Sensing religion,observing religion,reconstructing religion: Contingency and pluralization in post-Westphalian context

Abstract

The article argues that what is performed and understood as religion in global society has in the course of the modern centuries come to be increasingly dominated by the idea that religion is something distinct and differentiated, something distinct from what is not religion, namely the secular. It manifests itself principally as a plurality of identified and performed religions. Towards the latter half of the 20th century, however, that dominant understanding of religion has come to be increasingly challenged by alternative ways of ‘sensing religion’, alternative ways that are to some extent a reflection of new developments in this domain of religion in global society. They are also indicative of a reassessment of alternative ways of understanding and doing religion that have always accompanied the dominant sense. This reassessment allows the ‘hidden’ and ‘ignored’ to appear as religion and be recognized as such without negating the hitherto dominant form. The first of these developments is analyzed as the construction of a Westphalian system for religion; the reassessment and transformation is discussed under the contrasting idea of a post-Westphalian circumstance.

Introduction

The theme of the 33rd conference of the ISSR/SISR in 2015 was ‘Sensing Religion’, a deliberately ambiguous phrase in that sensing refers both to the use of the human senses – more generally to direct experience and the involvement of the human body – in religion and to the sense of ‘finding’, where we detect religion, what we detect as religion. Both senses point to the uncertainty inherent in the object of our observations and our experiencing. What religious phenomena and religion are, what we recognize in such titles, depends on how one regards them as well as on what one is looking at or sensing; both are variable, both are subject to change.

Added to the polysemous character of the theme is the fact that it was chosen as the theme at all. One reason for this choice is, I suggest, that it speaks to and out of a wider context in which the conference took place: the emphasis on the senses and on the variability in what we consider religion to be is indicative of our living in a period of transformation with regard to religion. My main thesis in this article centres on the idea that what we understand as religion today is changing, to some extent because religion is changing, but also because we are reassessing our approaches to our study of religion, somewhat irrespective of the changes that are happening. The two, of course, are related, but they are not just two ways of saying the same thing.

In this article, I argue as follows: what is performed and understood as religion in global society has in the course of the modern centuries come to be increasingly dominated by the idea that religion is something distinct and differentiated. This religion, to be sure, can and does affect all aspects of life, but it is nonetheless considered and lived as distinct from that which is not religion, often called the secular; and it manifests itself principally as a plurality of identified and performed religions. Towards the latter half of the 20th century, however, that dominant understanding of religion has come to be increasingly challenged by alternative ways of ‘sensing religion’, alternative ways that are to some extent a reflection of new developments in this domain of religion within global society itself. They are also, however, indicative of a reassessment of what, so to speak, has always already been there. The reassessment allows the ‘hidden’ and ‘ignored’ to appear as religion and be recognized as such without negating the hitherto dominant form. The first of these developments I will call the construction of a Westphalian system for religion; the reassessment and transformation I will discuss under the contrasting idea of a post-Westphalian circumstance.

This analysis of the construction of Westphalianism and its transformation towards a post-Westphalian situation is not a restatement of the received secularization thesis, above all because it does not focus on the increasing strength of ‘secular society’ and thereby the relative ‘decline’ of religion in comparison. Instead it focuses for the most part on constructions and reconstructions in the sphere of the religious itself, in which the rise of religions that might then possibly decline, resurge, or otherwise change has to be explained in the first place, and not simply assumed. In that context, my main conclusion will be that religion in today’s world is coming to be characterized more and more, especially from the perspective of our observation of religion, by a post-Westphalian pluralization and contingency, as opposed to what one may call in contrast a Westphalian segmentation or diversity (see Beyer, 2007).

Religion, religions, and Westphalianism

The starting point of the analysis is therefore that religion, as a concept and an institution, has in the past few centuries increasingly been socially constructed or reconstructed as something more or less distinct, as something differentiated from that which is not religion, often referenced by contrast as the secular. This construction has favoured the imagining and social enactment of systematic units that a great many, perhaps the majority, of people around the world understand as religions. These have come to dominate what counts socially as religion, not to the exclusion of other possibilities, but definitely as the dominant and default form to which the words tend to refer and in terms of which other things that might be ‘religious’ tend to be judged. Put briefly, religion is mostly that which is institutionalized as such, and this institutionalized religion expresses itself mostly, but not exclusively, through and as the religions. The list of religions that so count is variable, but limited; it almost always includes certain religions, often called the ‘world religions’. In addition, we tend to think of these religions both as independent entities, with particular identifying characteristics and content, and as internally variable or differentiated. Each of them can be done differently, such that the internal subdivisions may be more important than the distinctions among the religions. Moreover, we primarily associate and even identify these religions with collectivities, with the people that identify or are identified with a particular religion; and, although less consistently, we consider that, normally, a person will identify with, belong to, practice only one religion at a time, including the option, increasingly possible throughout the world since the later 20th century, of not belonging to any religion at all.

