1.2. Privatization and Religious Change rather than Religious Decline

“clear that the concept of secularization is now being used in sociology in different ways” (1981, p. 8).

1.2. Privatization and Religious Change rather than Religious Decline

So which ways of thinking about secularization have emerged instead of the normative prediction that religion will inevitably decline? The three ways – there are always three – in which secularization has been used according to Dobbelaere are referring to either “decline in church involvement, laicization of societal institutions, or to religious changes” (ibid.). The first one is statistically straightforward: increasingly fewer (young) individuals are baptized, attend the services of churches, mosques, synagogues, and so on (Archbishops’Council, 2013; Brenner, 2016; Hooghe et al. 2006); nor do they identify with any institutionalized belonging (Pew, 2018). Secondly, religion might indeed be receding from the public and political sphere (laïcité); but that often (thirdly) seems to have resulted into religion moving to less institutional, more privatized contexts (Shiner, 1967; Parsons, 1977; Dobbelaere 1981; Tschannen, 1991; Gorski & Altinordu, 2008). As Olivier Tschannen argues (1991), many of the most influential works on secularization have been theories of privatization, including Bellah’s Religious Evolution (1964), and Berger’s Sacred Canopy (1967) – in both cases a pluralization of religious organizations leads to religion as a choice for individuals to privately make; and there is a consequent collapse of shared ultimate meaning or a unified value system based on religion. Steve Bruce, in one of the latest defences of privatization-secularization, God is Dead, concludes that:

“individualism, diversity and egalitarianism in the context of liberal democracy undermine the authority of religious beliefs […] religion diminishes in social significance, becomes increasingly privatized, and loses personal salience except where it finds work to do other than relating individuals to the supernatural” (Bruce, 2002, p. 30)

Indeed, scholars such as Bruce have drawn on surveys to show that the importance Westerners place on religion in the form of gods, churches and (Christian) doctrines is waning in countries like England and those like it (Bruce 1995, 2001, 2002; Bruce and Glendinning, 2003; Field, 2001; Voas and Bruce, 2004; Voas and Crockett, 2005).

This might be true, but only when myopically looking at existing historically institutionalized forms of religiosity (Clark, 2012; Shiner, 1967): churches, rituals and what Grace Davie calls “belonging” to classical religious organizations (1990; 1994). Others have argued instead that religion has just changed in ways that secularization theorists had previously not been able to predict, measure or define properly (e.g., Shiner, 1967). In Davie’s example, surveys suggest that Europeans and Brits believe in God, hell, heaven and so on, but just do not attend church or see themselves as belonging to an organized religion (1990; 1994). Whereas Davie looked for traditional religious concepts outside of institutional religion, Thomas Luckmann argues that there are other wholly non-traditional religious beliefs and practices emerging. Even if institutionalized church religion may be in decline (particularly in the West), Luckmann argued that it made way for a more privatized “invisible religion” (1967, p. 103). That is, religion and spirituality appear privately through bricolage (Luckmann, 1967; 1979), an autonomously constructed ‘picking and choosing’ of religious elements, or what has variously been called “do-it-yourself-religion” (Baerveldt, 1996), “pick-and mix religion” (Hamilton, 2000), “religious consumption à la carte” (Possamai, 2003) or a “spiritual supermarket” (Lyon, 2000; cf. Aupers & Houtman, 2006). These individually customized forms of religion are typically theorized as a shift from ‘religion’ to ‘spirituality,’ often identifying the latter with “New Age” and conceiving it as “post-Christian,” “alternative” or “holistic” (e.g., Heelas & Woodhead, 2005; Houtman & Aupers, 2007; Partridge, 2004).

