ABSTRACT
It is not unusual to find academic reference to the Christian roots of such modern Western conceptions as individuality or rights, or the Weberian thesis that the historical roots of capitalism lie in the Protestant ethic. Nevertheless, one rarely finds references to links between religion and the institutions of Western modernity in actual practice. This is related to the fact, explored by Casanova (1994), that in many Western countries modernization entailed the development of a secular sphere, with religion increasingly defined as a “private” issue. Civil society, by this logic, is by its very nature secular, as is the modern nation-state. To this we may contrast Chatterjee’s description (1986) of societies responding to colonialism, where there is often a pattern of finding in spirituality a source of identity which allowed them, while recognizing the power of Western science and technology, to validate their own cultures as equal to that of the colonizers. In this context the revitalization of religion, sometimes entailing its own “modern” transformation, can be very much part of a modernizing process, however ambiguous that modernization may be.