An important, but usually neglected, distinction on the negative side of this understanding and construction is between that which is ‘not religious’ and that which is ‘not religion’. Much understanding and especially measurement of religion in global society assumes a rough identity of the two sides of these distinctions: ‘not religious’ means ‘no religion’; ¹ and correspondingly ‘religious’ people will generally also be people ‘of a religion’. This eliding is indicative of the dominance of thinking the religious through religion and the religions. The distinction, however, points to the contingency of ‘doing’ religion this way and therefore, indirectly, to alternative possibilities which are always already there and in fact observed, but usually with important difference.

The ‘religious’ that does not fit this model has since the 19th century been consistently observed in the anthropological literature, among other places. Historically, although far less so today, anthropology has been the social scientific discipline most concerned with what in shorthand I will call the ‘non-modern other’, precisely those socio-cultural contexts in which this dominant understanding of religion has not been prevalent or at least in which it has been less observed (by anthropologists). These are especially those contexts, often those of the ‘indigenous’ or ‘colonized’, in which religion has not been constructed as a differentiated domain, but in which it is nonetheless possible to observe the ‘religious’ using the model of (modern) religion. A somewhat related but further manifestation of this sort of alternative possibility is the relatively recent reconsideration of the idea of ‘spirituality’ or the ‘spiritual’ as a way of talking about the religious, both scientifically and in popular culture, as something other than religion. ² Indeed, the religions of the aforementioned indigenous societies are frequently referred to as ‘spirituality’. Another alternative way of observing religion can be seen in the recent increase in attention in the disciplines concerned with religion to what Meredith McGuire, Douglas Hall, and Robert Orsi, among others, call ‘lived religion’ (Hall, 1997; McGuire, 2008). In brief, one could say that the theme of the ISSR conference, ‘sensing religion’, enjoins one to focus on such alternatives. That said, even a brief look at the content that was produced for the conference ³ shows to what degree ‘the religions’ still structure the overall picture, often directly and sometimes only as a kind of colonizing appresentation in the background.

Lately, quite a number of suggestions have been put forward as to how to understand the context of transformation to which I have been referring. Ideas such as the post-secular, post-modern, post-Durkheimian; notions like spiritual revolution, consumerist religion, and desecularization are just a few of the terms that different scholars have used to try to describe what is happening. ⁴ As just noted, I would like to put the idea of post-Westphalian in this slot. I see two fundamental advantages in doing so. First, it allows a focus simultaneously on the semantic and socio-structural aspects, both on the expressions of the transformation that we use – terms like ‘lived’, ‘spiritual’, ‘consumerist’, etc. – and on the institutional frameworks with which the semantics resonate, frameworks like religion itself, but also others, for instance, state, economy, law, and mass media. The second advantage is that the idea of Westphalian implied in post-Westphalian allows a more focussed or fine-tuned consideration of just what it is about the old situation that is changing, what we are supposedly transforming ‘from’.

Thus far, I have referred to this old situation in terms of the dominance of religion as something institutionalized in contradistinction from that which is not religion, generally speaking the secular, and in terms of the religions that have (re)constructed themselves to a significant extent in relation to one another. If we add to this an examination of the global historical process in which this ‘religions constructing’ has been taking place, a number of features are of particular note. First, the entire development has taken place mostly in the context of the global expansion of European influence from about the 16th century onward, but reaching critical phases only in the 19th and 20th centuries. This does not mean that the imagining of religion as distinct from the secular and of religion as (world) religions is just a product of European sensibilities and European imperialistic imposition and diffusion, as some of the literature on this topic implies (Fitzgerald, 1990; McCutcheon, 1997; Masuzawa, 2005). If we can definitely view the process as having gotten a critical start in the European context, or at least as having reached a critical and consequential threshold there, especially after about the 11th century; if we can further observe that many aspects of the eventual model for religion and the religions evolved more out of historical forms of two of the religions, namely Christianity and Islam, and their respective regional societies; it still remains that the relative completion of the development – to the extent that it has ever been complete – occurred only as most of the world’s regions became involved in the process and made their own contributions on the basis of their own histories, traditions, and structures. This could be in the form of reimagining local culturo-religious traditions and resources as one or more of the religions beside others, as was the case in South and parts of East Asia with religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. It could be in the form of solidifying and reforming relatively slightly already formed religions, as was the case in regions like Africa and Asia where Islam dominated historically. It could also be in the form of ‘indigenizing’ one or more of the formed or forming world religions, especially Islam and Christianity, as has been the case in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. It could, of course, also be a combination of these alternatives; and it by no means excludes active and successful projects of refusal to engage in any of these, as is especially the case in certain East Asian countries (Beyer, 2006). But even there, what has ended up being constructed and counting as religion is still ‘the (world) religions’, with all else being ‘no religion’ (see Goossaert and Palmer, 2011).

