any handbook to achieve a successful balance. Too much emphasis on American sociologists leads to an unfortunate marginalisation of the work of European social scientists such as the tradition associated with George Bataille (1992) or the more recent work of Daniele Hervieu-Leger's Religion as a Chain of Memory (2000) or Steve Bruce's Politics & Religion (2003) or David Martin's Pentecostalism (2002) which is one of the most influential accounts of globalisation. There is also in general a strange neglect of the work of Niklas Luhmann whose Religious Dogmatics and the Evolution of Society (1984) offered a unique theoretical understanding of religious communication. In this respect the Sage Handbook contrasts decisively with Norman Birnbaum and Gertrud Lenzer's Sociology and Religion (1969) which drew overwhelmingly from a European tradition of social philosophy including Nietzsche, Troeltsch, Mannheim, Goldmann, Adorno and Schelsky. The Sage Handbook achieves a reasonable balance through a catholic selection of authors and the section headings which focus on themes rather than on societies. In this respect Beckford and Demerath have adopted a strategy very different from for example Louis Schneider who in Religion, Culture & Society (1964) devoted a whole section (or eight readings) on ‘the religious scene in the United States’. The Sage Handbook also avoids excessive concentration on New Religious Movements which had been such a prominent feature of earlier readers such as Lorne L. Dawson (2003) Cults and New Religious Movements. A Reader.

Most textbooks on globalisation ignore religion – for example Saskia Sassen's A Sociology of Globalization (2007). Most existing texts that do examine religion and globalization tend implicitly to conflate the study of global religion and the comparative sociology of religion. The Sage Handbook has a concluding section on ‘Case Studies from around the World’ but the result is somewhat ad hoc and partial – official religions in China, central and eastern Europe after Communism, Judaism and Israel, state Shinto in post-war Japan, and Mexico. What happened to Africa, Asia and Latin America? A more satisfactory approach can be illustrated by Stephen Sharot's A Comparative Sociology of World Religions (2001) which, employing Max Weber's notions of elites and virtuoso religion, manages to provide a more coherent and systematic approach. In the Sage Handbook, Sharot does however give a very creditable account of Judaism (chapter 32).

With what then is the Sage Handbook competing? The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion (Fenn, 2001) was divided into three sections –Classical and Contemporary Theory, Contemporary Trends in the Relation of Religion to Society, and the Sociology of Religion and Related Areas. The scope of the Sage Handbook is much greater and it covers a deeper set of empirical issues. Furthermore, the Blackwell Companion has relatively little comparative sociology and did not, perhaps for rather obvious reasons, deal with resacralisation, globalization, post-modernity or violence which are the topics that have most exercised contemporary sociology of religion. Its main focus on inter-disciplinarity was, somewhat unusually, between sociology and theology. By contrast, the Sage Handbook does not take inter-disciplinarity as a dominant focus. However, some of the more interesting criticisms of the sociological treatment of religion have come from philosophy and theology –for example John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1990).

