Old and New Gods in the Modern World: Toward a Theory of Religious Transformation

Both in the popular mind and in the social sciences, images of the modern world and the forces that brought it into existence frequently incorporate some notion of secularization as an essential process. Challenging the secularization thesis is the focal concern of this essay; claims of diminishing religious significance are reinterpreted as evidence of religious transformation. The argument unfolds initially by outlining the secularization thesis and identifying its principal weaknesses. Next, the contributions of key sociological theorists (Durkheim and Marx, in particular) serve as a basis for extracting some useful elements of the transformation thesis. Finally, the hypothesis of religious transformation is presented with special reference to the relation between the evolution of sacred symbols and the market and polity dimensions of sovereign organization in the modern world.