What I am calling the Westphalian character of this broad development arises from the fact that ‘religion’ was not the only institutional domain being constructed, eventually globally, during this long historical period. The construction and imagining of religion as this kind of distinct social domain in fact depended on the simultaneous and contrasting construction of several other domains, most notably that of the state, of law, and of science; all these and more in mutual reference to one another (Berman, 1983, 2006; Huff, 2003). In different words, the gradual historical construction of religion in this peculiar way depended on the simultaneous and deliberate gradual historical construction of the contrasting secular institutional domains or systems; this not in isolation from one another but quite expressly with relation to one another, to some extent modelling on one another in the process of becoming more and more clearly differentiated within society and from each other. Religion developed as religion in relation to the simultaneous development of law, science, state, economy and other increasingly secular – that is, distinct from religion – domains like health, art, education, and, somewhat later, sport and media. In this context, Westphalian refers to the peculiar way that religion and state developed in this kind of mutual modelling relation.

The word Westphalian itself of course refers to the European 17th century Peace of Westphalia, one which included in its provisions, particularly in the idea of cuius regio, eius religio, the coordination of religious and state identity, but under state regulation. Westphalia was in this aim an indicator along the way in a long and complex historical development, one of whose central features was a certain parallelism of the structuring of state and religion. The state, already at that time in some cases incipiently the nation-state (see for example, Gorski, 2003; Hastings, 1997), imagined itself as a distinct society, separate and sovereign. This state-centred society had members or citizens who were putatively mostly of the same cultural-national identity – for example, English, Dutch, French – and only of that one identity; with the exception of course of thereby inherently problematic minorities – for example, Cornish, Breton, Basque. In parallel – and this is the Westphalian logic – these members of the nation, again with the exception of always problematic ‘minorities’, belonged, again exclusively, to the same religion or, in certain cases, to one of only a very few religions. As time goes on, the religions and the states, as institutional domains or systems, do become more and more differentiated, with the states becoming more secular and the religions becoming more clearly religious, meaning among other things more ‘devotional-expressive’ and less ‘magical-instrumental’. Yet not only does this take a long time, really only beginning to come into its own at earliest after about the end of the 18th century, the parallel structure of ‘one state, one national identity’ and ‘one religion, one religious identity’ continues very imperfectly in most cases for quite some time in the era of global state formation and the rise to dominance of the attendant nationalisms.

This Westphalian parallel structuring has, however, never led to the identification of the two sorts of segmentation, the political and the religious, with certain very partial exceptions such as Japan and Shinto or India and Hindu. The boundaries of the overall religions, as opposed to their internal subdivisions, have not followed the boundaries of the states with any kind of consistency. Therefore, the religions have usually become the primary identifying religion of more than one state; and this is the case as well for the major observed subdivisions such as Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic Christianity; Sunni and Shi’a Islam; or Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism.

Nonetheless, the parts of the Westphalian logic that reached a kind of apogee in the later 19th and for much of the 20th century maintain the understanding a) that the religions are mutually exclusive; b) that they are defined and structured through their mutually exclusive adherents and mutually exclusive content; c) that outside of them there is ‘no religion’, or at best only ‘pseudo’ or ‘quasi’ religion or religious culture; and d) that religion is first and foremost a matter of fundamental identification and orientation as expressed in such phrases as ‘way of life’, ‘worldview’, or ‘ultimate meaning’, through systematic and coherent ‘beliefs and practices’. An intriguing scientific manifestation of this understanding has been the idea that religions are ‘foundational’, that they have the function of ‘integrating’ societies, of seeing to their necessary ‘social cohesion’, or in Berger’s terms, of acting as a ‘sacred canopy’. Thus have they been seen to be foremost a matter of identity, of common values, of community. ⁵

Something similar can be said for the political side of this relation: states are sovereign and distinct societies which a) are mutually exclusive; b) consist of their equally mutually exclusive citizenry; c) have difficulty accommodating or understanding people except as exclusive adherents of a national identity or an often problematic ‘minority’ identity; and d) are also matters of fundamental identification, way of life, or ‘culture’. As such, states are also foundational in this understanding.

