Introduction

There have appeared two lines of inquiry concerning the relationship between religion and modernization. The first line runs on the decline of religion driven by the intensification of modernization, which can be termed the ‘secularization thesis’. As we know, most of the founding fathers of sociology such as Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber argued along this line. Most well-known is probably Weber's observation of the shift from value-oriented and tradition-based rationalities to instrumental rationality (Weber, 1992 [1930]). This school of inquiry treats religions as the object of negation that allowed for the rise of science, reason, historical laws, namely all “oracular voices” of modernity as Milbank calls them (Milbank, 1990). Unbeknownst to the gesture of negation is the erection of ideological forms and new deities that often entail the reshaping of finite historical contingencies into inevitabilities. Various formulations of the Marxian ‘historical Law’ and the rise of the nation-state attest to modernity's own need for the sacred.

Following a more specific inquiry, Raymond Aron recognizes the homology between totalitarian social-political ideologies and religion, and gives such ideological systems a seemingly self-contradictory name: secular religion (Aron, 1957). In characterizing what he calls secular religions, Raymond Aron argues that “such doctrines set up an ultimate and quasisacred goal and define good and evil in relation to this ideal” (Aron, 2003: p.178). In his illustrative example, Aron points out that Hitler and his Germany functioned as the common foundation for the secular religion of fascism (Aron, 2003). Addressing the supposedly emancipatory impact of such secular religions, Aron further argues, “But every advance in liberation carries the seed of a new form of enslavement” (Aron, 1957: p. 21). Along a similar but ambiguous line, Bellah (1967) examines the elements in US political discourse, and argues that already present in the founding documents of the United States are the notion of God and its selected aspects.