Modernity

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MODERNITY

MODERNITY . Many factors working together have generated interest in modernity and religion. Among these are an increasing consciousness of the many human societies that now exist, an awareness of previous societies recorded in history, and a recognition of the overwhelming variety of cultures associated with them. The constellation of cultural characteristics associated with the modern period is very different from that normally associated with an isolated tribal culture, a medieval peasant society, or a transitional society of the early modern period. To talk of religion is to identify a particular set of cultural attitudes and activities that point to the deep sources of power in a culture, how humans relate to that power, and the corresponding, codified beliefs and behaviors surrounding it. Each concept is highly complex; to discuss the relationship between them compounds the challenge.

For some time it has been a sophisticated convention to assume that the progressive extension of scientific knowledge sparked the emergence of dynamic Western societies and the extension of their influence. The subsequent triumph of reason and rational behavior over ways of thought and patterns of action associated with traditional cultures was more or less taken for granted. Thus it seemed logical to expect that religious beliefs and behaviors would be forced to the periphery of societies that were becoming modern. By extension it seemed conceivable that religion would disappear altogether. Yet in fact, evidence has suggested that religion, far from disappearing or losing influence, has a prominent place in modern societies. Indeed, religions play many different roles in modern societies, and these societies in turn play back upon religion a wide variety of effects. The term modernity refers to the cultural conditions that set the terms for all thought and action in a particular culture. Religious beliefs and behavior cannot be unaffected, even when those who espouse some religion consider themselves untouched by their cultural location. Just as religion remains a cultural reality in modernity, so there can be no escape from modernity, even through a wholehearted appropriation of a comprehensive religious tradition.

Defining Modernity

Modern, modernism, modernization, modernity, and related terms, taken alone, qualified, or compounded, are used every day in the popular media as well as in specialized journals and technical exchanges. The ubiquity of these terms is due in part to the shifting sets of meaning they carry. To clarify the current discussion, I propose certain distinctions between these terms.

First, modern is a correlative term; it implies what is new as opposed to what is ancient, what is innovative as opposed to what is traditional or handed down. However, what is judged modern at a particular time and place in a culture will not necessarily be defined as such either in the future or in some other context. Students of religion, especially, who by definition are interested in cultural patterns viewed in a longterm framework, must not fail to put in perspective changing perceptions of what is "new" and what is "old." Since a judgment about what is modern is a matter of the perspective of the observer, phenomena that appear similar may in fact vary considerably depending on their context. Thus, "modern architecture" of the mid-twentieth century now has a distinctly dated look. Similarly, nineteenth-century symphonic music must have seemed "modern" to those brought up on the baroque, but outmoded to those brought up on Stravinsky and Hindemith.

Second, the terms modernism and modernization represent, respectively, cultural and social attitudes or programs dedicated to supporting what is perceived as modern. Modernism entails a kind of explicit and self-conscious commitment to the modern in intellectual and cultural spheres. It involves a commitment to support the tenets of the "new" in the face of critics, opponents, and detractors. In this it parallels the commitment to modernization, a programmatic remaking of the political and economic aspects of society in support of the "new." This distinction implies that it is more appropriate to speak of modernism in nineteenth-century French Roman Catholicism, or in twentieth-century American Protestantism, or even among those who espouse contemporary versions of ancient Indian traditions, than it is to refer to the "modernization" of a religious tradition. Conversely, it is appropriate to refer to the modernization of a factory plant or its organization of production, or of a tax structure. Modernism would normally not be a useful designation with respect to such matters—unless we speak about factory architecture in the one case or art objects as shelters under the tax code in the other.

