Hervieu-Léger challenges the modern thesis of secularization. She states that sociologists have focused on the reasons why religion is in decline and they have argued that such a decline had come about as a result of the impact of modernization and the ensuing
secularization that seemed to have disintegrated religion. These perspectives are based on the modern idea that prognosticated the withdrawal of the religious experience to the private sphere. According to this perspective, modern societies would resettle religion in social life by depriving it of its active role since “Modernity and religion are mutually exclusive.”40 Further evidence for this can be found in Émile Durkheim’s doctoral thesis when he asserts that
there is one truth that history teaches us beyond doubt, it is that religion tends to embrace a smaller and smaller portion of social life. Originally, it pervades everything; everything social is religious; the two words are synonymous. Then, little by little, political, economic, scientific functions free themselves from the religious function, constitute themselves apart and take on a more and more acknowledged temporal character. God, who was at first present in all human relations, progressively withdraws from them;
he abandons the world to men and their disputes. At least, if he continues to dominate it, it is from on high and at a distance, and the force which he exercises, becoming more general and more
40 Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “Religion and Modernity in the French Context: For a New Approach to Secularization,” Sociological Analysis 51 (1990): 15.
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indeterminate, leaves more place to the free play of human forces.41
Contrastingly, Hervieu-Léger argues that the rational disenchantment
characteristic of modern societies does not mark the end of religion. It has not caused the disappearance of the need to believe. On the contrary, as the authors in the previous section disclosed, the advances of rationality together with capitalism resulted in a global world full of risks and uncertainties that are fertile ground for religion. In her perspective, this assertion formed the starting point, in the 1970s, of a theoretical revival in the
sociology of religion. It paved the way for a significant re-evaluation of the secularization process, a task still far from complete. It has become clear that belief proliferates in proportion to the uncertainty caused by the mobility of Liquid Modernity perceptible in all areas of social life. At root, “secularization is not, primarily, the loss of religion in the modern world. It is the set of processes of readjustment of the beliefs that is produced in a society whose engine is the insatiability of the expectations that the society itself raises, and whose daily condition is the uncertainty linked to the never-ending search of the means to satisfy these expectations.”42
In line with Bauman’s thesis of the dual and ambivalent nature of Modernity, before the search of rational order, Hervieu-Léger observes an increasing loss of control of the established religious institutions over the belief systems and religious practices of individuals; hence, a gap between the official forms of religion and individually accepted
41 Émile Drukheim, Division of Labor in Society (Illinois: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960), 188.
42 Danièle Hervieu-Léger, El Peregrino y el Convertido: La religión en movimiento (Mexico D.F.:
Ediciones del Helénico, 2004), 43. (My translation)
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religious perceptions and behaviors emerges. Individuals are more and more freed from established religious authorities and thus enabled to determine their belief systems autonomously, often synthesizing various religious traditions. This process of religious individuation does not mean that individual religiosity is weakened. Instead, it becomes multifaceted, syncretistic, hybrid, and alienated from institutions.
Consequently, for Hervieu-Léger, it has become clear that belief proliferates in proportion to the uncertainty caused by Modernity. However, it is also clear that in societies that have adopted the autonomy of individuals as a principle, belief less and less sits on institutional dogmatic frameworks. On the contrary, individuals create their own small systems of belief that fit their own aspirations and expectations. Given this,
Hervieu-Léger elaborates on two core concepts that depict this process.43 The notions that Beck, Bauman, and Giddens offer about Late Modernity, especially those of
individualization and disembedding mechanisms, are the context in which we can situate the contributions of the French sociologist.
Firstly, she asserts that modern societies go through a process of individuation of beliefs. Individuals write their own little religious narratives using words and symbols that escape the constellations of meanings in which a given tradition has set them over the centuries; hence, the unpredictable diversity of these individual compositions of beliefs, which may include elements borrowed from a wide variety of symbolic resources. This exaltation of individuality is part of a deeper movement in which the governing systems of truth are being displaced, as the first section of this chapter evinces.
43 Hervieu-Léger, “In Search of Certainties”: 59-60.
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Legitimation of beliefs is moving from religious authorities to individuals themselves, who are responsible for the authenticity of their own spiritual approach, “since all pre-existing ‘foundations’ of epistemology have been shown to be unreliable.”44
Secondly, the other concept that Hervieu-Léger offers consists of one that she names the process of religious deinstitutionalization. The organized structure of belief systems authenticated by religious institutions is weakening. Putting into perspective the orthodoxies that institutions uphold shows the novelty of the rejection in strictly spiritual terms of an institutional means of authenticating religious truth. Such an institutional authentication had represented for centuries both the base for the unquestioned universal validity of the major religions and the ground for the denominational definitions that identify different churches.45
At this point, it is clear that in this work secularization does not mean the loss of religion, but rather readjustment of beliefs in a fluid and flexible context for individuals and institutions. This changing reality led Hervieu-Léger to address what she believes is the central question that confronts scholars who are trying to provide sociological insight concerning contemporary religion. That question involves coming to understand “the intellectual approach required to grasp both the dimension by which Modernity continually undermines the plausibility structures of all religious systems and that by which it gives rise to new forms of religious belief.”46 One of her most important works,
44 Giddens, The consequences of Modernity, 46.
45 Hervieu-Léger, “In Search of Certainties”: 60.
46 Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rurgers University Press, 2000), 2.
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Religion as a Chain of Memory, tackles these aspects through the category of memory, especially when defining the concept of religion.