Jose Casanova - Private and Public Religions

Private and Public Religions
Author(s): JOS CASANOVA

Source: Social Research, Vol. 59, No. 1, Religion and Politics (SPRING 1992), pp. 17-57
Published by: The New School
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Private and Public /
Religions / BY JOS CASANOVA
Binary distinctions are an analytic proce-
dure, but their usefulness does not guaran-
tee that existence divides like that. We
should look with suspicion on anyone who

declared that there are two kinds of
people, or two kinds of reality or process.1
'Jy all social phenomena, none is perhaps as protea

consequently, least susceptible to binary classificat
religion. Of all dichotomous pairs of relational terms, few
as ambiguous, multivocal, and open to discoursive contest
as the private/public distinction. Yet the private/public d
tion is crucial to all conceptions of the modern social
and religion itself is intrinsically connected with the m
historical differentiation of private and public spheres.
As inaccurate as it may be as an empirical statement, to
that "religion is a private affair" is nonetheless constitut
Western modernity in a dual sense.2 First, it points to th
that religious freedom, in the sense of freedom of consc
is chronologically "the first freedom," as well as the prec
tion of all modern freedoms.3 Insofar as freedom of
conscience is intrinsically related to "the right to privacy," th
1 Mary Douglas, "Judgements on James Frazer," Daedalus, Fall 1978, p. 161.

2 This duality is best expressed in the dual clause of "no establishment" and "f
exercise of religion" written into the First Amendment of the United Stat
Constitution.
3 Cf. Thomas J. Curry, The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of
the First Amendment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); William Lee Miller,
The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic (New York: Knopf, 1985); Georg
Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion
Press, 1979).
SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring 1992)
18 SOCIAL RESEARCH
is, to the modern institutiona

from government intrusion
control, and inasmuch as "the
very foundation of modern
individualism, then indeed th
essential to modernity.4
There is, moreover, yet an
privatization of religion is
emergence of the modern so
modern world "religion becom
very process of institutional di
tive of modernity, namely, to
whereby first the political
sphere emancipated themselve
well as from religious norms. R
to evacuate the modern secular
economy and to find refuge in
Like modern science, capital
bureaucracies manage to func
This forms the unassailable core of modern theories of
secularization, a core which remains unaffected by th
frequent assertions of critics who rightly point out that mos
people in the modern world still, or yet again, believe
God and that religions of all kinds, old and new, manage
thrive.5
Theories of secularization, however, have greater difficul
in answering those critics who point out that the modern wa
of separation between church and state keep developing a
kinds of cracks through which both are able to penetrate eac
other; that religious institutions often refuse to accept th
4 H. J. McCloskey, "Privacy and the Right to Privacy," Philosophy 55 (1980); Edw

Shils, "Privacy: Its Constitutions and Vicissitudes," Law and Contemporary Problems
(1966); Barrington Moore, Jr., Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History (Armon
N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1984).
For a review of theories of secularization see, Jose Casanova, "The Politics of the
Religious Revival," Telos 59 (Spring 1984).
PRIVATE AND PUBLIC RELIGIONS 19
assigned marginal place in the private s

assume prominent public roles; that reli
mixing up in all kinds of symbiotic relati
that it is not easy to ascertain whether one
movements which don religious garbs or r
which assume political forms.6 Above
unrelated yet almost simultaneously unf
with profound and still reverberating hist
gave religion the kind of global "publicity
reassessment of the role of religion in
Those four developments were: the Islamic
the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the eme
Fundamentalism as a factor in American e
the role of Catholicism in the Nicaragu
many other political conflicts throughout
Thus one is confronted with the seeming
religion in the modern world continues
privatized, one is also witnessing simulta
to be a process of "deprivatization" of r
this paradox we need to reexamine on
meanings of the distinction between
religions. The purpose of such a conc
should not be to develop an exhaustive a
classificatory scheme. Such a taxonomic
likely prove both impractical and futil
reasons for which all attempts at develo
of religion have proved unsatisfactory so
conceptual clarification attempted in th
aim, indeed a threefold one: (1) to serve as
the interpretation of what could be calle
6 Cf. Thomas Robbins and Roland Robertson, eds., Chur

and Transitions (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Boo
and Anson Shupe, eds., Prophetic Religions and Politic
1986) and Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsidere
1989); A.James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life
Institution, 1985).
20 SOCIAL RESEARCH
religion" in the modern world;

theories of secularization dou
theories of modern social p
prescriptive theories of mode
legitimize ideologically a particu
tionalization of modernity; an
religions may not play a rol
boundaries between the privat
modern world.
On the Private/ Public Distinction
There are so many different and outright contradictory

ways in which the terms "public" and "private" are being used
in everyday language as well as in social-science terminology
that one may only wonder why no call has been heard yet to
drop those terms altogether. Despite the apparent disagree-
ment as to how to draw the ever-shifting conceptual
boundaries, there seems to be at least a tacit agreement that the
terms are unavoidable and therefore ever open to contestation.
As in the case of so many other basic concepts of the social
sciences, a constantly changing historical reality and the
self-understanding of social actors keep interfering with
presumably detached and neatly drawn analytical schemes. Of
the various recent attempts to impose some analytical order
upon the reigning conceptual confusion, Jeff Weintraub's
study, while by no means exhaustive, is probably the most
systematic and illuminating. In "The Theory and Politics of the
Public/Private Distinction," Weintraub reconstructs and exam-
ines critically four major ways in which distinctions between
"public" and "private" are currently drawn in social analysis:
(1) "The liberal-economistic model, . . . which sees the
public/private distinction primarily in terms of the distinction
between state administration and the market economy."
(2) "The republican-virtue (and classical) approach, which
sees the public' realm in terms of polit

citizenship, analytically distinct from bot
administrative state."
(3) "The approach, exemplified for example by the work of

Aries (and other figures in social history and anthropology),
which sees the 'public' realm as a sphere of fluid and
polimorphous sociability."
(4) "A tendency ... in certain kinds of economic history and
feminist analysis, to conceive of the distinction between
'private' and 'public' in terms of the distinction between the
family and the market economy (with the latter becoming the
'public' realm)."7
It would seem that some of the terminological disagreements
are due to the difficulties of fitting the reality of modernity,
which at least since Hegel has been known to be tripartite- that
is, family, civil society, and state- into the binary and dichoto-
mous categories of "public" and "private," which to a large
extent derive from the dualistic differentiation of the ancient
city into oikos and polis. The novelty of modernity derives pre-
cisely from the emergence of an amorphously complex yet au-
tonomous sphere, named variously "civil society" (Ferguson,
Hegel), "bourgeois society" (Marx), "the social" (Arendt), or
simply society, which stands "between public and private" proper
yet has expansionist tendencies aiming to penetrate and absorb
both. This modern social sphere is itself the result of a complex
historical fission and fusion of separate elements of the oikos
and polis, which were to come together undifferentiatedly in the
medieval manor. The lord of the manor combined the tripar-
tite dominion of the domestic patriarch, the economic landlord,
and the administrative sovereign, which would later become
7 Jeff Weintraub, "The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction," paper
presented at the 1990 APS A Meeting in San Francisco, p. 4. My present analysis, as
well as my most recent formulation of the "deprivatization" of modern religion, is
heavily indebted to Weintraub's paper as well as to several conversations in which he
rightly pointed out the way in which my earlier formulations tended to collapse the
distinctions public/private, political/nonpolitical, and communal/individual.
22 SOCIAL RESEARCH
differentiated into the domestic sp

ciational/economic sphere of brge
ministrative sphere of the state.
aries between the three spheres,
and constantly shifting, thus cr
tween the three. Indeed, each of t
to have both private and public d
Since social reality itself is not
binary categories leads necessarily
tion of one of the poles, leavin
amorphous residual category, or
the two extreme poles, leaving a
sphere between public and priv
instance, which begin with a clea
sphere, understood either as the
or as the intimate sphere of dom
tend to include all the rest into an
"the public." E. Goffman's sociol
illustration. What Goff man cal
embraces the entire realm of face
the "face-to-face interaction wit
lishment."9 The private sphere
"backstage" where the individual c
donning the theatrical persona wh
in the strategic performance of "i
places. By contrast those liberal co
delimitation of the public sphere
sector tend to include all other s
ated "nongovernmental" private se
8 See, for instance, Joseph Bensman and R