1.2.1. Religious Change and Mediatization

Religious change into privatized bricolage aside, religious themes are also surprisingly prevalent in popular culture. Religious media (and the material mediatization of religious experience) prove to be an enduring form of religious tradition changed into entertainment. Christopher Partridge observes a “re-enchantment of the West” through film, television and popular music, designating such pop-cultural influences as George Harrison and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as popularizing spirituality, the occult and other alternatives to institutionalized religion: a “return to a form of magical culture” through popular media (2004, 40). Indeed, just as popular music of the 1970s introduced tropes from oriental spirituality, so did television in the late 1990s introduce a preoccupation with the occult and alternative religions such

as Wicca, continuing well into the 21st century. Examples by Partridge are hit series such as Charmed, True Blood or Vampire Diaries. We may see the same kind of use of what Partridge calls ‘occulture’ in the popular books and films of Dan Brown, or the Assassin’s Creed videogames – the latter of which came out at the top of Dan Brown’s rising popularity. Both engage in speculative fictions that suggest more is going on beneath the surface of our own societies’ history, by using the mystery of the Catholic church to unearth all types of plots and conspiracies in Jerusalem, the Vatican and old French churches that reveal the magical, mysterious secrets of Opus Dei or the Templars. Lynn Schofield Clark documented ethnographically how teens deal with such interweaving of the supernatural and religion in fiction (2005), and found that teens’ engagement with series like Angel, Buffy or The X‐Files leads them often to reconsider their religious stance against (or sometimes back in line with) organized religion, while speculating about the place of magic and the supernatural in their own belief systems (ibid.).

From a production perspective, fiction author and cunning linguist J.R.R. Tolkien writes on the need for fairy tales, describing his desire to insert “enchantment” back into modern societies through fiction in order to distract from modern, disenchanted daily life (Tolkien, 1939, p. 49). Religion scholar Patrick Curry argues that Tolkien’s and others fantasy writers’ magical, pre-modern, religious worlds answer to “the ‘war’ against mystery and magic by modernity [which] urgently requires a re-enchantment of the world” (1998, p. 19). He adds that Tolkien’s combination of Christianity, neopaganism and liberal humanism,

“[t]aken together, they comprise the whole implicit project of his literary mythology, and a remedy for pathological modernity in a nutshell: namely, the resacralization (or re-enchantment) of experienced and living nature, including human nature” (Curry, 1998, pp. 28-29, emphasis original).

Material religion scholar David Morgan goes as far as to argue that media consumption and religious experience are, in many ways, structurally similar if not fundamentally intertwined. According to Morgan:

“Religion has come to be widely understood as embodied practices that cultivate relations among people, places, and non-human forces—nature, spirits, ancestors, saints, gods—resulting in communities and sensibilities that shape those who participate. […] By the same token, media have come to be understood as technologies of sensation, as embodied forms of participation in extended communities joined in imagination, feeling, taste, affinity, and affect” (Morgan, 2013, p. 347)

In his review of both of these definitions, by ‘widely understood’ he refers first of all to a tradition of research on religion which “departs from an older framework in which religions were defined as systems of ideas to which believers assented” (ibid.; Hoover, 2006; Lopez, 1998; Lynch, 2007, 2012; Orsi, 2005; Zito, 2008; qtd. in Morgan, 2013, p. 347). Secondly, he refers by media communities to the kind of shared community of meanings that Jenkins describes as “participatory culture” (2006), Stolow describes as “a body of readers (and embodied readers)” (2005), and Meyer described as the “sensational form” (2006), of “religious media, acts, imaginations and bodily sensations in the context of a religious tradition or group” (Meyer, 2012, p. 26).

In recent years, these authors have increasingly studied the mediated and material side of religion, meaning that the role of “things,” objects, rituals and media – books, films, games – have been re-appreciated in a “material turn” in studying religion (Meyer & Houtman, 2012; see also Arweck & Keenan, 2006; Chidester, 2000; Houtman & Meyer, 2012; Meyer, 2012). Concretely, belief as merely “an interior spiritualized religiosity” is critiqued as reductive (Meyer & Houtman, 2012; p. 3): a concept of religion that traces its roots to a modern Protestant bias which views religion as sets of rules and an immaterial relation to a superior being (Engelke, 2012; Keane, 2007; Meyer & Houtman, 2012; Pels, 2012; Wharton, 2014). According to authors of material religion, this “assumes a normative requirement that the private interior of individual subjectivity is the proper location for modern religiosity,” which is odd: after all, the material ‘things’ of religion – headscarves, mosques, crucifices – are the site of discussion about the role of religion in the post-secular, seeing as those are “felt to erode the supposed neutrality of the public sphere” (Meyer & Houtman, 2012, p. 2; cf. Moors, 2012). The fear of religious objects and rituals as a threat to secular public