Introduction

This lengthy introduction provides the theoretical outline of this book’s proposal, which aims at shaking the discipline. It starts by insisting on the global nature of consumerism and of the rise to dominance of market economics over all dimensions of society and culture. It notes that while other disciplines in social sciences have acknowledged this shift and contributed to show its significant impacts on global societies, economics have been conspicuously ignored in the social scientific study of religion. This has to do with the enduring effects of the secularisation paradigm, which favours institutional and political perspectives. While the development of consumerism and neoliberalism is usually analysed separately, they can best be understood as forming a complex and multifarious set of processes through which economics have dislodged politics as a structuring and embedding force. The hypothesis here is that a political-embedded, National-Statist regime has ceded to a Global-Market one in which economics now play a structuring, embedding role. In the light of the widespread diagnoses of boundary blurring, the discipline’s preference for a differentiated social spheres approach is questioned and set aside in favour of a holistic approach which understands societies as integrated wholes. A first characterisation of global religious changes is given, for which a functional, Durkheimian–Maussian approach is deemed preferable to a conservative, substantial Weberian one. Distinguishing between three levels of religion—religious, religion(s), and religiosity—overriding discussions over ‘the secular’ or ‘secularisation’ is argued to provide a refreshing, comprehensive, and heuristic insight into contemporary dynamics and their transnational unfolding. The introduction ends with an overview of the chapters.