Public: The Lost Boundaries of the Self (New Y
9 Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Micro
Basic Books, 1971), p. ix.; The Presentation of S
Doubleday, 1959); Encounters (New York: Bo
Places (New York: Free Press, 1963); Interact
1967); Strategic Interaction (Philadelphia: Univ
10 For a reconstruction as well as critiques
But as Weintraub points out, some

differences between the various posi
terminological, nor are they simply due
tions as to where the actual empirical bou
itself. To a large extent they reflect "d
theoretical (and ideological) commitment
they are normative counterfactual cr
historical differentiation between th
spheres in the modern world, as well as id
the conceptual reifications which serve
modern historical trends. On the one hand, one finds
classical/republican critiques of the modern tendency to reduce
the political to the governmental sphere of the administrative
state, a tendency which contributes to the dissolution of the
specifically "public" sphere as a realm of political community
based on citizenship; similarly, one finds classical/republican
virtue critiques of modern utilitarian individualism with its
tendency to reduce the public interest to the aggregation of
individual private interests, or to private morality, reducing it
to subjectivist emotivism or solipsist value-decisionism.12 On
the other hand, one finds feminist critiques of the dichotomy
between a male, public, political, and immoral realm and a
female, private, apolitical, and moral realm.13
private, see S. I. Benn and G. F. Gaus, eds., Public and Private in Social Life (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1983).
11 Weintraub, "Theory and Politics," p. 2.
12 Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958), and On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963); Jrgen Habermas, Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), and "The Public
Sphere," New German Critique 1 (Fall 1974); Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1960); Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and
Public Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Alasdair Maclntyre, After
Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Robert N. Bellah et
al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985).
13 Cf. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981), and "Moral Woman and Immoral Man: A Consideration of
the Public-Private Split and Its Political Ramifications," Politics and Society 4 (1974);
Carole Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy," in Benn and
24 SOCIAL RESEARCH
One could certainly apply th

conceptualizing the private/Pu
field. The result would be four d
religions, that are indeed so
conceptual differentiations
scientific study of religion:
(1) Established vs. Disestablished

ization corresponds to the old
of church and state. In the tradition of liberal discourse,
established state churches are public, while disestablished
churches are private. Since the liberal conception, however,
tends to confuse state, public, and political, the disestablish-
ment of religion is understood and prescribed as a simulta-
neous process of privatization and depoli ticization. Religion
ought to remain a private affair. The liberal fear of
politicization of religion is simultaneously the fear of establish-
ment which could endanger the individualist freedom of
conscience and the fear of a deprivatized ethical religion which
could bring extraneous conceptions of justice, of the public
interest, of the common good, and of solidarity into the
utilitarian calculus and the rational choice of individual agents.
In this respect, liberalism would fear most of all republican
civil religion. The limits of the liberal conception show in the
paradoxical contrast between the highly depoliticized- that is,
privatized- religion of the established Church of England (or
of any national church which accepts Erastian principles) and
the at least potentially radical posture of free, congregational,
"leveling" sects, ready to clash with a sinful state. The liberal
conception is correct, however, in anticipating that the
combination of disestablishment and a free religious market
will tend to lead to diffuse, apolitical, pluralist denomination-
alism.
Gaus, Public and Private, pp. 291-303; Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds.,
Feminism as a Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
(2) Civil Religions vs. Alternative Religious

republican approach, by contrast, would d
on the one hand, public civil religions functi
the political community and, on the other
cults, associational community cults, and
gions of salvation. The tension here woul
particularism of an ethical community w
citizens into a compulsory political cult co
political community and competing allegia
primordial forms of community. More corr
civil religions, however, are those soter
messages which liberate the individual from
to the political community, freeing the
individualistic, inworldly or outworldly, road
join other individuals to form wider, univ
communities which transcend the particular
community, be it a city-state or a nation
problem for the republican tradition is
religion, that is, how to harness the powe
religion without exposing itself to the th
which, if triumphant, would eliminate th
political sphere. If successful, however, E
similar attempts to exert secular control
institutions will lead to the very impairm
field will be open for either iconoclastic pro
political idolatry or privatistic soteriological
Bellah's work on American civil religion ex
dilemmas.14 Can the republican, the biblic
individualist traditions be combined with
each other? Can American civil religion be a
the patriotic cult of the manifest imperi
14 Cf. Robert Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedal

Covenant: Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Seabury
and Phillip Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (New Yo
Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart; R. E. Richey and Donald G.
Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
26 SOCIAL RESEARCH
American nation or the cult of

pursuing their own private util
would undermine republican
republicanism will prefer to
sphere and pursue the secular r
(3) Individual Mysticism vs. Den

the approach of social historia
boundaries between the privat
sphere of polymorphous sociabi
approach of sociologists like E
between the presocial individu
interaction, then one would
individual religiosity and all kin
of associational religion.16 Th
sponds to the well-known typol
Ernst Troeltsch called "indivi
religion," which is becoming on
of religiosity, and the no le
voluntary, individualistic, and p
"the denomination." Although
tripartite typology, the denom
absorb, if not to supersede, the other two forms of
organizational religion, "the church" and "the sect."17 In a
typical German idealist fashion, Troeltsch conceived "church,"
"sect," and "individual mysticism" as the three alternative yet
equally authentic forms of institutionalization of the Christian
idea in the world. Indeed, his magisterial reconstruction of the
history of Christianity is built as the logical and systematic
15 For a critique, see Benjamin I. Schwartz, "The Religion of Politics: Reflections on

the Thought of Hannah Arendt," Dissent 17 (March-April 1970).
16 For a magisterial example of this approach, see the monumental five- volume
work, Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, eds., A History of Private Life (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1987- ).
17 Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1960).
unfolding of these three forms through hist

reason, Troeltsch could not have anticipated
that which H. Richard Niebuhr called "the evil of denomina-
tionalism,"18 since the denomination is not a form of
institutionalization of the Christian idea, but rather a form of
adaptation of religious organizations to the institutionally
differentiated structure of modernity.
It is a commonplace of sociological analysis that the
differentiation of autonomous spheres leads irremediably to a
pluralism of norms, values, and worldviews. Max Weber
attributed "the polytheism of modern values" to this differen-
tiation.19 Undoubtedly, the differentiation of the spheres leads
to conflicts between the various gods (Eros, Nomos, Mars,
Leviathan, Mammon, Muses, etc.). But this conflict can be
institutionalized and contained through systemic differentia-
tion.20 In any case, this is not the true source of modern
polytheism. If the temple of ancient polytheism was the
Pantheon, a place where all known and even unknown gods
could be worshiped simultaneously, the temple of modern
polytheism is the mind of the individual self. Indeed, modern
individuals do not believe generally in the existence of various
gods. On the contrary, they tend to believe that all religions
worship the same god under different names and languages,
only they reserve to themselves the right to denominate this
god and to worship him/her/it in their own peculiar language.
Thomas Paine's "My mind is my church" or Thomas Jefferson's
"I am a sect to myself" are the paradigmatic "high culture"
expressions of the modern form of individual religiosity.
Deism, the typical fusion of individual mysticism and
18 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Henry

