The cultural turn in the sociology of religion in France

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2004 by Jean-Paul Willaime

In a society dominated by rationalization and secularization, ethnic renewal and religious revival give meaning to human suffering and enable the individual to forge direct emotional relationships with others (Schnapper 1993). Emotional forms of religion and ethnicity are, therefore, fueled by modernity itself and are able to compensate for the abstraction and meritocracy of modern society (1993:158). Religious and ethnic domains are related in this respect--both are in the process of transformation. Here again we are dealing with the phenomenon of religious reconstruction that seems to be characteristic of ultra-modernity: emotional and imaginary dimensions are forged anew by means of the symbolic materials available in national and religious memories.

By observing these changes, we discover that religion overflows from the domain in which it had been habitually enclosed: that of worship and private, individual convictions. At the same time, political disenchantment and the calling into question of all forms of knowledge encourage a return to symbolic expressions and spiritual experiences. As Michel Wieviorka rightly perceives, "instead of dissolving in the face of modern secularization, religion ... becomes a more and more important element in individual and collective experience, and sometimes of political engagement, and at the heart of modernity--not only at the margins or in opposition to it" (2001:27). (17)

Alongside this political laicization, there is a similar disentangling of politics from the grand narratives of man and society. Marcel Gauchet, for example, sees the evolution of religious and political belief in relation to each other: "Religious belief is ceasing to be political. It is emptying itself of timeless implications about the nature of human living. This detachment from its origins offers new possibilities for the future. At the same time, political belief is ceasing to be religious. It is freeing itself from the restrictions which a sacred model continues secretly to exert on all possible representations of society" (2002:108). (18)

French sociology has also discovered the difficulties (notably the tendency towards reductionism) that arise if religions are identified by their irrational qualities. The rational/irrational division does not reflect the distinction between religion and agnosticism; it is internal to religions as it is internal to atheisms. Believers are just as rational and irrational as non-believers; beliefs and nonbeliefs combine in every individual in variable and subtle formulae. For example, in her work on the apparitions of the Virgin Mary, Elisabeth Claverie (2003) has described the ways in which different types of thinking are combined: a critical sense and a reference to belief. For Claverie, doubt lies at the heart of the faith shown by these pilgrims of the Virgin. In refusing a simple divide between reason and tradition, or religion and rationality, it becomes easier to think of religions as ordinary socio-cultural phenomena, i.e. symbolic worlds through which men and women speak and live their experience of life. Hence, in a world abounding with beliefs, the world faiths constitute--by the intrinsic rationality represented in their symbolic systems--real antidotes to irrationalism.