The religious situation in Europe: The background to contemporary conversions

Social Compass

Volumn 46, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 251-258

  Luckmann, Thomas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KONSTANZ   (Germany)

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EID: 0033442584     PISSN: 00377686     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003776899046003002     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Although I had read many years ago some of the literature on the subject - mainly about conversions from nominal membership in one of the established Christian churches to a sect, and about conversions to Buddhism and Hinduism by Europeans and Americans - I did not follow recent work in this area. The one marginal exception to my lack of competence in this area is related to a different kind of research. Some time ago I started to investigate the communicative processes by which collective memories are formed. With several colleagues I looked at the ways in which past events, actions or whole segments of life are re-created in the present, especially in oral communication. Among the many forms and genres which we investigated were also conversion narratives. But as I indicated, our interest - to the extent that one can separate interest in formal from one in substantive aspects - was in the structure of these narratives, not in what the narratives were about. In short, even that work was not concerned with conversion as such. Cf. Bernd Ulmer, "Konversionserzählungen", in Jörg Bergmann et al., eds, Rekonstruktive Gattungen (in preparation).
2. I articulated my views on the social forms of religion in a book (The Invisible Religion) and a number of essays and papers, the latest of which, "The Social Forms of Religion at the End of the 20th Century", is about to be published in the Proceedings of the Conference On Identity and Conflict: The Mediterranean, of the Forum per i Problemi della Pace e della Guerra, Firenze, 1997. Most of what follows in this and the next section is taken from that essay.
3. The original insight dates back to Herbert Spencer.
4. Cf. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Modernity, Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning, Gütersloh, 1995.
5. Eileen Barker, New Religious Movements. A Practical Introduction, London, 1989.
6. Cf. Hubert Knoblauch, "Neues Paradigma oder Neues Zeitalter. Fritjof Capras moralisches Unternehmen und die 'New Age-Bewegung'", in Jörg Bergmann, Alois Hahn and Thomas Luckmann, eds, Religion und Kultur, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 33, 1993.
7. Despite some obvious likenesses, one must distinguish this kind of fundamentalism from the organized violent response to the cognitive and emotional strains which, in addition to their very serious demographic, economic and political problems, similar conditions produce in many modernizing societies. The challenge to traditional religious legitimations, especially in the Muslim countries, was much more sudden and more radical than in the original core areas of the western processes of modernization. In addition to the highly unequal costs of incipient modernization and the demographic explosion, the loss of cognitive security seems to have contributed to the widespread anti-modernist reactions among substantial segments of the populations of these countries. Support from the small, generally disenfranchised professional and other middle classes, and recruitment of activists (and terrorist cannon fodder) among the masses of the dispossessed young were indispensable for whatever success such reactions could reap. Cf. Gilles Kepel's contribution to the Proceedings ... op.cit. Note 2.
8. Cf. Gabriela Christmann, "Die Ziele und Utopien von Akteuren der Okologiebewegung", Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 19, 1993.
9. I make more elaborate observations on this matter in my "Kanon und Konversion", in Aleida and Jan Assman, eds, Kanon und Zensur, Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation, München, 1987.