Holt, 1929), p. 24.
19 Max Weber, "Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions," "Science as
a Vocation," and "Politics as a Vocation," in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, eds., From
Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).
20 This is shown by the tradition of social systems analysis from Talcott Parsons to
Niklas Luhmann. See particularly Niklas Luhmann, The Differentiation of Societies (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
28 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Enlightenment rationalism, is
sions. "Sheilaism" is the name wh
the contemporary "low culture"
persons they interviewed actually
herself. In describing "my own
in God. I'm not a religious fana
time I went to church. My faith
Sheilaism. Just my own little v
"This suggests the logical pos
American religions, one for each
modern polytheism is not idola
this particular sense, the cult o
indeed, as foreseen by Durkheim,
While sensing that individual my
the future, Troeltsch could not
form. "Since it arose out of the failure of the real ecclesiastical
spirit," Troeltsch writes, "it finds it difficult to establish
satisfactory relations with the churches, and with the condi-
tions of a stable and permanent organization."22 In America,
however, individual mysticism found a fertile soil. Evangelical
pietism, "the religion of the heart," was the vehicle which
served to spread individual mysticism, democratizing and
popularizing it, as it were, throughout American Protestant-
ism; while denominationalism, the great American religious
invention, became its organizational form. Indeed, pietism
occupies in the modern transformation of religion the same
place which Maclntyre attributes to emotivism in the trans-
formation-that is, dissolution- of traditional moral philoso-
phy.23 The doctrinal basis of denominationalism already
emerged with the First Great Awakening. But, as in Europe,
the institutional structure of established churches and sectarian
dissent, even though already highly pluralistic, did not permit
21 Bellah et al., Habits, p. 221.

22 Troeltsch, Social Teachings, p. 997.
23 Maclntyre, After Virtue.
it to crystallize. First disestablishment an

Great Awakening transformed Protestant
alike into denominations. By midcentury,
Protestantism, organized denominationally
the culturally, though not politically, est
religious system.24 Following World War
Judaism were added to the system. "Protes
became the three respectable denomina
American religion; while President Eisenhow
as long as each American had a religiou
didn't care what kind it was. The great relig
tion of the 1960s left the denominational ga
by 1970 with the Welsh decision, the Suprem
always regulated the rules of entry into the
denominational, religious market, basical
willing to play by the rules- including "th
certainly occupy in the life of that individua
that filled by ... God' (cf. Seeger, 1965) in tr
persons." It is the denominational structu
subsystem which transforms all religions in
tive of their origins, into denominations.25
In a comprehensive historical-sociological w
turing of American Religion: Society and Faith S
Robert Wuthnow documents in detail
internal denominational ties, the recess of in
conflicts and prejudices, and the increasin
mobilization of religious resources across rat
24 Cf. Sidney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the America

University Press, 1972); Sidney Mead, The Lively Experiment: T
in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); George Mara
American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980
Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (Chicago: University of C
25 Cf. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden C
Robert Wuthnow, Experimentation in American Religion
California Press, 1978); Charles Glock and Robert Bellah
Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1
"Religious Movements and Modern Societies: Toward a Pro
Sociological Analysis 40 (1979); Robbins and Robertson, Churc
30 SOCIAL RESEARCH
the denominations. However,

"the declining significance
actually it is further indication
ism.26 From its inception in th
the three great revivalist p
Jonathan Edwards, Anglican Ge
rian Gilbert Tennent, crossed th
respective established churche
meant the absolute exclusiv
denomination. Those "born ag
enced" individually the redeem
have always tended to feel cl
spirits in other denominations
own. Once the denominations
individual religious experienc
form and the doctrinal content
become ever more secondary.
to switch denominations to find their own faith. This does not
indicate the declining significance of denominationalism, but

rather the triumph of its principle.
Even typologically classical sects like Protestant Fundamen-
talism or the classical church, the Una, Sancta, Catholica, et
Apostolica Roman church, are externally constrained and, more
importantly, internally induced to function as denominations.
The myriad "independent" Fundamentalist churches and
preachers, each and every one of them holier and more
Fundamentalist than the other, proclaiming "their own"
literalist interpretation of the same fundamentals of the same
Christian faith, that are contained in the same text, the Holy
Bible, attest to the power of modern individualism. Individual,
private reading of any text forms a very shaky ground for
doctrinal Fundamentalism. When those myriad Fundamental-
ist atoms leave their self-imposed private sectarian seclusion in
26 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1988), ch. 5 and passim.
order to organize themselves publicly in

or, in what amounts to the same, when those individual
resources are skillfully mobilized by political entrepreneurs for
collective action, then Fundamentalism becomes just another
denomination.
The Catholic church is exposed to similar internal and

external pressures. Recent visits of the pope to America have
shown conclusively that American Catholics are more than
ever willing to express publicly and effusively their union
with the "vicar of Christ" and their loyalty to the Holy See.
But like other modern individuals, American Catholics also
seem to reserve for their own consciences the ultimate
inalienable right to decide which doctrines from the
traditional deposit of faith are truly essential. Even whe
Catholic individuals accept voluntarily the authority
certain teachings as dogma, the interpretative problem,
leeway, still remains. The meaning and relevance of an
written or oral text for any given context still requir
interpretation. Increasingly, moreover, it is individuals w
are doing the interpretation. Thus, car stickers to the
contrary, Roma dixit, or the fact that God has spoken lo
and clear, does by no means settle the matter. The history
the great religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity, a
Islam, irrespective of the fact whether they have hierocra
ecclesiastical institutions or authoritative schools of interp
tation, shows that they are all caught in the same doctrin
interpretative quagmire. When modern structural differen
ation and religious individualism are introduced, one fin
everywhere the same logic of denominationalism at work.
any case, in America one religion after another- Protesta
churches, Protestant sects, Catholicism, Eastern Christiani
Judaism, Eastern religions, and, lately, Islam- have becom
denominations, both internally and vis--vis one another.
remains a historically open question whether one should vi
religious developments in America as yet another instanc
perhaps the most striking one, of American "exceptionalism,
32 SOCIAL RESEARCH
or whether one should rather

as harbingers of the modern
(4) Home vs. Religious Market.

the religious field the distinctio
some modes of economic analys
"work" and the private dom
course, the antonym of "wor
The distinction, nonetheless, describes the actual modern
historical process of separation of the workplace from the
household. Moreover, it plays a critical function in drawing
attention to a dual process constitutive of modernity. It shows,
in the first place, that under modern conditions of commodity
production only the sphere of salaried employment is
recognized as "work," thus excluding from consideration and
reward (power, status, wealth) the entire sphere of human
reproduction, from parturient "labor" to child rearing to the
entire gamut of domestic activities connected with the
reproduction of the labor force, all of them activities in which
female exertion and work is preponderant. Such a develop-
ment contrasts most sharply, for instance, with the model of
the ancient city where, by definition, oikos- that is, the
household- was the sphere of "work," the sphere where all
forms of human "labor" took place.27 Additionally, it points to
the fact that under modern capitalist conditions the sphere of
leisure itself has been commodified and transformed into the
autonomous sphere of "culture," the sphere where cultural
objects are produced, distributed, and consumed.
When applied to the religious field, the distinction between
"public" work and "private" home immediately shows the
ambiguous place of religion in the modern world. On the one
27 Hannah Arendt's philosophical anthropology, as developed in The Human