The way I have stated this case is, of course, of necessity greatly oversimplified. If one can well defend the idea that this Westphalian logic and structuring became a central feature of states, religions, and society throughout most of the world’s regions by the later 20th century, it is also the case that these developments were always accompanied by counter-currents. On the side of religion and the religions, one set of manifestations of these were the many ‘minority’ religious movements associated with or included within the religions, ones that very often had no ‘nation’ with which they were closely associated. Such movements, however, typically have a history of comparative difficulty in being recognized and accepted, as for instance is the case for Christian Mennonites or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Muslim Ahmadiyyas or Ismailis. Then there are the religions that have never or only with difficulty had a state with which they are associated, for instance Judaism before Israel or Baha’i today. Such manifestations, however, do not and did not question the basic logic of structuring religion as religions and their subdivisions; or the principle of single and exclusive adherence; or the notion that religion is essentially foundational and expressive of personal and collective identity or worldview. Clearer counter-currents are typically to be found in those long-standing manifestations that have greater difficulty in, or even expressly eschew, being recognized as religion at all.

Undoubtedly the most important category under which, at least since the 19th century, many such counter-currents have increasingly been subsumed is that of ‘culture’. Included here are, for instance, the ‘religious’ dimensions of societies classically examined by anthropology, especially the many traditions and forms practised around the world that can be and have been observed as religious but never actually subsumed or structured into one of the religions or as one of the religions. This includes those ‘religions’ named simply for the ethno-cultural group with which they are identified, as in the phrase, ‘the religion of the [people]’ or in such generic phrases as ‘Chinese religion’ or ‘indigenous religion’.

One symptom of the penumbral status of such manifestations is that occasionally, here and there around the world, one has been able to witness movements that seek to have these ‘religions’ recognized as ‘one of the religions’. One thinks, for instance, of movements to treat and have recognized ‘Confucianism’ as a religion (Coppel, 1981; Jensen, 1997), or a number of Indonesian local cultural traditions as either a religion apart or as part of an already recognized religion like Hinduism (Hefner, 1985). In Africa, there have been the occasional efforts to imagine and have recognized what is often referred to as African Traditional Religion (ATR), not just as religion, but as ‘one of the religions’ (Mndende, 1998). In North America there have been the examples of the Native American Church or the Code of Handsome Lake Longhouse religion from already the 19th century (Grant, 1984).

Most often, however, such ‘religion’ is not named, practised, or recognized as religion but more likely as (aspects of) culture. And yet it still ‘has something religious about it’ and has consistently been observed as religion, and this following something like the Westphalian logic that has impacted on the structuring of the religions: ‘if there is a people who can be seen as coming together to enact a society, then that people, that society must have its characteristic religion’. This is why so-called ‘civil religions’, ‘national teachings,’ or ‘secular ideologies’ like communism also fall under this category. They do so because the presumed foundational quality of religion eventuates in the Durkheimian assumption that ‘every society has to have a religion’, and indeed, such religio-culture resembles differentiated religion often in the way such culture is practised expressively, as foundational of personal and collective identity. Where it diverges, besides in the fact that it is mostly not understood by its supposed carriers as religion, is precisely in its lack of clear boundaries in relation to other religions, as exhibited, for instance, in the fact that people can practice this sort of thing while at the same time being (exclusive) adherents of one of the (exclusivist) religions.

A third sort of counter-current is more difficult to name because it consists in a wide variety of social phenomena and traditions that do not have the seemingly foundational quality of marginal religions or of religio-culture, but nonetheless have what can be seen as something potentially religious about them. This range of phenomena would include a wide variety of esoteric traditions around the world. It would include what often gets labelled popular religious culture, almost anything that has something ‘transcendent’, esoteric, or secret about it, that is somewhat hidden or marginal, and often ‘magical’ in its characteristics (see Faivre and Needleman, 1992). Indeed, popular, sometimes pejorative, words to describe these alternatives are ‘superstition’, ‘magic’, ‘witchcraft’, ‘folklore’, ‘occult’, and the like. The key point about them in the present context is that that to which these words refer has always also already been there in the social environment in which differentiated religion and religions formed.

