ABSTRACT
‘Religious modernity is individualism’: this proposition – which has assumed an infinite variety of forms based upon observations drawn from all the Western societies – constitutes the leitmotif of theoretical reflection upon the contemporary evolution of religion. Religious individualism was no more responsible for modernity than was modernity for the invention of religious individualism. The moment of ultra-modernity corresponds to the most recent instalment of the modern individualism: that of an invasion by the theme of personal realization of the subject, an episode that Jean Baudrillard would designate in the early 1980s, as the time of ‘psychological modernity’. The specificity of new religious movements comes not from their completely new way of bearing witness to the ‘triumph of the individual’ but rather from their pushing to its logical consequences the incorporation of the spiritual quest in a psychological modernity characterized by the individual concern for self-fulfilment.
