Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

CHAPTER FOUR

Social Forms of Religion and Religions

in Contemporary Global Society

Peter Beyer

CONCEIVING AND DEFINING RELIGION AND RELIGIONS

It may seem to many readers that religion is a fairly straightforward notion, easily bringing to mind clear and concrete pictures: A group of Muslims at daily prayer, a Christian priest saying mass, a Buddhist monk or nun meditating, a person lighting a votive or holiday candle, and myriad other possibilities. Yet, as in several other domains of social life, such as art, sport, and that ever elusive term, culture, what seems clear at a quick and first glance is anything but upon further reflection. If a Shakespearean play and neolithic cave paintings count as art, what about the arrangement of flowers on the dining room table, a television advertisement, or the rousing performance of a popular politician on the hustings? If ice dancing is an Olympic sport, why isn’t ballroom dancing even a sport? If dim-sum is part of Chinese culture, how many kung-fu centers do there have to be in Houston or San Francisco before they become an expression of American culture? Similarly, while most readers may agree that what happens in a Jewish synagogue or at a Shinto shrine qualifies as religion, many people in Western countries have just as serious doubts about what happens at a Scientology course as government officials in China have about Falun Gong. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Brahma Kumaris are clearly religious groups; are they also Christian and Hindu, respectively?

How important such questions are varies according to time, place, and circumstance. If the Christian status of Mormons and the cultural status of kung-fu establishments are currently not all that critical in the United States, the Islamic status of Baha’is in Iran or the cultural implications of the magazine, Sports Illustrated,1 in Canada have in recent years been hotly debated or highly consequential issues. Ambiguities and disagreement in these matters can often be of great practical importance; they interest more than detached intellectual observers. Moreover, it seems that the sorts of dispute that arise with regard to these concepts are basically of three kinds, two of them having

1Sports Illustrated, a large American-based sports magazine, publishes a Canadian issue, but sells advertisements at relatively low prices to Canadian companies, thus making it harder for Canadian-based magazines to survive only in the Canadian market. The argument against what Sports Illustrated does has been framed in Canada as a matter of defending “Canadian culture.”

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to do with boundaries, and one with the valuation of these concepts in their social contexts. Thus, we have disagreement about what does and does not belong in a category like religion or culture; we debate the boundaries between members of a category, such as where one religion ends and another begins; but we can also contest the status of the categories themselves. We do this, for instance, when we discuss the legitimacy of what can be claimed by appealing to categories like religion, culture, sport, art, or a number of other social forms.

In one sense, problems of this nature are as old as human history. Boundaries are the very stuff of social structures and human knowledge: We make distinctions and thereby create ordered worlds. Yet, although social order would be impossible without them, these social forms also always seem in one way or another to be problematic, to not quite “work” (e.g., Berger and Luckmann 1966; Douglas 1966). That said, however, the specific ways that this general feature works itself out in contemporary society has its particular and somewhat unique characteristics when compared to societies of the past. It is to the contemporary situation with respect to the idea of religion that this chapter addresses itself.

Sociological discussions about defining religion have almost always come to the conclusion that this is a difficult exercise about which there is little agreement. Generally, these debates hover around the central organizing distinction between substantive and functional definitions or restrictive and expansive ones (e.g., O’Toole 1984; Hervieu-Leger´ 2000). More often than not, substantive definitions, which focus on what religion is, tend to be restrictive; and functional definitions, which center on what religion does, lean toward being more expansive in what they include. Accordingly, the most typical criticism of substantive/restrictive definitions is that they include too little, perhaps on the basis of an implicit theological bias that wishes to exclude “false” religion. By contrast, a frequently cited weakness of functional/expansive definitions is that they exclude too little, thus rendering the term meaningless and perhaps even betraying an antireligious bias: What “religion” does can be done (better) by many other things, like the state, art, sport, medicine, or science. Thus, from the nature of the functional/substantive difference and the criticisms of either side, it becomes evident that all three of the axes of dispute I mentioned above are at work. Sociologists have disputed the boundary between religion and nonreligion, what counts and doesn’t count. They have disagreed on how valuable or important religion is, whether it is necessary or not. And behind both issues is that of internal variety: They assume that there are many religions, irrespective of whether the favored approach is substantive or functional.

In both sociological and nonsociological realms, therefore, the term religion remains somewhat elusive. And this along similar lines of dispute. One reason for this parallelism is undoubtedly that the two domains exist in the same social and historical context. That fact leads to this hypothesis: The definitional or conceptual difficulties with respect to religion point to a social context that encourages and perhaps even requires “religion” to be multivalent. In other words, the problem is not in the ambiguous or variable nature of “religion itself,” whatever that may be but, rather, in a social context that makes such ambiguity sensible. It is this variability of religions in that social context which is the specific focus of this chapter. The sections that follow explore various aspects of this overall question, and they do so by translating it into two interrelated matters: The social context of contemporary global society and the social forms that religion and religions typically seem to take in this context. The main

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argument is that the intensified globalization of society over the past few centuries has generated a situation that favors certain social forms of religion and religions yielding, among other things, the conceptual ambiguity just discussed.