Although Beckford and Demerath offer some useful guidelines to social theory in their opening section on ‘Theories and Concepts’, there are some strange gaps in the Handbook as a whole. There is only one reference to Talcott Parsons and yet it is arguable that Parsons's essays on religion and his notion of ‘the expressive revolution’ have been deservedly influential (Robertson and Turner, 1991). As I have noted there is almost no engagement with the work of Niklas Luhmann's controversial theory of the nature of religion as a system of communication and there is little coverage of the recent debate regarding the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu to modern work on religion (Rey, 2004). Although the issue of postmodernism and religion is raised, there is little serious attention to for example the work of Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo (Zabala, 2004) or to Hent de Vries's work on Religion and Violence (2002). There is also no significant engagement with feminist critiques of religion. Linda Woodhead provides a comprehensive chapter on ‘Gender differences in religious practice and significance’ but there is no attempt to engage directly with feminist theory or theology such as one finds in Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray or Carol P. Christ (Anderson and Clack, 2004). These are of course especially potent in the case of modern Islam (Mernissi, 1991). Underpinning the current debates about ‘political theology’, ‘religious nationalism’, ‘political Islam’ and ‘religion and violence’ is a deeper question about the nature of secularism. While the Sage Handbook has an excellent section devoted to the whole issue of ‘Religion and Politics’ and includes a chapter by Demerath on ‘Secularization and Sacralization Deconstructed and Reconstructed’ to some extent the Handbook overlooks a more fundamental question about what secularism is. There appears to be, especially in political theory, a widespread assumption that the liberal model of secularism dating from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 is in crisis, because assumptions about the privatisation of conscience and the clear separation of religion and politics no longer holds. A modern handbook of the sociology of religion needs to look more determinedly at the range of concepts that grew up around liberal tolerance – secular, secularism, secularity, secularisation and laicity. The notion of the secular has a complex history from St Augustine's idea of the two cities through John Locke's vision of religious tolerance to Richard Hooker's defence of Anglicanism as a national religion, to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. It has of course also exercised the minds of modern thinkers such as Harvey Cox in his The Secular City (1967). Perhaps the most compelling examination of these issues has been undertaken by Charles Taylor in two significant works – Varieties of Religion Today (2002) and A Secular Age (2007). In the process of exploring secularisation, Taylor has also shown how important William James was to the early development of the sociology of religion for example in the work of Max Weber. James is almost with the exception of Jack Barbalet (1997) ignored in the study of the development of the sociology of religion. More generally one might say that accounts of the evolution of the sociology of religion neglect the importance of pragmatism not only in America but for European social thought as well (Baert and Turner, 2007; Croce, 1995). The analysis of secularism is therefore an important prior step to any understanding of the contemporary relation between religion and politics, and in any exploration of the secular it is unwise for sociology to stray too far from philosophy. To do so is to ignore at our own cost the work not only of Charles Taylor but of Alasdair MacIntyre, Jean-Luc Nancy and Hent de Vries. One could argue that the best illustrations of British sociology in general and of the sociology of religion in particular have always combined philosophy and sociology such as MacIntyre's Secularization and Moral Change (1967). Even Ludwig Wittengenstein appears to fall out of the frame of reference of much sociology of religion, despite his pivotal position in the debate about practice in relation to belief (Arrington and Addis, 2001). In On Certainty (1969) and in his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (1979), Wittgenstein rejected or at least brought into question assertions about the absolute truth or falsity of religious beliefs, insisting that they had to be set within a ‘language game’, but more importantly that we should look more determinedly at religious practices not beliefs.

One very successful section of the Sage Handbook which makes it distinctive in the clutch of contemporary textbooks on the sociology of religion is the excellent section in part two on ‘method of studying religion’. By implication, the Sage Handbook brings out once more what used to be a major distinction between the study of religion in American sociology and in other national traditions. In the 1950s and onwards, American sociology of religion was somewhat dominated by the quantitative analysis of survey data. The leader in the field in this earlier period was Charles Glock who developed his multidimensional notion of religious commitment (belief, practice, experience, knowledge and consequences) to study the strength of American religious institutions in Religion and Society in Tension (Glock and Stark, 1965). This debate on the unidimensionality or multidimensionality of religious commitment, which is ongoing, is thoroughly analyzed by David Voas in his chapter on ‘Surveys of Behaviour, Beliefs and Affiliation’ in the Sage Handbook. The methods section is particularly useful in considering the range of research methods, other than survey methods, that are now being explored in the sociology of religion. Voas in particular shows the innovative nature of the subfield in exploring such techniques as item response scaling, computer simulation, multilevel modelling, and social network analysis. The development of new and sophisticated techniques may be especially relevant when looking at spirituality as opposed to conventional religiosity, because ‘[w]hereas there is still a reasonably close connection between mainstream religious belief, affiliation and attendance, the realm of spirituality is considerably more diffuse; it is very difficult to predict what people believe, do, or call themselves on the basis of any of the other pieces of information’ (Voas in Beckford and Demerath, 2007: 159). Turning to qualitative methods, there is obviously a rich tradition of research in this genre which is fully explored by James Spickard in chapter 6 on ‘Micro Qualitative Approaches to the Sociology of Religion’. Spickard dispels the common notions that qualitative research is merely exploratory and that there is a unified method. He considers a range of methods relating to phenomenology, hermeneutics, narrative and discourse analysis, and ethnography. Spickard (2007: 139) concludes with the perfectly reasonable observation that the fact that there is now so much good qualitative work in the sociology of religion is a sign of the discipline's growing maturity. Finally John Hall surveys the equally rich and diverse tradition of ‘History, Methodologies and the Study of Religion’ in chapter 8. We are familiar with the notion that Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch pioneered much of the early work on the comparative and historical study of religion, but Hall shows just how substantial this field has become and also explores the range of historical research strategies that are now being employed by figures like Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly and by John Hall himself. These historical studies have created an impressive legacy of research on secularisation, fundamentalism, political religion and modernity.