A final sort of alternative demonstrates exactly how broad such phenomena can be, just how much what counts as religion is entirely a matter of what does and does not get constructed as such. Much as atheism sometimes forms itself in such a way as to seem to be a kind of film negative of religion, so can one detect or observe the ‘religious’ dimension or quality of almost any social phenomenon or experiential event, whether it is actually constructed as religious/religion or not. Much like Durkheim observed that almost anything can be ‘sacred’ because sacredness inheres not in the object but in how it is treated (Durkheim, 1965: 37–63), so do all social constructions have the potential to be understood as religious because that too is a matter of relative treatment. While this may seem to be an obvious point hardly worthy of mention, in the current context it is of significance because of the way religion has been historically constructed ‘in relation’ to that which was simultaneously constructed as non-religion, namely the secular or secular domains. More specifically, under the consideration of counter-currents just discussed are precisely these secular domains. This is mainly because, as I have pointed out under the idea of Westphalianism, the construction of religion and the religions has happened in relation to the simultaneous construction of the secular domains beside religion, and religion has modelled itself partially on some if not all of these domains. Accordingly, the accompanying counter-currents that I am listing here have to include the possibility of religion forming itself in contrasting relation to these secular systems or domains, of modelling itself on domains other than the political: of modelling itself less or not on state, and more on other secular systems than before. This concerns especially those domains that have historically appeared to be constructed more in opposition to religion, domains such as the capitalist economic domain, the mass media domain, or perhaps even the domain of sports (Beyer, 2012).

Possibilities for understanding a post-Westphalian construction of religion

If all this shows the contingency of religion construction through the simultaneous consideration of other ways that it could have been done or, quasi, has been done, then the question of transformation in how religion is constructed can be translated into the following question: What indicators do we have to support the hypothesis that the religious and religion are moving away from their hitherto dominant forms, the way they have been globally constructed over at least the last couple of centuries?

In answer, one can start with the until recently quite prevalent and popular secularization thesis. Accordingly, much of what, under the various versions of this thesis, has been taken as evidence for the decline of religion in modern societies is perhaps better understood as indications of a shift away from the dominance of particular forms of religion. Now, by itself, this is indeed not a new thesis at all. The alternative between secularization as religious decline and secularization as religious change has been prominent already at least since Durkheim and Comte, and was perhaps most famously elaborated in the 1960s in Thomas Luckmann’s invisible religion thesis (Luckmann, 1967). The insufficiency in most of the elaborations of this idea, however, lies in what has been offered as the new directions, what religion is transforming toward. These are generally manifestations that the supposed carriers of these ‘new religious forms’ do not enact or understand as religion, and often enough not even as religious. The alternatives, like Durkheim’s Cult of Man, science, nationalism, civil religion, medium and small transcendences, etc., are rarely constructed as religion by those who supposedly perform them. They are ‘religious’ only in a functional sense, meaning that they are deemed to be capable of replacing the old religion because they supposedly ‘do’ what the old religion did. Nonetheless, if the perceived alternatives to religion in secularization theories that posit only a change of form may be inadequate, that does not mean that their understanding of the ‘decline’ of the old form is thereby likewise inadequate.

A look at these reveals developments that remain relatively uncontested even in an era when secularization theories are no longer popular. These include, for instance, that in many contexts around the world people perform their ‘national’ religions less and less, and what is left is restricted to a minority or reduced to certain identity declarations and markers such as church belonging or anodyne identification, the twin phenomena, for instance, of believing without belonging or belonging without believing, and in neither case practising (e.g. Davie, 1994; Day, 2011; Francis and Robbins, 2004). Especially in many Western Christian countries, the churches identified more or less with the nation are precisely the ones that have been ‘shrinking’ sometimes already since the 19th century, but mostly in the post-1960s era. In addition, it is becoming more and more acceptable and common to claim or admit ‘no religion’ in these contexts and to cease even the pretence of a religion-identity for the sake of appearing like a ‘normal citizen’. The phenomenon of religion à la carte and religious bricolage also falls into this category as the specific or lived religious identity is under less and less pressure to follow the boundary lines among religions. And finally, states themselves, through everything from public discourse and official policy to institutional structure and normative expectations, become more ‘secularized’ in the sense of reducing more and more the privileged status of religion and the national religion or religions specifically. Thus is the privatization of religion, meaning the reduction and even elimination of its role in determining the collectively binding or state-normative, part and parcel of the decline in the dominance of the Westphalian form of constructing and imagining religion and the religions.

