Conclusion

The phenomenon of religion, it appears, has outlasted all former predictions concerning its gradual marginalization and final eradication through humanity’s ongoing enlightenment or, what proponents of this subtraction story usually call, progress. Charles Taylor is perhaps the currently most recognized demythologizer of the subtraction narrative. He has shown that one’s view of religion inevitably influences one’s interpretation of history together with one’s consequent views and expectations of social developments. Most importantly, Taylor demonstrates that the West’s passage to the cultural period known as modernity is not unambiguously positive. For those who still adhere to Freud’s view of religion as an individual or collective neurosis, its “return” appears as an unwelcome regress to primitivism. Compared with the rest of the world, of course, this Whig history of religion written and disseminated by a comparatively small Western academic elite is pretty much an anomaly, a fact which does not keep its adherents from clinging to it with an almost fundamentalist zeal. Yet, religion has maintained its social importance.1 Sociology can answer the question about religions’ staying power only to a limited extent; the real answer, as philosophers and theologians have claimed repeatedly, lies deeper, and they do not eschew the idea of a common human trait: if human beings are meaning-making animals, or “moral believing animals,” as one sociologist put it,2 then religion remains the deepest cultural expression of a higher good as the ultimate resource for exploring perennial human questions about life. As we have argued in the introduction, and as the contributions in this volume have shown, religion is a vital source for inspiring human visions of society and for social action.