What happens when the boundaries between religion and other institutional spheres such as politics, economy, education, care, and the arts are blurred? This question calls for renewed attention to the public sphere, stretching from the prominent presence of religion in contemporary politics to the public significance of individual faith among younger generations.
Despite ongoing secularization as generally observed in quantitative studies of religion in Europe, religion continues to play an important role in the public sphere, including in politics, civil society, and social media. The role of religious institutions and discourses in recent political events—such as the US elections, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the continuous rise of populist movements in Europe and beyond—shows the need to reflect on the shape of the public sphere and its prominent actors. These events also present an opportunity to critically rethink the place of religion in ‘modern’ societies beyond theories of privatization and differentiation.
This meeting of the ESA RN34 Sociology of Religion focuses on the volatile relations between the religious and the secular, particularly where the religious ‘leaks’ into the secular and vice versa. We welcome papers that examine how secular institutions take on ‘religious’ characteristics and how religious organizations or groups incorporate secular elements into their practice. The conference aims to further our understanding of how current developments—such as globalization, neoliberalism, the rise of authoritarianism, and digitalization—influence and transform values, social relations, and religious communities and shape new ways of meaning-making and religious experience. Research projects on all three levels of analysis (macro, meso, and micro) and their interactions are invited.
