Suchergebnisse

The notion of "invisible religion" is an integral part of the set of theoretical tools that had a decisive impact in the shaping of the classical theory of secularization. It specifically fits the religious trajectory of European societies that built their political modernity in the very long term, by exempting themselves from the supervision of religion. Beyond the extreme diversity of national histories, this historical trajectory formed the matrix of a typical (and relatively homogeneous) modernization process that implies the privatization of religion, the proliferation of individualized small transcendences, and a sharp decline in the social and cultural influence of religious institutions. Starting with the concept defined by Luckmann, the author suggests changing the approach of the process of the "invisibilization" of religion in Europe, by focusing the cultural-encoding function of religion which operates in a completely different manner, but just as powerfully, in all European countries. This approach could open the way to a sociological (both genealogical and "geological") description of the multiple religious modernities that make up the composition of the so-called "Eurosecularity".

This paper proposes—in a deliberately subjective way—a retrospective of the trajectory of the sociology of religions in France since the 1950s. It identifies three moments: they correspond both to typical periods of the French religious evolution since the Second World War and to intellectual problems that have marked the theoretical development of the research. Till the 1960s (the first moment), the classical vision of secularization found its confirmation with the observation of the collapse of the Catholic parochial civilization. A second moment is linked with the discovery of a proliferation of beliefs throughout the allegedly secularized society. A third moment deals with the question of the shaping and transmission of socio-religious identities in a multicultural society, where the need for redefining the very notion of laïcité is at the centre of public debate.