Condition, is based upon such a particular historical formation. Arendt chose to live in
the categories of the Greek mind rather than reflect unreflectively, as most modern
philosophies do, modern categories derived from the separation of "home" and
"work."
hand, one could say almost categorically

to the sphere of culture. Indeed, historica
as attested by anthropology, cultural hist
analysis alike, "the core" of culture.
sociological analysis of religion, moreo
religion in the modern world, like th
exposed to the forces of commodificat
situation," writes Peter Berger, "is above
In it, the religious institutions become m
the religious traditions become consumer
it is symptomatic of the uncertain pla
modern world that theories of modern cu
established field of the sociology of cu
religion altogether. It is understood, at
culture one means exclusively "secular"
It is the feminist critique of the public
split which perhaps illuminates best the
modern privatization of religion. To sa
private affair" not only describes a
institutional differentiation but actually
place for religion in social life. The pla
assigns to religion is "home," understood
but as "the abiding place of one's aff
Home is the sphere of love, intimacy, subj
ity, emotions, irrationality, morality, spir
This domestic sphere, moreover, is the
excellence. Indeed, Ann Douglas has app
the historical process of privatization o
place in the first half of nineteenth-c
process of "feminization."29 As femin
philosophers have pointed out, moreove
religion and morality had impoverishin
28 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, N.Y.

Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (N
34 SOCIAL RESEARCH
private and the public realms

became so sentimentalized and
public power but also public
discoursive rationality and ac
morality became simply matt
This privatization went actua
"irreverent" and "in bad tas
publicly. Like the exposure o
confessions are considered no
privacy but also an infringeme
others. The consequences for th
equally significant. Politics a
"amoral" spheres, realms fr
considerations ought to be exc
The most systematic analysis o
religion along these lines is to be found in Thomas
Luckmann's Invisible Religion.31 Luckmann radicalized the
thesis of secularization by arguing, first, that traditional
religious institutions were becoming increasingly irrelevant
and marginal to the functioning of the modern world, and that
modern religion itself, moreover, was no longer to be found
inside the churches. The modern quest for salvation and
personal meaning had withdrawn to the private sphere of the
self. Anticipating later analysis of narcissism and of the "new
30 Ehlstain, "Moral Woman and Immortal Man"; Rosemary Radford Ruether, "The
Cult of True Womanhood," Commonweal, Nov. 9, 1973. Paradoxically revealing is
moreover the fact that, as pointed out also by feminist critics, the public male/private
female split runs also internally through most religious institutions. Ministry and
ecclesiastical office are reserved predominantly, in some denominations still
exclusively, for males; while the laity and churchgoers tend to be disproportionately
female. Actually, it is this most female of spheres which reveals as perhaps no other
sphere the signs of patriarchal domination. Cf. Mary Daly, The Church and the Second
Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985); Rosemary R. Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a
Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).
31 Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1967). In the
following presentation I have drawn freely, at times literally, upon my own earlier and
more elaborate presentation of Luckmann's thesis. See Jose Casanova, "The Politics of
the Religious Revival," Telos 59 (Spring 1984): 9-12.
religious consciousness," Luckmann a

expression" and "self-realization" had b
religion" of modernity. Luckmann's ex
theories of institutional and role differentiation. Modern
differentiation leads to a sharp segmentation of the vario

institutional domains, whereby each domain becomes
autonomous sphere governed by its own "functionally ra
tional" internal norms. The person qua person becom
irrelevant for the functionally rational domains, which come
depend increasingly on abstract, impersonal, replaceable r
performances. Since the individual's social existence becomes
series of unrelated performances of anonymous specializ
social roles, institutional segmentation reproduces itself
segmentation within the individual's consciousness.
Moreover, since religious institutions undergo a process
differentiation and institutional specialization similar to that
other institutional areas, religious roles also become speci
ized, part-time roles within the individual conscience. Th
more the performance of the nonreligious roles becom
determined by autonomous "secular" norms, the weak
becomes the plausibility of the traditional global claims
religious norms. Consequently, "a meaningful integration
specifically religious and nonreligious performances a
norms with their respective jurisdictional claims remain
problem."32 In principle there are several typical solutions
the problem, from (a) "a prereflective attitude in which o
shifts from 'secular' to religious performances in routin
fashion," to (b) a reflective reconstitution of individual
religiosity after some search, to (c) the adoption of competing
"secular" value systems. Crucial is the fact that the individual
can and, thus, has to choose at least implicitly one of those
solutions. Irrespective of the choice, the solution will be,
therefore, an individualistic one. The free choice, in turn,
determines the consumer attitude which the "autonomous"
32 Luckmann, Invisible Religion, p. 86.
36 SOCIAL RESEARCH
individual manifests vis--vis a

buyer, the individual confro
gious" representations, tradit
secular new ones, manufact
specialized service agencies,
constructs and reconstructs-
with like-minded selves- a
system of ultimate meanings.
Significant for the structur
fact that this quest for sub
personal affair. The primar
economy) no longer need nor
sacred cosmos or a public r
words, modern societies do
"churches," in the Durkheimian sense, that is, as moral
communities unified by a commonly shared system of
practices and beliefs. Individuals are on their own in their
private efforts to patch together the fragments into a
subjectively meaningful whole. Whether individuals are able,
moreover, to integrate the segmented performances into "a
system of subjective significance" is not a relevant question
for the dominant economic and political institutions- so long
at least as it does not affect adversely their efficient
functioning. In any case, it is amply evident that capitalist
markets and administrative states can live with a lot of
individual and social "anomie" before reaching a Durkheim-
ian crisis of social integration. Luckmann shows, moreover,
how the modern sanctification of "subjective autonomy" and
the retreat of the individual to the private sphere serves de
facto to legitimate and reinforce the "autonomy of the
primary institutions." In this respect, Durkheim was correct
in viewing "the cult of the individual" as a social product, as
the new social form of religion which modern societies have
created for themselves. But, as Luckmann points out, "by
bestowing a sacred quality upon the increasing subjectivity of
human existence it supports not only the secularization but
also what we called the dehumanization of the social

structure."33 Luckmann ends by noting pessimistically
even though one may view such "dehumanizing" mo
trends as undesirable, they may have become noneth
"irreversible."
Religious Revivals
Undoubtedly, one could continue elaborating more system-

