New Frontiers and Relations between Religion, Culture and Politics in Western Europe

Abstract

Sociology was born as a discipline that analyzed the process of modernization of Western European societies. However, in turn, this science was developing a predictive, prophetic vision of the future of human communities, assuming that they were all going to follow paths similar to those followed by Western Europeans. This prophetic dimension reduced the capacity of sociology to analyze new phenomena including, on the one hand, phenomena relating to other societies, on the one hand, but also, on the other hand, phenomena related to the transformations suffered by Western European societies after their process of modernization. This last case constitutes the objective of this work, in which I try to recover the purely analytical character of sociology. To this end, I intend to relate the general model of the political modernization of Western European societies elaborated by historical sociology to the theory of social differentiation, avoiding the evolutionary drift of this theory. From that position, I try to specify the analytical nature of some conceptual instruments of sociology, in order to make them more useful to understanding the contemporary social transformations of Western European societies. Some of these transformations have changed the tendency towards the cultural homogenization characteristic of modernization, because after the two world wars these societies began to receive strong flows of immigration.

Religion as a Human Right and a Security Threat—Investigating Young Adults’ Experiences of Religion in Finland

“…On the other hand, the "Secularist orientation" highlighted the need for a fundamental separation of religious institutions and the secular state. These views are in many ways in line with and relatable to the processes of modernization and secularization that have become characteristic not only of Finland but also many other Europe countries (see also Casanova 2009;Pérez-Agote 2018;Taylor 2007).…”

“…In addition to ideologies, religions are frequently discussed in relation to migration as often objections or concerns related to immigration are linked to questions about the core values that define a nation-state (e.g., Ben-Porath 2012). In the European context, the 'Western' and 'European' identity has been primarily shaped by the processes of modernisation that emerged in Western Europe in the mid-19th century together with the emergence of secular values (e.g., Taylor 2007;Pérez-Agote 2018).…”

Historical Sociology and Secularisation: The Political Use of ‘Culturalised Religion’ by the Radical Right in Spain

“…Faced with these simultaneous trajectories, the critique of secularisation theory since the 1980s has opened up the opportunity to re‐examine recent history and study the causality of processes (Barkey, 2009, p. 713) in order to discover a more complex past of secularisation than that sometimes depicted by secular myth (Turner, 2010, p. 651). This is confirmed by the sociologist Pérez‐Agote when he points out that, from the critique of secularisation, two paths open up for analyzing the past: genealogy and historical sociology (in Pérez‐Agote, 2018, p. 2). In parallel to this “socio‐historical” opportunity to nuance secularisation, the different conceptual categories that have emerged in recent decades, such as “culturalised religion”, provide the theoretical framework for this journey between the past and present, which also benefits from the contributions that historical sociology provides for this endeavour.…”