Critically assess the claim that New Religious Movements represent a challenge to the secularization thesis
The dramatic global resurgence of religious movements over the last decade has caught many people by surprise. To most, such a resurgence came as a surprise since according to modernization myth, religion was supposed to be headed towards a continuous path of secularization and privatization. Indeed, this myth presented us with several options for the fate of religion in the modern world, but neither a return of religion as a public force, nor its ability to shape people according to its own ethos and instil into them a new habitus was among them. Very few people expected religion to disappear completely, assigning religion to a legitimate space in the private sphere and that religious institutions would undergo a process of internal secularization and would increasingly adapt to the requirements’ of modern structures while maintaining their religious symbolism. Some imagined that national ideologies or civil religions would replace religious traditions , or expected religious values to permeate modern societies leaving behind the tradition forms of religion. But few were prepared for the global resurgence of religions as public forces and powerful shapers of religious subjects. In light of this dramatic resurgence of New Religious Movements, this essay will attempt to analyse whether these movements represent a challenge to the secularization thesis, or whether they are in fact evidence of the marginalization of religion from the centre of modernized society.
Bryan Wilson (1991) contends that the secularization process now gone so far, that it is virtually unstoppable. He argues that rather than being eviden ...