Thus it is inappropriate to refer to the "modernization" of a religion unless we mean as part of a self-conscious, perhaps largely social and political, program. On the other hand, modernism in this context implies a commitment (and usually a cultural program in addition) to render religion compatible with more general commitments in other areas. But is modernism divisible? Attitudes toward art, music, drama, religion, and so forth usually hang together and form a powerful set of interactive commitments. Indeed, such a set of cultural ideals may be related to economic and political change as designated by modernization. The conviction that cultural modernism is often associated with programs for social modernization frequently evolves into a more general belief that secularization is relentlessly supplanting the old with the new. In its extreme form this argument concludes that a process of secularization makes claims upon those involved with it that exhibit a religious character, or that seem like religion in that they are ultimate, unqualified, and beyond review.

Only at this point does the term modernity enter our discussion. It explicitly identifies an openness and a commitment to the new as opposed to the old. Our move to the term modernity brings us to the consciousness of cultural change. Yet a further move attributes a congruence to the many aspects of a modern culture that makes them appear to be the expression of an entity powerful and coherent in its own right. This third step effectively serves to reify the term modernity. To take this step will generally promote confusion in our thinking. It is not helpful to use the term modernity as if it referred to a spiritual medium in contemporary life that necessarily rivals religious traditions. It is much more helpful to use it in a prereified or nonreified way as a means of recognizing that cultural change and awareness of that change are pervasive in contemporary societies. What depends upon this distinction between reified and nonreified uses of modernity ?

One unfortunate consequence of reifying the term modernity is that it settles by definition an issue that ought to remain under discussion. To conceive of modernity as a spiritual medium that envelops and interconnects all particular instances of commitment to the modern, whether through modernism or modernization, is to posit an implicitly religious phenomenon, for it assumes that modernity plays the cultural role or roles characteristic of religion. As a consequence, modernity is seen as a rival to traditional or "authentic" religion. An important implication of this view is that religion in a modern society is regarded dichotomously. Either an individual or group is thought to be "for" modernity (and thus against traditional religious commitments) or "for" traditional religion (and thus antipathetic toward modernity in any and all forms). In its most intense version, this dichotomy is characteristic of every period of cultural change known to us and especially of the period we know as the modern one. Under conditions of social and cultural change, and of modernity in particular, one of many responses will be an attempt to reaffirm traditional cultural forms, albeit in highly selective and often strident versions.

Cultural Change and Modernity

It is important to explore, at least briefly, the distinction between cultural change and modernism. Stated exactly, the latter is a special case of the former. Cultural change has been a given in human societies throughout every period of which we have knowledge. There have been some periods of more, and others of less, intensive social and cultural change; but certainly no society we know anything about has been altogether free of cultural change. Records of ancient societies and cultures do not permit refined distinctions, but access to more recent historic examples allows some generalizations. Certainly it is possible to identify characteristic religious responses to periods of intensive cultural change. One is the development of the dichotomous view of the world upon which we have already remarked—"civilized" versus "barbarian," "believers" versus "heretics," and so forth. Another response has been the enhancement of orthodoxy, orthopraxy, or tradition in both ancient and recent examples of interaction between cultures as well as within a single culture. A third is the frequently recurring millenarian or apocalyptic response to cultural change. Here change is experienced as so threatening and intense that it is believed a "big change" will necessarily occur.

Cast in this framework, modernity, too, is a special category of social and cultural change. It is, to be precise, social and cultural change embraced self-consciously in the contemporary world. Some characteristic attitudes toward religion mark modernity, but they tend to be special cases of the more general attitudes toward change and not exclusively related to religion. For example, modernity includes a systematic commitment to rationality, that is, a conviction that logically consistent and universalizable principles ought to be the basis for change. Again, modernity tends to undervalue the role of symbols and the subconscious. A third and related attitude is that human life is highly malleable. This set, and the preceding enumeration, is certainly not a full set and is surely a special case of attitudes to social and cultural change. But it is also a special case, because it is self-conscious, of conceivable responses to that larger and more universal phenomenon of social change. Hostility on the part of religious traditions to the modern, especially when cast as a rejection of modernity, is itself as much a characteristic response to social change as its opposite, the enthusiastic acceptance of change by a confirmed modernist. An explicit and positive attitude toward social change is no more directly related to the experience of change than is a negative response. Both are typical attitudes of individuals and groups throughout history who have been religiously sensitive to social and cultural change.