Nonetheless, these symptoms amount to no more than that the Westphalian form thereby is losing its taken-for-granted dominance. It is by no means simply on the decline, destined to disappear, much like those few hard versions of the secularization thesis were always wrong in predicting such a fate for religion as such. In many regions and countries around the world, one of two situations obtains, alone or in combination with the sorts of developments just discussed. In some countries, Westphalian structuring is not in decline and may even be on the rise, such as in some South Asian countries, in some African countries, in some Middle Eastern and West Asian countries, and perhaps even in Eastern European countries. In other countries, by contrast, such as especially in some East Asian countries, the Westphalian structuring of religion never reached a dominant position, and therefore today they appear to many of us as ‘still secular’. One thinks of China and South Korea in particular in this regard, although in the Chinese case the Maoist context of the post-war period was in fact very Westphalian, if only in a kind of mirror image, negative way. This variation around the world is one of the main reasons that the secularization thesis has become so relatively unpopular: it does not seem to apply in enough cases now that our observational perspective has for most of us moved definitively in a global direction rather than remaining regional, usually Western. Thus the transformation in religion that is at issue here seems at least to a significant extent to be a matter of re-observation rather than, or in addition to, an actual change in the ways religion is structured in global society.

The indicators for the decline of Westphalian religion are therefore relative, and I stress that the idea that we are living in a post-Westphalian era has everything to do with a relative loss of self-evidence of the Westphalian model for religion rather than with a simple decline and loss. As I shall stress from here on, the post-Westphalian situation is much more a case of the pluralization of forms and perspectives for observing those forms than it is the straightforward decline of one clearly structured arrangement in favour of another, different, but also clearly structured arrangement.

Moving now to the specifically post-Westphalian arrangements rather than just the challenging of the Westphalian ones, I again turn to the kind of suggestions that have already been put forward in the context of abandoning the secularization thesis. That is, if secularization is now, and perhaps always was, inadequate as a master theory for understanding the forms and fate of contemporary religion, what has been suggested as more correct? For this I refer to four such suggested options, namely ‘spiritual revolution’ and ‘religious resurgence’ on the one hand, and ‘lived religion’ and ‘religious market’ on the other. The first two adopt the strategy of ‘something new has been happening which invalidates the old’; the second two adopt more the strategy of ‘we have always been understanding religion wrong’. I have deliberately left out the idea of the ‘post-secular’; it would technically belong in the first category, but in its current versions focuses too much on, as the phrase indicates, change in the non-religious dimensions of society and tends to assume the form of the religious, generally speaking, according to the hitherto dominant model (Habermas, 2010). This it shares with the ‘religious resurgence’ alternative.

The idea of ‘spiritual revolution’ as represented, for instance, by Paul Heelas and others, sees a rise in a different form of religiosity, understood through the now broadly popularized idea of the ‘spiritual that is not the religious’, to replace what are assumed to be the old and declining forms (Heelas et al., 2005). It is largely a ‘transformation as replacement’ perspective. Included under spiritual are a wide variety of religious forms, traditions, practices, and understandings that distinguish themselves, among other ways, as centred on the individual, as often quite instrumental as opposed to mostly expressive, but above all as not included in any of the ‘religions’. Such spirituality is, moreover, observed to be decidedly more performative than cognitive, focussing more on individual experience, on the body, on the senses, than the religions are supposed to be. In any case, it is these aspects of the new spirituality that are more centrally observed both by scientific and practitioner perspectives. The cognitive and performative aspects of this spirituality are in many respects not historically new, but they are definitely understood and practiced in new ways. This spirituality, in its instrumentality, can often be analyzed as having a consumerist aspect, meaning that the dominant ways of ‘doing’ it are personal, choice-oriented, and specifically not focussed on ideas like membership/adherence, identification, and conformity to some sort of model of, broadly speaking, orthodoxy (Gauthier and Martikainen, 2013a, 2013b). This does not mean that such spirituality forms have no contours, no consistency, no convergence, but they do not usually follow the frontier lines of the religions, even if they often include elements from them. It is thus in the ways they are bounded, the relative lack of importance of such boundaries, and the way they inform personal identities, that this ‘spirituality’ distinguishes itself from ‘religion’.

The spiritual revolution perspective, insightful as it is for understanding these sometimes new but certainly now more visible religious forms, does suffer from an insufficiency, however, at least to the extent that it posits a zero-sum relation between what it analyzes as spirituality and as religion (see Marler and Hadaway, 2002). In particular, this orientation always has trouble explaining why the new spiritual forms do not seem to be rising to the same extent as the so-called old forms appear to be declining. It also has some difficulty with precisely those religious developments to which the ‘religious resurgence’ perspective standardly points, developments that almost all take place very overtly and in a self-identified fashion within the modernly (re)constructed religions. The religious resurgence perspective is represented by quite a number of thinkers and seems to have reached in certain quarters the status of a kind of self-evidence. Prominent among its defenders is Peter Berger (1999), one of the most famous defenders of precisely the opposite, the secularization perspective, from the 1960s.