As I have already noted, perhaps one of the most influential developments in contemporary sociology of religion has been in the United States where an economic model of religious competition has been examined by a range of authors. These issues and trends are amply explored in the Sage Handbook by Marcela Cristi and Lorne L. Dawson on civil religion (chapter 13) and by Frank Lechner on economic models (chapter four). The study of spirituality – an emotional, personal and post-institutional form of religiosity –the principal text here still remains Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas's Religion in Modern Times (2000). These models are not limited to the West or to Christianity.

The editors of handbooks have to make difficult choices about what to leave out perhaps more than what to leave in. Although I have criticised Beckford and Demerath for some lacunae that arise from their editorial decisions, the Sage Handbook is without question the most comprehensive and intelligent guide we have to the current state of the sociology of religion. Unlike its predecessors it includes, as I have noted, an excellent section on methods of studying religion. It does not, unlike the Blackwell Companion, dwell too much on the classics – apart from chapter 1 by Randall Collins –thereby allowing a more robust treatment of contemporary approaches. It has two innovative sections on ‘Individual Religious Behaviour in Social Context’ and ‘Religion, Self-Identity and the Life-Course’. It has more than adequate coverage of the standard components of the sociology of religion in the sections on ‘Social Forms and Experiences of Religion’ and ‘Issues of Power and Control in Religious Organisations’ where there are relatively conventional discussions of new age religions, cults, congregations, and religious careers.

In general terms, what then does the Sage Handbook communicate about the state of the field? The study of religion is clearly going through a renaissance – as the quality of the chapters in this handbook clearly illustrate. The renaissance is a consequence of the awareness that while institutional religion may have declined in northern Europe, there are powerful movements of revivalism, mission and charismatic upsurge in many parts of the world, but especially in many post-Communist societies. There are important examples in contemporary societies of powerful combinations of nationalism and religion for example in Poland (Zubrzycki, 2006). There has been with the post 9/11 security crisis much greater attention not only to more radical forms of Islam but to the whole question of religion and violence. As a result of these social changes – many of which can simply be summarised under the heading of globalisation-religion has come to the top of the public policy agenda concerning the governance of civil society and the management of religions (Turner, 2008). Sociologists have responded to these new developments with new theories about spirituality, popular religion, religious nationalism, spiritual markets and supply-side religion, the network society and identity politics.

The Sage Handbook is the most comprehensive statement of that new vitality in theory and method in the sociology of religion.

But a current renaissance in the fortunes of the sociology of religion –arising from the globalization of religion, the security crisis and the apparent failure of secularism as a strategy for managing religions – cannot tell us as such why the sociology of religion would matter from the point of view of sociology as a whole. One still wants to ask: what is at stake here? What appears to me to be at stake is the very nature of the social itself. Sociologists have been interested in religion because it is assumed to contain the seeds of social life as such. This insight was the real point of Durkheim's critique of rationalist theories of religious belief – as it was also Wittgenstein's. Religion will not crumble before the flames of rationalist critique or the consequences of scientific experiment, because religion is deeply embedded in the actual social structures that make social life possible. Durkheim claimed that rational objections to Christian belief simply missed the point that religious commitment is bound up with a particular way of life and with membership of a particular community. Religious beliefs rather like the rules of cricket are neither rational nor irrational, but relevant or not relevant to the ongoing existence of a community. The question that faces modern sociology is whether the social is being dismantled by processes such as globalisation, and if so whether religion can still successfully express the form of the life of a community. Is the death of institutionalized religion in the face of the new spirituality a sign of the erosion of the social? What is the social in a global world of mobility, flows and networks?

Conclusion: social change and the future of religion

The major changes that have taken place in religion can give us some insight into broader changes in the social fabric. If it is to remain important, future handbooks of the sociology of religion will need to capture the importance of these major developments for religion. These changes can be simply described in the following list. First employing the notions of communication and complexity from the sociology of Luhmann, we can argue that whereas religious communication in an age of revelation was hierarchical, unitary and authoritative, communicative acts in a new media environment are horizontal rather than vertical, diverse and fragmented rather than unitary and integrated, and that the authority of any message – religious or otherwise – is negotiable. The modern growth of diverse foci of interpretation in a global communication system has produced a general crisis of authority at least in the formal system of religious belief and practice. In Islam for example there has been an inflation of sources of (lay) authority since almost any local teacher or mullah can issue a fetwa to guide a local community by setting himself up with his own blog.