atically different aspects of the various types of private and
public religion along these four semantically different versions
of the private/public distinction. It seems evident, however,
that irrespective of the way in which one draws the line,
structural historical trends seem to constrain religion toward
the private pole. It is important to stress and recognize the
enormous directional inertia of these modern historical trends,
before one begins to evaluate the potential counterinertial
force of what appears to be recent trends toward deprivatiza-
tion or, at least, the reassertion of old and new forms of
"public" religion. Only then can one recognize the truly
unexpected novelty of the public outbreak of "religion" in the
70s and '80s on a global scale. Such public outbreak not only
took most people, layman and expert, by surprise, but it has
forced a reassessment of the taken-for-granted theories of
secularization which were dominant in the social sciences.
Moreover, only then can one begin to offer a credible
interpretation of the historical significance and real potential
of what appears to be newly emerging countertrends.
This is not the place to attempt an interpretation of what has
been variously called "the return of the sacred," a worldwide
"religious revival," "the coming of postmodernity," etc., even
though this paper is meant as a preliminary conceptual
clarification before such an attempt at interpretation. I would
only like to present somewhat categorically three series of
53 Ibid., p. 116.
38 SOCIAL RESEARCH
remarks, before continuing to

public religion/private religion
conceptual perspective.
First, before one speaks of any
to specify whether one has in
religions in any of the sense
individual religiosity was alive an
I have seen no evidence that peo
world were more religious in t
were the 1980s a particularly p
and growth of "new" religions
proliferation of "new religious
consciousness," "religious exper
which tended to fade out in the 1980s. What was new and
unexpected in the 1980s was the assumption of public roles
and the revitalization of precisely those religious traditions
which both theories of secularization and cyclical theories of
religious revival had assumed were becoming ever more
marginal and irrelevant in the modern world. Indeed, as Mary
Douglas has rightly pointed out, "no one credited the
traditional religions with enough vitality to inspire large-scale
political revolt."34 The two best-known cyclical theories of
religious revival are based on the assumption that functional
need, in the one case for meaning, in the other for
compensation, is the mother of religious invention.35 Conse-
quently, the sacred should have returned there where its
absence created the greatest need and we should have
witnessed, therefore, religious revivals precisely in those
societies where the process of secularization had gone the
34 Mary Douglas, "The Effects of Modernization on Religious Change," in Mary

Douglas and Steven M. Tipton, eds., Religion and America: Spirituality in a Secular Age
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), p. 25.
35 Daniel Bell, "The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of
Religion," British Journal of Sociology 28 (1977); Rodney Stark and William Sims
Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985).
furthest- Sweden, England, France, Ur

them representative secularized societi
gious traditions. But the public resurg
place in Poland, the United States, Bra
etc., all places which can hardly be charac
wastelands. What we witnessed in the 1980s was not the return
of the sacred where religious traditions had dried out, but

rather the resurgence, revitalization, and reformation of old
living traditions which are actively reacting to changes in their
societal environments. The social sciences, particularly the
sociology of religion, should pay less attention to "invisible"
and exotic "new" religions and more attention to the old
historical religious traditions which, theories of modernization
and secularization to the contrary, have managed to stay alive.
Second, one should be cautious before abandoning all too
hastily and uncritically a theory of secularization which gained
quasi-paradigmatic status within the social sciences and which
for so long has served rather well to make sense of relevant
modern historical processes. Undoubtedly, the theory of
secularization ought to be reconsidered, as any other theory, in
view of new empirical evidence. Clearly, the theory should be
"desacralized" and freed from the "secularist" ideological
antireligious bias which it acquired when it emerged as a
central part of the Enlightenment critique of religion.36
However, as Karel Dobbelaere has pointed out, "sound
methodological practice demands an evaluation of the facts in
light of the theory" before one discards it.37 In other words,
one should first see whether the old secularization theory may
not be able to explain the new facts better than new competing
theories. Dobbelaere's analysis points to two aspects which are
central to the most systematically developed theories of
36 Jeffrey K. Hadden, "Desacralizing Secularization Theory," in Jeffrey K. Hadden
and Anson Shupe, eds., Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsidered (New York:
Paragon House, 1989).
37 Karel Dobbelaere, "The Secularization of Society? Some Methodological
Suggestions," in Hadden and Shupe, Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsidered, p.
28.
40 SOCIAL RESEARCH
secularization. First, "since se

evolutionary sequence, we shou
events along an ordinal scal
secularization are basically subt
of modern differentiation.
This essay is not the place to challenge some of the general

premises of evolutionary theories or of functionalist theories of
differentiation by pointing to some of the well-known pitfalls
and limits of such theories.38 But Dobbelaere's position implies
that if one were able to challenge successfully those theories of
secularization, one would also have challenged functionalist
theories of modernity, since they are so intrinsically related.
This paper is also not the place to take up such a tempting
challenge. For the sake of argument, one may even concede
that some of the religious resurgences can easily be accounted
for within the theory of secularization. After all, theories of
modernization also made use for a long time of terms such as
"transitions," "breakdowns," "eruptions," "split-up moderniza-
tion," etc. to explain ad hoc the failure of particular societies to
follow the prescribed model. For instance, one may concede
that some developments (e.g., the Islamic revolution in Iran)
may be viewed as rearguard reactions, with a still uncertain
impact, against the very process of differentiation described by
theories of secularization. After all, a somewhat similar case of
reactive organicism, the Franco regime in Spain, did actually
serve at the end as the historical vehicle of the very process of
modernization it had attempted to block and reverse. Other
developments, such as the role of Catholicism in recent
transitions to democracy from Brazil to Poland, from Spain to
the Philippines, could be viewed similarly as evidence of the
final accommodation of the Catholic church to modernity. It is
possible that the very success of Catholicism's "public" role
38 For a critique of the functionalist and evolutionary premises of theories of

modernization, see Jose Casanova, "Legitimacy and the Sociology of Modernization,"
in A. J. Vidich and R. Glassman, eds., Conflict and Control (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage,
1979).
leads after the transition to its priva

secularization. One may even concede, fina
resurgence of Protestant Fundamentalism
significantly the structure of American
pastoral letters of the American Cath
nuclear arms race or the U.S. econom
significant impact on either.
The point of so many concessions is to
conclusion that we do not know yet wh
developments may or may not serve to bl
or modify ongoing processes of diffe
words, history is still open. History may
than described and prescribed by Luhm
theories of secularization. Religions, re
religious people- by refusing to restric
marginal, subsystemic, specialized religiou
assigned to them by those theories; by ref
primary (religious) function"; by refusi
"finding answers to religious questions
secondary considerations stemming from
polity, the family, or science"; by refu
functional specialization of every other
other's boundaries"39- may still contin
historical roles and in the process falsify
"religion would have no impact, or at
impact, on the rules governing the dif
domains."40 This does not necessarily mean
will contribute to the "resacralization of 'modern' societies."
The implication that to question the thesis of privatization of
religion means to somehow expect the return of the sacred is a
non sequitur. Indeed, it is a "red herring." To question the
thesis of privatization may simply mean that one may expect
39 Dobbelaere, "Secularization," p. 40; Niklas Luhmann, Religious Dogmatics and the

Evolution of Societies (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984).
40 Dobbelaere, "Secularization," p. 39.
42 SOCIAL RESEARCH
that the Roman Catholic church

matter, will continue taking "p
tional division of labor, on issu
dehumanizing effects of a capital
internally functional devices, etc
reasonable to expect that religi
Islam, will continue playing impo
development long after the nati
and unquestioned unit of analysis
theory of differentiation, has lef
Finally, even if the public resur
stop or reverse the functionalis
such a resurgence may not have
role. The public impact of relig
solely in terms of the ability of
own agendas upon society, or to
claims upon the autonomous sph
ated societies, religions are inde
role of systemic normative in
boundaries, by raising question
mous pretensions of the differ
without regard to moral norms o
may help to mobilize people ag
may contribute to a redrawing
very least, they may force or
about such issues. Irrespective of
impact of such a debate, rel
important public role. Like femin
virtue critiques of modern de
functioned as counterfactual nor
need to accept the normative pr
perhaps one will be forced to rec
character of modern developmen
question the normativity of mod
"cognitive theories" which claim
of modern societies and, thus, su
precisely inasmuch as they have aban