The religious resurgence perspective finds its reason in quite a number of developments worldwide since that heyday of the secularization thesis. Prominent among these, indeed dominated by them, are religio-political movements in many states around the world, movements that began to rise to incontrovertible visibility in the 1970s; and the growth of certain worldwide religious movements such as especially Christian Pentecostalism and what can be called Islamic pietism. One could include under this perspective also the sort of transnational movements attendant upon global migration, which also challenge the boundaries that the Westphalian arrangements assume. Resurgence in this case would be indicated by the presence of religions in various regions with which the Westphalian understanding has not associated them, thus appearing as a challenge and a reassertion, especially when the ‘newly introduced’ religions appear to be ‘growing’ while the national religions are ‘declining’. Overall, in terms of my present thesis about a post-Westphalian circumstance, what these developments show is that the hitherto dominant form of religion is not in inevitable decline, even in the ‘secularized’ countries of the West and of East Asia; but is rather continuing to produce new movements and developments as it has been since its formative period 500 or more years ago. The question is twofold, however. Do these new developments rising in hitherto already secularized situations constitute a proper ‘resurgence’? Or are they in fact more ‘replacement’ movements, developments that take place mostly in contexts where the ‘old religions’ never did decline very much in the above mentioned ways. This is the question that must be asked in large parts of the Islamic world and in places such as Latin America and Africa, where arguably there was never that clear of a decline of the Westphalian forms in the first place; although that does not exclude the new strong forms firmly challenging the old strong forms (Kepel, 1994). It also does not exclude that the always strong religion in these areas may not enter the political arena in a way that it had not for quite some time (Almond et al., 2000). A second question in this regard is the extent to which the rise of these movements is simply the assertion or re-assertion of the Westphalian religious forms with their exclusivity and precise boundaries, or whether it also indicates a transformation away from the Westphalian arrangements, in particular as concerns not so much the exclusive belonging aspect as the association of the religious belonging with the national belonging (see Csordas, 2009). The answer to this last question must be different depending on whether we are talking about the rising global movements like Pentecostalism or Islamic pietism, or the rising religio-political movements from the American Christian Right to Boko Haram or ISIS. In other words, while it is incontrovertible that these movements represent anything but the decline of religion as the religions, they do not necessarily represent a continuation of Westphalianism. This is more obvious with the non-political than the political movements in that they are so visibly and in self-identified fashion global and transnational, and only rarely take on a national component. The religio-political movements are in many cases very Westphalian in their nature, but it remains to be seen whether they are the exceptions that prove the rule or indicators of the continued health of Westphalianism.

Moving now to the two other perspectives, those of lived religion and religious market, we get a rather different picture. What both these perspectives emphasize is a) the extent to which the Westphalian way of structuring religion is historically contingent and therefore not the necessary or the only way of structuring religion, and b) that the so-called alternatives have probably always already ‘been there’ but were perhaps marginalized or simply not observed because they did not conform to the observer’s expectations, or they were simply not present to any great extent. The lived religion perspective deliberately emphasizes both these aspects, and especially the observational bias point. Its central point has been that a whole lot else that could or should be seen as and that has been lived as religion has been present all along while the historical Westphalian religions were becoming more and more dominant; but that they were dismissed precisely because they did not conform to dominant (and often elite) expectations, dismissed as so much irreligion, superstition, folk practices, heresy, foolishness, ‘savagery’, or simply not ‘serious religion’. The fact that we can successfully assert the idea that this has been an inadequate way of proceeding itself already indicates that we are likely living in a changed situation. And indeed, the proponents of the lived religion perspective, like Meredith McGuire or Robert Orsi (McGuire, 2008; Orsi, 2005), criticize those whom they consider to be observing otherwise, like Clark Roof, Robert Bellah, or those who dismiss ‘consumer religion’ (Bellah, et al., 1985; Carrette and King, 2005; Roof, 1999), for missing the point: the lived religion, what individuals construct in their personal lives as religion, should be the preferred perspective, not the Westphalian institutional authorities or defenders. Thus the lived religion approach addresses my central question by pointing out, not the replacement of one form of religion with another, not the return of a religion that had been thought in decline, but rather the fact that the Westphalian arrangements, while real, powerful, and effective, were nonetheless never the only way of imagining and constructing religion; and that today we can perhaps see that more clearly than before, from my perspective precisely because those Westphalian forms have been losing their self-evidence, their dominant role in determining what religion both is and can be.

