Reimagining God and Resacralisation

Alexa Blonner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429624452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

This book shows that widespread resacralisation has been taking place, which is producing new ways of perceiving God and the divine. The last century has seen unmistakable changes in religious practices and the concept of spirituality right across the world. There was a broad expectation for much of the twentieth century that religious worldviews would eventually succumb to the challenge of secularist materialism, but this process of secularisation has yet to occur as predicted.

The book begins by contrasting theories of secularisation and resacralisation. Throughout the book, conceptual threads, or 'new religious themes', related to this resacralisation are discussed in terms of three main categories: reimagining God's nature, substance and location; reimagining human value and purpose; and reimagining modes of redemption. Finally, the book considers how these threads are moving in various different directions, and what the religious future might hold.

This is a bold examination of contemporary spirituality that will appeal to academics and scholars of religious studies, new religious movements and the sociology of religion.

1 The changing face of religion

The world of religion has been changing monumentally and profoundly. This can be seen first in the dramatic currents that have engulfed the major world faiths. Modifications in sermon language and worship style have occurred in many Protestant parishes.¹ Leonard Swidler likened Vatican II, held between 1962 and 1965, to a ‘Copernican turn’ in Catholicism, so wide were its modernisations.² In Judaism, what are being called ‘emerging’ forms, where a predominantly young adult cohort has been opting for self-sustained and operated ‘sacred communities’ as opposed to formal, traditional congregations, have been ballooning in North America since 1997.³ ‘Neofundamentalist’ and Islamist movements have been impacting Islam. These come in varying stripes, but all idealise what Olivier Roy calls a ‘deterritorialisation’ of Islam to achieve a worldwide ummah replete with a restored caliphate.⁴ In India, the Brahmins have been increasingly challenged by moderated versions of Hinduism that sidestep their time-honoured authority and customs. Traditional Buddhism too has been confronted by new versions that downplay its customary statues, incense and chanting in favour of more ethics-based applications.

The second indication is the proliferation of new non-traditional religious forms. Countless new sects, religious movements, spiritualities and para-religious groups have appeared over the last few centuries. Several Neo-Christian sects, such as the Pentecostal Assemblies of God and Church of God and the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, doubled their memberships in the United States between 1965 and 1985.⁵ Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity has more recently gone on to a worldwide expansion so extensive that some predict it will surpass Roman Catholicism as the dominant form of Christianity before the end of the 21st century.⁶ Neo-Eastern spiritualities have likewise been proliferating. The Baha’i Faith has accumulated a following in the millions since its founding 150 years ago and is now regarded by scholars as a new world religion. The Unification Church, now officially known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, despite disputes over direction and succession arising both just before and since the death of its founder Sun Myung Moon in 2012,⁷ has been steadily increasing its numbers and influence in the Far East and other areas such as Southeast Asia and Africa. Soka Gakkai and Sathya Sai Baba Centres are other new Asian religions that have spread to a significant degree. Neo-pagan faiths and New Thought approaches have likewise attracted sizeable interest.

The third area of change is growth in the number of persons who are vacating formal religious involvement. The trickle of reduction in religious attendance that was noted in the 1960s has now become a torrent.⁸ Northwestern Europe has been the most affected. As just one example, a 2008 study in Germany found that though some 80% of its citizenry nominally belonged to a church, only 3–4% attended religious services with any regularity and fewer than 50% of Germans believed in life after death.⁹ Buddhism too is losing ground in its strongholds. In Thailand, the number of monks has drastically fallen over the last few decades despite a mushrooming population.¹⁰ Whereas a generation or so ago, most people adhered to the dominant religious practice and belief system of their region, recent polls and censuses indicate that the number of religious ‘none’s’ is steadily increasing.

Such de-religionisation has been taken by many as supporting the long-proposed and widely accepted theory of secularisation.¹¹ At one time, secularisation was taken practically as an article of faith in the discipline of sociology.¹² The classical secularisation thesis goes approximately like this: As people increase in affluence and education, they will reject sacred narratives as explanations of reality and religious inclination will fade into insignificance.

The ‘cult boom’ of the 1970s and 1980s and other events such as the Iranian Revolution threw the secularisation thesis into less certain territory. It was not the poor and uneducated who were at the heart of these movements but an educated middle class. The resurgence of religious interest in former Communist countries since the 1990s further shook the theory.¹³ The more recent flood of Christianisation outside the West has rendered classical secularisation theory all but dead in the minds of many. Some have tinkered with the theory to soften its edges, but alternative theories that religion is adapting itself to changing times and situations by de-traditionalising, often referred to as resacralisation or re-enchantment, increasingly have found favour.¹⁴

This book, based on my doctoral thesis, supports this alternative but elaborates to show that the process is deeper and more complex than a simple matter of adaptation, or even resurgence or revitalisation as terms like ‘resacralisation’ and ‘re-enchantment’ imply. The radical new interpretations concerning the nature and substance of deity, the purpose of human existence and the relationship between the sacred and mundane that have been gathering steam for some centuries now are more indicative of a gigantic rethink of key theological premises. Former Harvard Divinity School professor Harvey Cox, initially a secularisationist, concluded that religion is ‘mutating’,¹⁵ which is a highly apt metaphor for what has been afoot.