"humanist" norms of a bygone age a
ideological reflections of modernity,
historicity of particular developments b
evolutionary rationality. In other words, o
share, for instance, the particular m
Catholic church on the capitalist econom
abortion. Nonetheless, one may recogni
attempt to reintroduce some moral norms
to deprivatize individual morality raises im
about the human and social conseque
market laws and atomistic utilitarian individualism.
Religious Differentiation
At the risk of adding confusion to what attempted to be an

exercise in clarification of the various usages of the terms
"private" and "public," one should point out that some of the
distinctions between private and public religion, which were
analyzed so far from the particular perspective of modern
Western societies, appear also within the social-scientific study
of religion. They appear as the distinction between "individu-
al" and "group" religiosity at the interaction level of analysis; as
the distinction between "community cult" and "religious
community" at the organizational level of analysis; and as the
distinction between "religion" and "world" at the societal level
of analysis.41
(1) Individual and Group Religiosity. In analyzing religious

action, or interaction, one finds two clearly defined and
opposite schools of thought, both of which tend to reject
41 In differentiating between these three levels of analysis I am following Niklas

Luhmann. See his "Interaction, Organization and Society," in The Differentiation of
Societies, pp. 69-89.
44 SOCIAL RESEARCH
explicitly the other position.

sented by William James, insis
feelings, acts and experienc
solitude," is primordial; while
religion, "worship and sacrifice
dispositions of the deity, theol
tical organization," are second
individual charisma, "the pe
elementary form of religious
institutions he analyzed as t
charisma."43 At the other extr
represented by W. Robertson
which insists that religion is al
that there is no religion with
and practices . . . which u
community"; that individual r
from group religion, or is no r
the presence or absence of a ch
what helps define both religion
without a church, there is no c
We know the particular ideo
both definitions. James's ra
against priestly mediations
tempered by Swedenborgian m
ological individualism could
Durkheim's life-long commitm
logical and utilitarian indivi
facts." But the fact is that all at
of the two poles, while exclud
derivation of the former, hav
42 William James, The Varieties of Religiou

28-31 and assim.
43 Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978), vol. 1, ch. 6; vol. 2, chs. 14-15.
44 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press,
1965); W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (1989).
The attempt to solve this problem by ord

religion in an evolutionary sequence, w
from primitive, collective religion to
religion, turns out to be equally problemat
fact that one can show clear historical trends in this direction.
There is enough evidence to indicate that some primitive
religions also served rather well as the institutional vehicle for
the most varied forms of individual religious experience.45
Since it seems that collective religions always needed to be
appropriated- that is, internalized- individually, while indi-
vidual religiosity today, as always, tends to form institutional-
ized expression through some kind of community, one may
conclude that the task of drawing a clear analytical distinction
between public and private religion at the level of individual
religiosity turns out to be rather difficult.
(2) Community Cults vs. Religious Communities. A similar distinc-

tion, with similar analytical problems, can be found at the level
of religious organization between what, following Weber,
could be called "community cults" and "religious communi-
ties." Weber distinguishes between, on the one hand, "the cult
of the political association" (clans, tribes, ethnia, nations,
city-states, empires, etc.), whose gods tend to leave all
individual interests out of consideration, while taking care only
of interests that concern the collectivity as a whole; and, on the
other hand, those religious arrangements (sorcery and
witchcraft, systems of physical therapy and cure of souls,
mystery cults, etc.) which have emerged as responses to the
needs of individuals to remove evils, sickness, poverty, etc., and
which "under favorable conditions [have] led to the formation
of a religious 'community,' which has been independent of
ethnic associations."46 The same distinction, moreover, is
45 Cf. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1965), and Paul Radin, Monotheism Among Primitive Peoples (New York, 1954).
w Max Weber, "The Social Psychology of the World Religions," in From Max Weber,
p. 272.
46 SOCIAL RESEARCH
clearly drawn by Robertson

"religion did not exist for th
preservation and welfare of soc
of social dissolution . . . that ma
sphere of tribal or national
religion of the tribe or state h
private and foreign superstiti
terror may dictate to the indiv
The most important differ
religion would be the different
the different status of the in
rules. In the case of community
communities are the same and, therefore, one is born into
community cults since membership in the sociopolitical and
religious communities coincide. Durkheim, who presented as a
general, universal theory of religion what in fact turns out to
be a particular theory of one of its forms, correctly viewed the
god of the community cult as the symbolic representation and
sacralization of the community. Religious communities, by
contrast, are constituted in and through the association and
congregation of individuals responding to a religious message.
Originally, at its inception, the religious community is separate
from and not coextensive with the political community,
although it may soon assume also a political form. The most
developed form of religious communities, "salvation religions,"
represent an individualized and usually privatized form of
religion which is primarily constituted through the personal
relationship with the savior, the personal God, the prophet or
the spiritual adviser. They are "twice-born" religions which
presuppose the experience of "a sick soul" in need of
redemption, of a "divided self" in need of "unification."
Because they release the individual from particularistic,
ascriptive ties, salvation religions are potentially conducive to
47 W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (New York: Macmillan,
1927), p. 29, 55.
the formation of universalistic religio

through processes of fraternization.48
Strictly speaking, as presented here, both
are only analytical ideal types. In reality, m
mixed types presenting some combination
both, while in many societies one may find
gion side by side. Since normally religions h
social and psychological functions and meet
individual needs, there is a built-in tension
a transformational dynamic, in cyclical o
from one form into the other. But in certa
or stages of development as well as in par
religious traditions, one form may clearly p
other. Neither the typological variations n
transformation could be discussed properly
entering into the systemic level of analysis
the process of differentiation of the religio
spheres, as well as the internal process of r
religious sphere. It is unnecessary to retrace
painstakingly explored by Max Weber in th
critical remarks are in order:
It should be obvious that the form of the community cult will

be determined primarily, other things being equal (something
which rarely happens in history), by the type of political com-
munity: clan, tribe, tribal confederation, kingdom, republic,
etc. We would lose ourselves, however, trying to cover all the
possible variations and combinations. It should be even more
obvious, since this was shown by the work of Max Weber, that
the form of religious community will be determined primarily,
again other things being equal, by the content and structure of
the religious message itself and by the dynamics of the ideal and
material interests of those groups and strata to which the reli-
48 Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), and On the Roads to Modernity (Totowa,
N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981).
48 SOCIAL RESEARCH
gious message is originally ad

dynamics historically emerge w
ics of community cult formati
community formation- meet,
each other in all kinds of combinations.
The Christian "church" is only one particular historical type