Second, new media provide multiple channels of access and promote discursive interaction through such blogs. The result is that the new media bring about a certain level of the democratisation of information. Although there is obviously a digital divide, more and more people have access to interactive religious sites, and the result is a democratisation of religion. Many young Muslims bypass their ulama and imams in order to learn about Islam in English from pamphlets and sources such as The Muslim News and Q-News. The majority of these Muslim users of the Internet are resident in Europe and North America. These diasporic Internet users are typically students in western universities undertaking technical degrees in engineering and computing. Because Internet access is often too expensive to be available in many communities in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, it is again the student population of western universities who are accessing the Internet for religious and political purposes. There is evidence that the Internet is used by radical activists against the West, but the Internet can also promote reasoned argument in a context where everybody can in principle check the sources for themselves. The majority of sites are not developed by official Muslim organisations such as the Muslim World League and these alternative Muslim sites provide opportunities for discussion and discourse outside the official culture. It is for this reason that the Internet is a means of bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of Muslim orthodoxy. These Internet sites also serve to reinforce the individualism which many observers have associated with neo-fundamentalism because the global virtual ummah is the perfect site for individuals to express themselves while still claiming to be members of a community on whose behalf they are speaking (Mandaville, 2001). These developments are not of course confined to Islam and one general feature of ‘global religions’ is the spread of Internet sites for worship, study and discussion. Buddhist meditation techniques originating in Tibet are now widely available in the form of short-cut vispassana sessions on video-cassettes and on the Internet, thereby creating large Buddhist networks between Asia and California (Obeyesekere, 2003: 74).

Third the ubiquitous media contribute to a growing individualism that is very different in content from the ascetic individualism of early American Protestantism. The religious subjectivity of the media is a facet of the ‘expressive revolution’ that had its roots in the student revolts of the 1960s (Parsons, 1963). In the new individualism, people invent their own religious ideas giving rise to the new spirituality. The result has been a social revolution flowing from both consumerism and individualism. Religious life styles are modelled on consumerism in which individuals can try out religions rather like they try out new fashions as in any leisure activity. New industries have emerged offering everything from spiritual advice, to pilgrimage packages, to religious holidays and to dating agencies. Globalisation thus involves the spread of personal spirituality which typically provides not only practical guidance in the everyday world, but also subjective, personalised meaning. Such religious phenomena are often combined with therapeutic or healing services, or the promise of personal enhancement through meditation. Spirituality appears to be closely associated with middle-class singles who are thoroughly engaged with western consumer values, and who experience no contradiction between personal piety and consumer capitalism. In the Sage Handbook, Michele Dillon's chapter on ‘Age, Generation, and Cohort in American Religion and Spirituality’ deals successfully with these new developments by adopting a generational frame-work. Whereas the traditionally religious find meaning in existing mainstream denominational Christianity, spiritual people, according to Courtney Bender (2003: 69) ‘build and create their own religions in a spiritual market place, intentionally eschewing commitments to traditional religious communities, identities, and theologies’. The new religious movements are closely associated also with themes of therapy, peace, wealth and self-help. Of course the idea that religion, especially in the West, has become privatized is hardly new. However, these new forms of subjectivity and privatized practice are no longer confined to Protestantism or the American middle classes; they now have global implications.

Fourth, because authority has been devolved with the principle of subsidiarity, the result is the hybridization of religious traditions. This hybridity is reinforced through globalization and through the processes of borrowing from different religious traditions in a global religious market. To quote once more from Bender's Heaven's Kitchen (2003: 72) in her description of ‘Anita’ an informant from the kitchen (known as ‘God's Love We Deliver’). Anita ‘attended the Sunday morning services at the Episcopalian and Catholic churches on her block. She spirit channelled, took astrology courses, read Deepak Chopra, and dabbled in Catholic mysticism. She grew up in a Jewish family, but since childhood she had been attracted to the “mysterious” black habits that Catholic nuns wore. She recently learned that she had been “a nun in a past life”. Anita emphatically told me that her inner spirit guided her to ideas that would be “helpful”’.