If modernity is not reified as a spiritual entity, and if modernism is recognized as a special and self-conscious case of positive response to social and cultural changes, our proper subject is how religion appears to respond and vary under the conditions of self-conscious social and cultural change in the contemporary world. If we distinguish the fact of cultural change from a postulated, spiritualized, and thus reified modernity as the controlling commitment, we are then in a position to review what seems to happen to religion under the conditions of prolonged change—or at least what has happened in social contexts that have been so characterized. Specifically, in an era that is conscious of the new, are there characteristic changes in religion, especially in relationship to the modern?

The Impact of Modernity on Religion

If we take modernity in this descriptive sense, the decisive commitment to modernization socially and to modernism culturally is first to be observed as a coherent process in the United States. It may be thought that revolutionary France in the last decades of the eighteenth century or Japan in the late twentieth century represent more thoroughgoing examples of commitment to the "modern." Certainly, for brief periods other societies may well have manifested an intense and thoroughgoing commitment to change. But over time, at least to date, American society has set about more thoroughly than other societies to overcome traditional ways and self-consciously to replace them with new ones. It is here that the best exhibits are available, and exhibits over time, of the kinds of cultural changes attendant upon the systematic modernization of society. Further, the actual changes we can observe in religion seem to be remarkably heterogeneous, that is, the changes by no means run in one direction only. How can we best summarize what happens to religion under conditions of modernity?

One useful distinction at this point is between responses to modernity that are explicitly keyed to the whole scope of a religious tradition, and those effects that represent the taking on of a coloration from modern society or that are evidence for generalized, nonspecific influence of modernity. It is preferable to consider the latter kind first, since these effects are ubiquitous; this will enable us in turn to review without confusion explicit religious responses to modern life.

Bureaucratization and rationalization

Some of the changes to be observed in religion relating to the modern world clearly derive from the permeation of religious institutions by techniques and procedures developed in other sectors of the society. For example, European-derived (and certainly American-begun) church traditions have adopted much from the business world. These techniques or procedures are inevitably centralizing. This is apparent, for example, in communications: telephone calls have taken the place of pastoral letters, written reports preempt personal visits, revivals and healing services are often televised rather than held locally. Other consequential changes have to do with the liquidity of wealth; even as successful a promoter as the evangelical John Wesley could not have imagined the means available to the contemporary Methodist (or Roman Catholic) church to generate financial resources and shift their allocations throughout a worldwide, well-organized structure.

Adoption of these kinds of management technique potentially strengthens the hands of central religious leaders. But the same modern society also extends to laity the knowledge and ability to challenge such a transfer of power to central authorities. Countervailing trends, then, are at work, leading both to enhanced localism in the parishes and to the creation of extraecclesial religious organizations. Like centralized religious organizations, the latter make use of techniques widely used in the modern world (media appeals, direct mail campaigns) to raise and dispense funds and to exercise influence. These techniques often are used independently of, if not against, more established ecclesiastical authorities whose power is thus countered.

Other kinds of changes characteristic of the modern world also permeate religious behavior. Many have to do with the high degree of rationality required to function in societies of the scale and complexity characteristic of the contemporary world. One example of this concerns the ordering of time. In the past, traditional religions imposed, or at least sanctioned, a structuring of time to include myriad festivals and feasts. In our society such patterns are in tension with broad social (and especially economic) objectives, so they no longer carry much weight. Thus we can observe certain new constraints or limitations on traditional religion as it impinges on the modern public world. Correspondingly, however, the relevance and influence of religious traditions in the realm of private time and space receive greater emphasis.

