ABSTRACT
Often when religion is discussed the topic is not about religion, as such. Religion becomes a catch-all category for other issues, topics and concerns.1
This chapter aims to tease out what some of these concerns may be if religion is viewed as a stand-in category. From the vantage point of modern multi-faith and multicultural societies religion becomes a topic that concerns the recognition of religious pluralism and of cultural differences, and hence cultural encounters between groups, especially in the context of the complexity of the modern world. When one speaks of ‘the modern world’ it is also a less than straightforward concept. In the history of concept formation it has often been referred to as secularisation, modernisation and historical progress. In more recent social theory the concept of ‘multiple modernities’ has emerged as a way of capturing both the regional diversity of modernising impulses, and the modern reality of living with its multiple dimensions, often in long-term historical contexts. One can critically draw on Habermas’s engagement with the term post-
secular as a way of looking at the problem of encounters and coexistences of multiple modernities and religiously constituted forms of belief and ways of life. It is here that religion can also be a signal for the way in which such intersections and coexistences may be articulated, ignored or dogmatically or fundamentalistically ‘resolved’. This chapter is concerned with the way in which this intersection may be articulated democratically. Moreover, the intersection itself opens onto the way in which the social
meaning, which is imbedded in the intersections between religion and modernity, is socially produced or created. In other words it opens onto the nature of socially produced meaning itself, and religion has also often become a standin category through which the problem of the creation of meaning has been articulated. This issue of the social creation of meaning has often been conceptualised in terms of a great divide between the pre-or non-modern and the modern. Within the classical traditions of the social sciences, of which sociology and anthropology are its handmaidens, Durkheim’s work, more than any other, asks whether the distinction between religious and modern societies that besets the founding tradition is a robust distinction. In summary, then, religion may
become a stand-in category for the topics of modernity, encounters between it and religiosity, and the production of social meaning. In order first to explore the topic of the production of social meaning, our analysis will begin with Durkheim’s notion of the sacred, before turning to the problem of religion and modernity.