Finally, we live increasingly in a communication environment where images and symbols play a more important role in public life than the written word. This visual world is therefore iconic rather than one based on a written system, and this iconic world requires new skills and institutions that no longer duplicate the hierarchies and institutions of the written word. It is also a new experimental context in which the iconic can also be the iconoclastic as Madonna in her Catholic period switched to Rachel and for a while explored the Kabbalah (Hulsether, 2000).

Although some sociologists have argued that the Internet creates new communities, the growth of privatized spirituality points to the decline of the social and the erosion of community. In the past, Protestant individualism was combined with a deep involvement in church life and community activity. The social life of the New Age does not build communities and is entirely compatible with the individualism of consumer society. In short, the new forms of religiosity do not appear to build new publics. Contemporary interpretations of such developments tend therefore to be pessimistic. Perhaps the best representative of such cultural pessimism in recent years was presented by Philip Rieff (2006) in his notion of three cultures – first, second and third – and the idea of deathworks. By this concept, Rieff pointed to artworks and other phenomena that stand at the juncture of two cultures where one of them is collapsing. A deathwork is a destructive and deconstructive work that signals and contributes to the collapse of a culture. The deathworks are represented by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Piero Manzoni, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Rieff believed that we are standing at the collapse of the second culture and the arrival of a third culture. The third culture is post-sacred, post-literate and post-communal. The first and second worlds were sacred spaces, characterized by a high literature, and a priestly class. For Rieff, the modern world still has a priestly class – sociologists, welfare workers, psychoanalysts, therapists and so forth – but it no longer has a sacred space or a sacred literature.

Rieff recognized that the democratization of culture in the third world involved a celebration of illiteracy – ‘The democratization of deathworks is seen in the rise of armies of principled illiterates’ (Rieff, 2006: 92). However, the implication of Rieff's nostalgic critique is that no social order can survive without some notion of the sacred as a foundation for a shared sense of what constitutes authority. His condemnation of Andres Serrano is possible the clearest statement in his work of this issue. Serrano's Piss Christ is seen as a direct and pathetic assault on the sacred that seeks to rob identity of its underpinnings in the sacred sphere. In this sense, Serrano is the archetypical artist of the deathwork. Rieff's critique of modern culture in many respects parallels my analysis of religion in the age of information. We might say in a Rieffian framework that Madonna's ‘Like a prayer’ in 1989 is a deathwork in which Catholicism as an authoritative and meaningful system is collapsing under the weight of the democratizing feminist message of the video.

In a famous article on ‘religious evolution’ in the American Sociological Review in 1964, Robert Bellah developed an influential model of religious change from primitive, archaic, historic, early modern to modern religion. The principal characteristics of religion in modern society are its individualism, the decline in the authority of traditional institutions (church and priesthood) and awareness that religious symbols are constructs. Bellah's predictions about modernity have been clearly fulfilled in the growth of popular, de-institutionalised, commercialised and largely post-Christian religions.

In a differentiated global religious market, these segments of the religious market compete with each other and overlap; the new spirituality is genuinely a consumerist religion; while fundamentalism appears to challenge consumer (western) values, it is in fact also selling a life style based on special diets, alternative education, health regimes and mentalities. All three have a degree of consumerism, but they are also distinctively different; and gender is a crucial feature of the new consumerist religiosity where women increasingly dominate the new spiritualities; women will be and to some extent already are the ‘taste leaders’ in the emergent global spiritual market place.

While globalisation theory tends to emphasise the triumph of modern fundamentalism (as a critique of traditional and popular religiosity), perhaps the real effect of globalization is the triumph of heterodox, commercial, hybrid popular religion over orthodox, authoritative professional versions of the spiritual life. Their ideological effects cannot be controlled by religious authorities, and they have a greater impact than official messages. In Weber's terms, it is the triumph of mass over virtuoso religiosity. These changes signal a major transformation of the social and it is this transformation that has once more made the questions – what is the social? what is the religious? – so central to modern sociology.

Any modern textbook on religion needs to find a way of forcefully expressing the enduring significance of religious life in the context of the changing social world. The Sage Handbook has obviously been a substantial undertaking comprising over 700 pages printed in columns. It represents a comprehensive statement not only of the current state of the sociology of religion, but of the character of the social in a modern rationalized and global world. The vitality of religion which is conveyed in its pages may well stand as testimony to the vitality of religion.