These are examples of what we might term the "coloration" through which "new" or modern societies influence all kinds of religious behaviors and beliefs in very basic ways. This "coloration" is thoroughly comparable to the codification of religions in the idioms and through the symbols of particular periods and societies, whether nomadic, pastoral, or urban. The degree of penetration by context is different in the contemporary world in some respects, but it is not a different kind of penetration. Thus religion is generally affected in the modern era but not solely in terms of conscious response to social and cultural change as represented in modernity.

Religious responses to modernity

There is, however, a contrast between this coloration or permeation of religious traditions and much more explicit religious responses to social change as represented in modern society. Especially as exhibited in American society, these responses may be seen to fall into five categories.

One kind of response is the advocacy of new religious ideas or the claim to new insights into ancient religious traditions. This frequently entails embracing the "new" in the name of correctly understanding the old. One dramatic example of this response in North America is the Oneida Community of the nineteenth century. Its founder, John Humphrey Noyes, believed that the spiritual sources for the new modern common life of his community flowed from early Christianity, whose tenets the community claimed to fulfill. Another interesting case is that of Christian Science. Its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, believed that she had correctly interpreted Jesus' teaching, indeed the essential message of early Christianity, which she thought to yield "modern" insights into healing. Many contemporary religiously innovative groups find their sources not so much in Western traditions as in Eastern lore and ritual. (In these cases, too, the connection with healing is often pronounced.)
Another response is self-conscious accommodation of religious traditions to modern society, often in very explicit terms. Indeed, here the term modernist is frequently used pejoratively with respect to religion. Into this category fall such well-known adaptations as Protestant liberalism (with European as well as New World versions), the Jewish Reform tradition (which of course had its origins in accommodation to modern European culture at the time of the Emancipation), and Roman Catholic Americanism in the late nineteenth century (a largely indigenous movement).
A third pattern of response is the determined attempt to preserve the continuing tradition, albeit self-consciously within limits posed by the new framework. In many respects this strategy undergirds various churchly responses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to modern societies, ranging from the proliferation of mainstream Protestant denominations to the careful and restrained Roman Catholic updating of tradition that became highly visible as a result of the Second Vatican Council and to the self-conscious but limited case of the isolated Mercersburg Movement of antebellum nineteenth-century America.
A still different pattern, infrequently recognized as equally a response to modernity, is the strident reassertion of a presumed tradition in a condensed, purified, or even reductionist form. The strands of "fundamentalism" in most of the major religious traditions of the globe are to be interpreted in this light. In this perspective, fundamentalisms, as the simultaneous reduction and enhancement of particular traditions, are no less than modernisms determined by the modern culture that they so stridently reject. Here also American society provides the most fully developed instances of fundamentalism, specifically within denominations with a self-consciously British heritage and especially among Presbyterians and Baptists.
A final pattern in the religious response to social change in the modern world is the generation of wholly new traditions. This entails celebration of the modern in often bizarre and idiosyncratic ways, although it may also take the form of recovering pagan traditions or exploiting exotic or esoteric beliefs. These new religions are explicit attempts to reject old traditions rather than to accommodate them. But in the larger sense they are also a response to the intense social and cultural changes experienced by people living in the modern era.

This fivefold pattern is, to be sure, an arbitrary division, for the lines between these five types are always shifting. But it serves to point out that the explicit relationships between modern cultures and religions are not single or of one kind only. They vary greatly. Indeed, the relationships are so plural that respective religious movements responding to perceptions of modernity in different ways may in fact be directly opposed to each other. The classical confrontation between liberalism (or modernism) and fundamentalism in American culture is a prime exhibit of this antagonism between essentially related, though very different, responses to a common cultural experience.