I became more acquainted with the depth of such change through a questionnaire I distributed in 2013 as part of my doctoral research. This questionnaire was designed to measure the degree and type of religious change that might have occurred in participants’ lives. I had two small control groups (composing 58 persons) and one general group (composing 40 persons). Lack of resources to mount a larger study resulted in the findings being too small to be considered ironclad, but they were often surprising and yielded highly useful clues for research directions.

The first surprise was that the change ratio turned out to be much higher than expected. Though some 90% of respondents (whose average age was 45 to 65) had been raised in a conventional religion (Protestant, Catholic or Jewish), barely 10% still pursued an active association with their birth religion, though another 10% at some point had changed to and remained active in another church or religion. In other words, only 20% of the religiously raised people in my samples had remained actively religious. A further 20%, although having become inactive, did still identify with either their birth religion or another one. A further 20% did not identify or associate with any specific denomination but regarded themselves as ‘generic’ Christians and loosely retained the doctrines and values with which they had been raised.¹⁶

That the remaining 40% of the religiously raised group no longer felt any attachment to any religion could be taken as support for secularisation were it not for the fact that the vast majority of these ‘none’s’ nevertheless gave expression to some kind of religious or spiritual outlook. A very large proportion, for instance, claimed to believe in the existence of some kind of Supreme, Supernatural Power; they often said religious or spiritual concerns were very to moderately important to them; many prayed or meditated at least occasionally; the majority admitted to having had ‘sacred’ experiences at least on occasion, sometimes even frequently; and they sometimes expressed certain doctrinal beliefs, such as belief in life after death.¹⁷ Although the overall ratio of non-belief had increased within a generation in my sample roughly from 10% to 18%, interest in spirituality and the sacred per se was far from absent.

Other research also supports broad retention of religious/spiritual belief/interest, though it must be acknowledged that the proportion has been diminishing. In 2009, 71% of Australians acknowledged belief in the existence of God in some form, which was significantly lower than the 95% of 1950, and the amount and frequency of uncertainty had also increased.¹⁸ A Eurobarometer survey came up with a 79% God-belief for Europeans in 2005,¹⁹ which had decreased to 77% by 2010.²⁰ A 2017 Pew survey of non-Muslim Western Europeans found 26% did not believe in God in any form.²¹ A 2017 Pew poll had American God-belief at 90%,²² down not that much from the 94–96% of the 1940s.²³ A compilation of Gallup polls showed that although religious identification, faith and practice was in decline in the United States, belief in the existence of God was still at 89% as of 2016,²⁴ a ratio very similar to the Pew finding.

Similar to my results, although the number of religious ‘none’s’ has grown unambiguously, that does not equate with lack of belief. The 2017 Pew poll cited previously found that seven out of ten American religious ‘none’s’ believed in some type of God.²⁵ ‘None’s’ sometimes refer to themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR). A study by Linda Mercadante that involved 90 in-depth interviews with self-inscribed, unaffiliated SBNRs found a high level of interest in sacred matters, though belief structures were likely to be heterodox.²⁶ British sociologist Grace Davie, on the basis of similar British data, famously labelled the rise of religious ‘none’s’ as ‘believing without belonging’.²⁷

More pertinent to the subject of this book, what my questionnaire responses further alluded to was a definitive change, even among active Christian believers, in the type of God in which they believed. Although most had been raised with the traditional anthropomorphic God, when asked what kind of God they currently believed in, the most frequent choice from a list of options was a supernatural Spirit, Force or Power. Others saw God as a universal Force of Love, or as Nature, or man with a capital M. Several said God was ‘all of the above’. Others ventured thoughtful personal descriptions: God is the ‘All of Everything’; God is the ‘universal energy and frequency that connects everything in this world and beyond’; God is a ‘universal power/force that can be manipulated by man’; God is ‘the life force that dwells in all things, from deep space to minuscule atoms’; God is ‘NRG’. In my sample, the traditional anthropomorphic, Big Man in the Sky God had moved distinctly to a minority position.

It was not only changed conceptions concerning God’s substance to which my questionnaire results pointed but also God’s gender. Rather than the male Being of traditional belief, God was more frequently held to be genderless, or second, as a male-female Spirit or Power.

Still another change that was indicated concerned God’s location. Traditionally, in the Abrahamic religions at least, God has been believed to reside outside or beyond the material realm. But in the questionnaires, God’s location was most often described as concurrently outside materiality (transcendent) and within it (immanent), with God thought of secondarily in terms of immanence alone. Only a small minority looked upon their God as wholly transcendent.

Yet another important change to emerge was the extent to which Scripture no longer dictates moral choice. Even practicing Christians...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The changing face of religion
• 2 The great emergence in outline
• 3 Reimagining God’s substance, nature and location
• 4 Reimagining material value and purpose
• 5 Reimagining redemption
• 6 A new Sacred Canopy
• Bibliography
• Index