Finally, the religious market perspective, while in one sense opposite from the lived religion one, nevertheless also focuses on what hitherto dominant observation has missed. It too asserts that the taken for granted status of institutional religion in the context of the secularization thesis has blinded us to seeing what has been going on in addition. The religious market perspective in part uses the same gambit as the lived religion perspective by focussing on the level of the individual and what the individual chooses or decides, to see how religion could be or, more accurately, is constructed and reproduced. To be more precise, the religious market perspective asserts, in contrast to the Westphalian modeling that I have been highlighting, that ‘economic’ modelling has also been happening, that religion ‘works’ like ‘capitalist economy’ with its structural emphasis on cost and benefit, supply and demand, capital and investment, competition and monopoly, and so forth (Finke and Stark, 1992; Iannaccone, 1990, 1995; Stark and Bainbridge, 1987). It asserts that religion has always worked like this, an assertion that I think has been shown to be, if not unsustainable, then at the very least incomplete. In particular, in making this assertion it commits the same sort of error as the secularization thesis defenders supposedly made: to confuse one way that religion could be structured and observed as the only rather than as an historically contingent way. In doing so, however, the religious market perspective nevertheless has done a service in pointing out precisely that religion could operate like capitalist economy, another of the secular institutional domains or systems, beside the state; and that perhaps one of the aspects of contemporary transformation with respect to religion is this alternative modelling, religion deliberately and overtly structuring itself in a different way than the Westphalian one, here an economic one; less like ‘national loyalty’ and more like ‘brand loyalty’. With one stroke, therefore, the religious market perspective gives us a way of better seeing this alternative modelling, and furthermore points out that perhaps religion has in part always constructed itself during the modern era in this way, at least in certain regions. One does not have to be convinced of the accuracy of this assertion to appreciate the observational advantages it offers. It allows one to see that it could be otherwise than it dominantly was, and gives us some extra tools to be able to see how this may be happening right now; how, for instance, ‘market-oriented’ religion or ‘consumer’ religion may be increasing in our world in part because the relative decline of the Westphalian form leaves room for these alternatives to be both more present and more visible.

Conclusions

The main conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing can be subsumed in the ideas of contingency and pluralization. Under contingency, I mean that religion is not anything by itself. Like all social and psychological realities, religion has to be fashioned in social and conscious practice; it is not just what it is. This constructionist aspect is fundamental; variation in religion is not just a matter of variations on an essential theme. Therefore, what religion is becoming in our world depends in large measure on what religion has been historically, a kind of dependent origination; but it also depends on what new possibilities arise from time to time. In order for us as scientific observers to be able to sense such change, we have to understand that our ways of sensing, of observing, are themselves influenced and structured in this contingent and dependent way. We tend to sense what we expect to sense, and not surprisingly are far more likely to find what we expect than what we do not expect. Indeed, we may even assume that if we do not find what we expect, then the matter in question is disappearing or not there in the first place. To see what may be being constructed in its stead, we have to find ways of seeing differently, and indeed perhaps of going precisely against expectations by sensing religion in what for us has hitherto been the ‘wrong’ or at least a ‘strange’ place. This is what I believe the contrast between Westphalian and post-Westphalian can assist us in doing. In sensing the dominant religion as structured in a certain, historically contingent way, it allows us to appreciate better its non-necessity, to find those characteristics that are visibly and historically constructed so that perhaps we can be more open to seeing how it could be otherwise. The various theoretical perspectives that I outlined in the last section do likewise, even if some of them still operate on the assumption that religion somehow always has to be the same thing, either declining or reviving, either institutional or not, either economically or politically structured, but essentially always ‘what it is’.

Under the idea of pluralization, I refer to that other aspect that I have been stressing all along: religion, even if we accept its non-essential and its contingently structured character, does not have to be structured dominantly just one way at a time, nor is there necessarily a best way to observe religion in any particular societal context. What may be the most particular characteristic of religion, the religious, and the understanding of these phenomena in the times in which we live is the plural ways that religion is prevailingly done, and the plural ways, therefore, that it can be and is understood. A central point about the post-Westphalian thesis is that it is not a thesis of radical transformation, but one of the opening up of alternatives, both structurally and semantically. Religion can be and increasingly is multi-formed, multi-modelled, and multi-present: it takes more forms that are lived, institutionalized, and recognized than before; it comes in different strengths in those different forms; it can be clearly institutionalized or less clearly institutionalized and still be lived and recognized as religion; it can be sensate, cognitive, performative, or any combination of these in different proportions; it can be clearly bounded and exclusive, or not (Beyer, 2007). Its forms, in short, are increasingly plural and expected to be such. Even though the old dominance – institutionalizing and understanding of religion according to religion and the religions – is for the time being still reasonably prevalent throughout the world, it is perhaps less and less so. We are still Westphalian in many respects, but also post-Westphalian at the same time.