Conclusions

Modernity has proven to affect religion in heterogeneous ways, both explicit and implicit. The various explicit religious responses range from a strong and strident reassertion of traditions, frequently on a reduced basis, to outright and uncritical celebration of cultural change. In this the term modernity most usefully refers to the kind of intense social, and hence cultural, change that especially characterizes Europe and America, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but that has extended to other cultural areas a well. This period is not unique, however, for in earlier periods something like the same pattern of a range of religious responses to social change has been evident. Religious life within the Roman Empire may be a useful parallel. With respect to the second kind of response—the implicit level of coloration provided by purely technological aspects of contemporary society—it does seem helpful to identify a peculiar cultural configuration exclusively with "modernity." But this coloration extends as much to the activities of critics of the modern as it does to its partisans. Finally, a significant point is that the modern is not to be seen as itself a spiritual medium, that is to say, a unique religious stance.

When taken together, the concepts of modernity and religion identify the broad range of religious responses to intense and self-conscious social change in the contemporary world. What is uniquely modern is not the particular religious responses to change per se but their variety, intensity, and duration in the contemporary world. Crucial is the insight that religion is not so much threatened by modernity as challenged by it. And the challenge involves an inevitable and implicit coloration of virtually all religious behavior as well as a forcing of responses of many kinds, some direct, some indirect, all to some degree explicit, in the realm of religious belief. In these terms, the concepts of modernity and religion encompass a subject as fascinating as it is complex.

Bibliography

The subject of modernity has been most fully explored in the social sciences because it has offered a rubric under which scholars can analyze the relentless social change characteristic of the contemporary world. This field looks back to the work of Max Weber, who first gave substantial attention to the relationships between religion and the emergence of modern societies. His Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons (London, 1930), has continued to provoke strongly positive and negative scholarly responses. The following general discussions of modernity may be particularly useful in the current context: David E. Apter's The Politics of Modernization (Chicago, 1965); Cyril E. Black's The Dynamics of Modernization (New York, 1966); and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt's Tradition, Change and Modernity (New York, 1973). For a different treatment of the question, see Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), by Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith. An interpretation of American history under the same rubric is available as Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York, 1976) by Richard D. Brown.

Recent discussions of religion depend heavily on anthropological and sociological perspectives, each of which introduces its own implicitly comparative framework. See the essays (especially that by Clifford Geertz) in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Banton (London, 1966). Anthony F. C. Wallace's Religion: An Anthropological View (New York, 1966) is also useful.

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann collaborated on an influential study, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N.Y., 1966), but subsequently have explored somewhat different sociological perspectives on religion in the modern world. Berger's The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, N.Y., 1967) and Luckmann's The Invisible Religion (New York, 1967) give different estimates of the status of religion in contemporary society. Berger also collaborated with Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner in The Homeless Mind (New York, 1973), an explicit consideration of how religion is affected by modernization.

Among studies of particular episodes of religious change in modern societies, William R. Hutchison's The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass., 1976) is a fine study of liberalism in American culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On this topic also see Kenneth Cauthen's The Impact of American Religious Liberalism (New York, 1962). Ernest R. Sandeen's The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago, 1970), sharply focuses on the question of sources. George M. Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York, 1980) is a superb study that suggests the broader sources of this movement and its implications.

Whitney R. Cross's The Burned-Over District (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950), an older case study of religious responses to the extreme social change of upper New York State in the early nineteenth century, suggests how religious movements as diverse as revivalism, Mormonism, and the Oneida Community could originate under the same social conditions. See also Paul E. Johnson's A Shopkeeper's Millennium (New York, 1978), a case study of the Rochester Revivals, for one model that explicitly relates religion to rapid social change. Religious Movements in Contemporary America, edited by Irving I. Zaretsky and Mark P. Leone (Princeton, 1974), is a compendium of essays on new religious movements.

On the expectation of "big changes" induced in a society whose culture is threatened, see Kenelm Burridge's New Heaven, New Earth (New York, 1969). Millennial Dreams in Action, edited by Sylvia L. Thrupp (New York, 1970), a broader discussion of millenarianism, suggests additional perspectives on this phenomenon.