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This article draws on a global, 15-nation comparative study of religion, politics, and the state. The three countries at issue here may seem more peripheral than central to Europe, but all represent important aspects of the late 20th-century European experience—whether the tension between religion and secularity in Poland, the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or the final sigh of religious disestablishment in Sweden. While unpacking these different scenarios, the author uncovers a shared phenomenon of “cultural religion”.

This paper contends that the social scientific study of religion has long labored under a chafing constraint and a misleading premise. It suggests that our primary focus should be on the sacred, and that religion is just one among many possible sources of the sacred. Defining religion "substantively" but the sacred "functionally" helps to resolve a long-standing tension in the field. Broadened conceptions of the sacred and of "sacralization" help to defuse the conflict among the two very different versions of secularization theory: the "all-or-nothing" versus the "middle range." Meanwhile, a conceptual typology of the sacred pivots around the intersections of two distinctions (compensatory vs. confirmatory and marginal vs. institutional). This generates four distinct scenarios: the sacred as integrative, the sacred as quest, the sacred as collectivity, and the sacred as counter-culture. The paper concludes with three admonitions for research in the area.One hundred years ago today, and barely minutes away, it is not unreasonable to suppose that William James was ensconced in his Cambridge study hard at work on the Gifford Lectures that were later published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience. Since this is a day for looking back, it seems only right to pay homage to a social scientist whose work on religion predates the major works of even those great lions of the hunt, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Nor has James yet been relegated to the remainder tables (cf. Capps and Jacobs, 1995). Indeed, Varieties recently passed my personal test of a living classic when I realized I had left the copy at home that I had planned to read on a train trip, and so ducked into the station's paperback book stand on the off chance of finding a suitable replacement. Lo and behold there it was -and the only book in that tiny collection of paperbacks even remotely pertinent to our mutual interests today.Of course, James would not have passed Durkheim's muster. James was a psychologist not a sociologist, and one who focussed on what Weber would later call the religious "virtuoso" rather than the "mass" or its institutions. Still, James shared with Durkheim and Weber a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, he, like them, was religiously "unmusical" in his personal life. On the other hand, he, like them, provided an epiphanal account of religion's importance.Like all true classics, the works of all three scholars not only beckon us backward but propel us forward. Both directions are appropriate on a day that marks a 50th anniversary on the eve of a new millennium. As a way of pointing towards the future, James, Durkheim, and Weber share a paradox within a paradox. While all three were deeply aware of religion's importance, they were also aware that religion is not as singular in its consequences as in its attributes. All three were attuned to alternative and equivalent experiences that could be significant for either the individual or the collectivity. This is a theme I want to develop further, one that is hinted at in the de...

Civil religion denotes a religion of the nation, a nonsectarian faith that has as its sacred symbols those of the polity and national history. Recent scholars have portrayed it as a cohesive force, a common canopy of values that helps foster social and cultural integration, but this perspective may now be at odds with a complex reality. Ours is an increasingly differentiated society with the rise of group politics and subcultures. The forms of civil religion remain, but the cultural cohesion it purportedly reflects is dissolving. Civil-religious discourse has become a tool for legitimating social movements and interest-group politics. A critical examination of the current uses of civil religion must lead to a critical reanalysis of the society at large as well as the concept itself.