of combination of religious community and political commu-
nity, which emerged out of the complex encounter of the
Christian religious community and the Roman imperial state
structure. This is a truism, which needs to be repeated,
however, since Western sociologists still tend to use the
typology developed by Troeltsch and Weber as general ideal
types, applicable to other times and places, when "church" and
"sect" are strictly speaking "historical" ideal types, which are
misleading when applied uncritically to non- Western contexts
and are equally misleading when applied to modern times
after the emergence of an altogether different and radically
new form of political community, the modern nation-state.
The early Christian church was a particular, almost typical
form of congregational "religious community" or "salvation
religion," organized around the soteriological-eschatological
cult of Christ, which after a period of clear separation from the
Roman political community and confrontation with the Roman
imperial structure, was adopted by the Roman Empire as its
"community cult."49 Afterward, with the disintegration of the
Western Roman Empire, moreover, the Christian religious
community itself adopted the political machinery and the
administrative and legal structure of the imperial state,
becoming in the process a salvation religion with the political
structure of an imperial state. Such a "church," such a
combination of salvation religion and political community, is
unlikely to appear anywhere else, even though Islam and
49 In this form, which basically implied that the church had to adapt to an
already-existing political structure which exercised control over it, the Byzantine
church survived in the Second Rome, and was continued in Muscovy, the Third Rome.
This is the classical case of caesaro-papism.
Buddhism, the other two great universali

gions, have developed their own variou
political and religious communities.50 The Ch
both the Roman Catholic church and the territorial national
churches, cease to be sociologically speaking "churches" the
moment they cease being compulsory, coercive, monopolistic,
"sacramental grace institutions." This happens either when a
church loses its own means of coercion and enforcement, or
when the state is no longer willing or able to use its means of
coercion to maintain the compulsory and monopolistic position
of the church. Indeed, the moment "sects" become institution-
alized as separate parts of the same political community, even
the established state church ceases being strictly speaking a
"church." The differentiation of religious communities and
community cults reemerges once again, but now along a
separate modern secular state which no longer needs a
religious community cult to integrate and maintain the political
community. The precariousness of "established" national
churches (Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox) in the
modern world is understandable, caught as they are between
secular states which no longer need them and peoples who
prefer to go elsewhere if and when they want to satisfy their
individual religious needs. The more they are the "established"
churches of secular states, the less are they able to weather the
winds of secularization.51
Islam is the unique historical case of a religion which was

born simultaneously as a religious charismatic community of
50 The unique complexity of Western developments was stressed by Joseph Strayer

in "The State and Religion: An Exploratory Comparison in Different Cultures: Greece
and Rome, the West, Islam," Comparative Studies in Society and History 1 (1958): 38-43.
On Islam, see Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power: The Politics of Islam (New York:
Vintage, 1982); and Hamid Dabashi, "Symbiosis of Religious and Political Authorities
in Islam," in Robbins and Robertson, Church-State, pp. 183-203. Further, Randall
Collins, "Historical Perspectives on Religion and Regime: Some Sociological
Comparisons of Buddhism and Christianity," in Hadden and Shupe, Prophetic
Religions, pp. 254-271.
51 Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society (London: Watts, 1966), particularly the
"Conclusion."
50 SOCIAL RESEARCH
salvation and as a political com

the dual religious and polit
Muhammad, as God's messeng
leader. It is even more literally
Islamic era begins not with the
with the date of revelation,
migration, which marks the fo
community in Medina ("the C
community, has often under
neously a religious and a politic
of believers and the nation of I
to argue that Islam has no diff
spheres. Indeed, the history o
history of the various instituti
and political charisma of Muham
ated religious and political in
proved institutionally more i
Buddhism to either theocracy
Understandably, the foundat
community has a special parad
transmission of human trad
foundational myth can avai
revelation. Rebellions, reformat
of historical changes can be i
foundational myth, while cla
pristine purity of origins, to a
to the world had taken place. A
religions, was also forced t
differentiation of the secul
eventually also embrace both
the return to the myth of orig
community of salvation was
political community.52 For
52 Cf. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy

1983); Friedrich Gogarten, Despair and Hop
modern processes of secularization is

difficult by the paradigmatic power of th
the expansion of Western colonialism, t
Turkish Empire, and the emergence of
have undermined all the traditional historical forms of
institutionalization of the umma as a dual religious and po

community, it has opened up the way for all kinds
religious-political experiments in the name of returning t
original umma.53
(3) Religion and "World."
Know that you can have three sorts of relations with prin
governors, and oppressors. The first and worst is that you vi
them, the second and the better is that they visit you, and th
third and surest that you stay far from them, so that neither
see them nor they see you.
The above statement by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-

Ghazzali, the twelfth-century Muslim theologian, captures
most succinctly the basic options, as well as the typical and
traditional attitude of salvation religions toward the world of
politics. Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims may read the
statement differently, since their original paradigmatic atti-
tude, as well as the historical experience of those religions
accumulated through the ages, may vary significantly. None-
theless, the three basic options remain and, if made to choose,
the three great "world religions" would probably rank the
three options in the same order. They fear most, perhaps
because they know how frequently they found themselves
unable to resist it, caesaro-papism in any form- that is, the
"world" 's control and use of religion for its own purposes,
1970); Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (London: Hollis & Carter, 1954); Harvey
Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965).
53 Cf. Mortimer, Faith and Power; Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); James Piscatori, Islam in the World of
Nation-States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
52 SOCIAL RESEARCH
most frequently to legitimate

economic oppression.
The second option, theocracy,
shape the world according to God
It is also a very tempting op
otherworldly religions have oft
Indeed, human civilization owes
all kinds of Utopian, theocratic
religion to shape the world, while
found in the most unexpected p
Tibet to the deserts of Utah.
The third option, distance, detachment, and separation, is

indeed the surest and the one which ultimately triumphed in
history. It is also the one which, paradoxically enough, most of
the time, both religious and worldly people tend to prefer,
since it protects the world from religion and religion from the
world. Taking a lofty view of world history, while being
conscious that such a perspective flattens out all the
"differences," one may easily discern two great axial shifts in
the relation between religion and world. The first axial shift,
well noticed by Karl Jaspers and used by Max Weber as the
foundation for his world-historical sociology of religion, was
the wave of world-renunciation which, beginning roughly
around 500 b.c., shook one ancient civilization after another,
from India to China, from the Near East to Greece. Weber
insisted and later anthropology confirmed, against Durkheim's
categorical definition, that originally religion and world were
enmeshed and there was no radical clear-cut separation
between sacred and profane.54
The new attitude of world rejection took hold first on
intellectuals and elites, on philosophers and prophets. But
later, this attitude of devaluation and relativization of this
54 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1953); Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); and Mary
Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Praeger, 1966).
world for the sake of a higher one becam

popularized by the new salvation religions
the most consequential world-historical resul
At least in the case of the Mediterranean ba
shift from public to private religion, from c
man, from objectivist to subjectivist phi
amptly documented by historians of ideas an
alike. The paradox of the triumph of C
ancient pagan world is made then more i
quote one of the best historians:
The surprisingly rapid democratization of t

upper-class counterculture by the leaders o
church is the most profound single revolut
classical period. . . . The rise of Christianity alt
the moral texture of the late Roman world. Yet in moral matters
the Christian leaders made almost no innovations. What they did
was more crucial. They created a new group, whose exceptional
emphasis on solidarity in the face of its own inner tensions
ensured that its members would practice what pagan and Jewish
moralists had already begun to preach.55
Yet this inward turn of religion toward the private individual

for the sake of salvation is full of public paradoxes and
external consequences in the world. Precisely when religion
wanted to leave this world alone, the powers of the world could
not afford, it seems, to leave religion alone. Jesus' message to
abandon the messianic hopes of a worldly kingdom and to find
"God's kingdom" in one's "inner heart" threatened the core of
Judaism as a public covenanted religion. The "scandal of the
cross" was the appropriate punishment for such a public crime.
The Roman imperial state, which had abandoned its old
republican civil religion, which had incorporated all kinds of
gods into its pantheon, which permitted its subjects to pursue
privately the most exotic of religions and mystery cults, could
55 Peter Brown, "Late Antiquity," in Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, eds., A
History of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge: Belknap Press,
1987), pp. 51, 60.
54 SOCIAL RESEARCH
not allow that the most private

of religions, Christianity, wo
only community cult left, the
Christians had to meet public
The Christian "inward" turn to
ism" had other external, un
world. Otherworldly asceticism
combination of world abnegati
cal sociologists parting from v
Max Weber to Louis Dumont, from Norbert Elias to Michel
Foucault, have amptly demonstrated that inner discipline,
which originally, for most ordinary people, came from the
hope of reward and the fear of punishment in the other world,
has a greater "civilizing" effect than any this-worldly reward or
any external discipline and punishment effected by the powers
of this world. Of course, the unique establishment, for all kinds
of reasons, of a civitas dei in this world, of a Roman church with
real and significant worldly power, which pretended to rule
the world directly or indirectly, is also a crucial part of the
story. Many observers have, indeed, insisted that the histori-
cally unique character of the modern state, which is made up
of individuals, not of orders or functions, cannot be
understood unless one sees it as a "transformed church." In
any case, the story we are tracing ended paradoxically with an
unprecedented commitment of the Christian individual to the
world, with a new transformation of the outworldly individual
into the inworldly individual, with the rise of the modern
individual.56
Irrespective of whether one sees the joint rise of the modern

state and modern capitalism as being codetermined by this new
Christian attitude, or whether one sees the new Protestant
innerworldly attitude as being determined by the emergence
of the modern world system, there is no doubt that it marks a
56 Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism; Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
new axial shift in the relation between

Eventually, the world forced religion to w
created and for the first time in histor
private sphere. But before doing so,
evidence that, to use once again Weber
breaking of the monastery walls and the
onto the world, puritan Christians of all s
role in institutionalizing the new innerw
the spheres, in the economy as well as in
well as in the arts and letters. Once again,
traditional boundaries between religion
the way for all sorts of new theocratic ex
Bible commonwealths of New England
reservations in Paraguay. The official chu
after another, were subjected to royal a
despoiled of their large holdings by
became more and more ingratiated to t
classes. The same dual process is evid
eighteenth-century Europe: Erastianism
papist control from above which transf
Christianity into "established" but impoten
the new nation-states, and a new pietis
liberating the modern individual from th
sacramental control of the church, tran
denominations more and more into priv
nities."
Protestantism, used here as an analytical model without
entering into the very significant internal variations within it,
both pioneered this process and helped to shape the particular
form which the process of institutionalized differentiation of
the spheres has taken so far. In this respect, Protestantism has
set a powerful historical precedent to which other religions will
have to respond in their own way. For centuries, the Catholic
church fought quixotically both the modern innerworldly turn
and the modern differentiation of the spheres as heretic
windmills. Finally, with Vatican Council II came the "official"
56 SOCIAL RESEARCH
recognition of the legitimacy

throughout the world, Cathol
worldly with a vengeance. Yet t
uphold the "church" principle
therefore refuses to accept the
modern differentiation, wh
individualist private sphere a
secular spheres from any exte
Catholicism wants to be both
religion.
Islam, which never was a world-rejecting salvation religion
like Christianity or Buddhism, can easily embrace the modern
innerworldly turn. What Islam cannot easily do without
abandoning its religious identity and in the process losing its
own historical civilizational identity is to accept the Protestant
model of individualist privatization of morality. Paradoxically,
the most otherworldly and individualist of the world religions,
Buddhism, may find an easier path of maintaining its identity
by turning innerworldly, but concentrating on providing
individual paths of innerworldly mysticism while abandoning
the public secular spheres to their own autonomous logic.
Judaism has found its own solution to the modern challenge by
splitting internally between various Jewish denominations,
from secular Zionism to a "reformed" Judaism which has
adopted the Protestant model, to a "conservative" Judaism
closer to the Catholic model, to "orthodox" and "fundamental-
ist" Judaism which is closer to the Islamic model. Jewish
pluralist denominationalism may work well in the American
diaspora. But it is becoming increasingly evident that the
American model of a free, pluralist religious market cannot
easily be institutionalized in the Jewish state of Israel.
I would like to conclude by stating once again the obvious.
We do not yet know whether other religions will be forced
eventually to adopt the Protestant model of privatization and
differentiation in order to survive as "religious communities"
in the modern world, or whether they will find their own ways
of institutionalization of religion in mod

societies. They could still find a way of f
religions of private individual salvation an
some institutionalized place in a revitalize
any case, the tension between religions' priv
is likely to endure as long as there rem
between religion and world. Of one thing
be certain. Religion cannot easily be en
private individual sphere.

Jose Casanova - Private and Public Religions

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Private and Public Religions

Author(s): JOS CASANOVA

should look with suspicion on anyone who

people, or two kinds of reality or process.1

'Jy all social phenomena, none is perhaps as protea

1 Mary Douglas, "Judgements on James Frazer," Daedalus, Fall 1978, p. 161.

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring 1992)

is, to the modern institutiona

4 H. J. McCloskey, "Privacy and the Right to Privacy," Philosophy 55 (1980); Edw

assigned marginal place in the private s

6 Cf. Thomas Robbins and Roland Robertson, eds., Chur

religion" in the modern world;

On the Private/ Public Distinction

There are so many different and outright contradictory

sees the public' realm in terms of polit

(3) "The approach, exemplified for example by the work of

differentiated into the domestic sp

8 See, for instance, Joseph Bensman and R

But as Weintraub points out, some

One could certainly apply th

(1) Established vs. Disestablished

(2) Civil Religions vs. Alternative Religious

14 Cf. Robert Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedal

American nation or the cult of

(3) Individual Mysticism vs. Den

15 For a critique, see Benjamin I. Schwartz, "The Religion of Politics: Reflections on

unfolding of these three forms through hist

18 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Henry

21 Bellah et al., Habits, p. 221.

it to crystallize. First disestablishment an

24 Cf. Sidney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the America

the denominations. However,

indicate the declining significance of denominationalism, but

26 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton

order to organize themselves publicly in

The Catholic church is exposed to similar internal and

or whether one should rather

(4) Home vs. Religious Market.

27 Hannah Arendt's philosophical anthropology, as developed in The Human

hand, one could say almost categorically

28 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, N.Y.

private and the public realms

religious consciousness," Luckmann a

differentiation leads to a sharp segmentation of the vario

32 Luckmann, Invisible Religion, p. 86.

individual manifests vis--vis a

also what we called the dehumanization of the social

Undoubtedly, one could continue elaborating more system-

remarks, before continuing to

34 Mary Douglas, "The Effects of Modernization on Religious Change," in Mary

furthest- Sweden, England, France, Ur

of the sacred where religious traditions had dried out, but

secularization. First, "since se

This essay is not the place to challenge some of the general

38 For a critique of the functionalist and evolutionary premises of theories of

leads after the transition to its priva

39 Dobbelaere, "Secularization," p. 40; Niklas Luhmann, Religious Dogmatics and the

that the Roman Catholic church

precisely inasmuch as they have aban

At the risk of adding confusion to what attempted to be an

(1) Individual and Group Religiosity. In analyzing religious

41 In differentiating between these three levels of analysis I am following Niklas