DIFFERENTIATED RELIGION IN GLOBAL SOCIETY

If we accept that the social forms that religion takes in contemporary global society are to a large degree peculiar to that context, then it follows that assuming these forms to be historically universal would create even more confusion. This sort of projection does in fact take place quite frequently, in particular among academic and theological observers. Academics, in spite of protests to the contrary, regularly assume that so-called

world religions such as Hinduism and Daoism have a long history and have existed as such at least since the first millennium b.c.e. They are not alone, however. Often theo-

logical observers from within these religions insist on similar observations: For instance, neo-Vedantic Hindu thinkers who style Hinduism as an ancient religion centered on the Vedic scriptures (e.g., Dalmia and von Stietencron 1995); or post-Meiji Restoration Shinto theologians who successfully asserted Shinto as a unified and ancient tradition2 distinct from Buddhism and dating back at least to the eighth century c.e. While such projections can and do make analytic and theological (not to mention political) sense, they also tend to hide the degree to which this differentiation of religions as mutually distinguishable and historically self-identified entities is of comparatively recent origin, and would make little sense if we were not all observing from the same contemporary social context.

A number of contemporary critiques of the concept of religion point out the degree to which the current meaning of the word is in fact of Western and not at all of global provenance (e.g., W. Smith 1978; Fitzgerald 1997; Chidester 1996). Historically speaking, this is an accurate observation. The idea of religion as a distinct and differentiable social domain did originate in European-based society and one could argue that it refers more easily to religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam than it does to other religious traditions. It would, however, be entirely misleading to assume, in addition, that the word religion has always had this meaning among Europeans, or that other parts of the world have not now incorporated this meaning into their own languages and applied it to at least some of their indigenous religious traditions. In fact, this supposedly Western concept did not exist in the West before about the seventeenth century and did not really solidify until well thereafter (W. Smith 1978; Despland 1979). And words such as dharma in India, agama in Indonesia, zongjiao in China, and shukyo in Japan do today have very similar meanings to Western variants of religio; and refer explicitly to entities such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Daoism, not just the Abrahamic religions.

The question that emerges, therefore, is how did we arrive at this differentiation of religion as something distinct and as something that inherently manifests itself in, among other forms, a plurality of mutually distinguishable religions? The answer has much to do with the development of global society over the last few centuries.

2To be sure, these Shinto priests, scholars, and political leaders also claimed that Shinto was not a religion, but this also had more to do with the historical context and what the word religion implied for them, than it did with the characteristics of what they reinvented as Shinto. See Hardacre 1989: esp. 34f, 63f.

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The fact that this modern understanding of religion as differentiated and plural developed first specifically in seventeenth-century Europe is of some significance. Already in the sixteenth century, the prolonged and violent conflict that came in the wake of the Protestant Reformation impressed on many elite Europeans the idea that religious differences are fundamental and intractable. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, we see crystallizing a double notion. First, people do not just have religion, they have a religion, implying both something distinct and more than one possibility. Second, therefore, there exist distinct religions, now in the plural. Initially, the religions thus recognized were few: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, with a broad residual category of heathenism or paganism. In the context of their imperial expansion virtually all around the world over the next two centuries, however, European observers “found” an increasing number of other major religions, including what by the nineteenth century began to be called Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, and Confucianism.3

Although religious conflict in Europe and European imperial expansion were important for this discovery of religions, other factors were just as critical. Prime among these were the close association of religion and nation, the eventual collaboration of nonEuropean elites in the construction of some of these religions, and the rise of increasingly powerful institutional domains more and more independent of religion.

The seventeenth-century solution to the prolonged religious conflict in Europe was the Treaty of Westphalia, which coordinated religious and political identity: Protestant rulers would have Protestant subjects; Catholic rulers would have Catholic subjects. After the French Revolution and especially in the nineteenth century, we see solidifying the further idea that states gain their primary legitimacy as agents and expressions, not of rulers, but of nations, cultural units that in most cases carried forth the Westphalian formula to include a particular religion as a central element in national identity. This overlapping of nation, state, and religion was by no means rigidly consistent or even always straightforward, but it did have the effect of institutionalizing a triple plurality: There are many states, which correspond to the many nations. And these nations are very frequently the carriers of different religions.

The European observers who carried forth the global expansion of European influence did not simply apply this formula to everyone else. Indeed, their dominant attitude, especially among the Christian missionaries, was that most of the others were heathens, targets for conversion, not carriers of yet other religions. In some cases, however, such observers did “discover” additional and distinct religions, notably other so-called world religions such as Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism. These efforts by themselves did not, however, lead to the differentiation of these entities as yet more self-identified, popularly, and officially recognized religions. For this additional step to happen, indigenous carrier elites had to take up this task of revisioning the complex and to some degree amorphous religious traditions of their civilizations as delimited and recognizable religions, formally on a par with and distinct from the others, in particular, given the religious identity of the Westerners, with Christianity. Where this additional vital step happened, we witness the construction, imagining, recognition, and to varying degrees organization of religions such as Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, and, perhaps less clearly, Daoism. Where we meet the failure of indigenous

3For a fuller discussion, see Beyer 1998, 1999. See also Almond 1988; Harrison 1990; Jensen 1997; W. Smith 1978; Despland 1979; Dalmia and von Stietencron 1995.

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carriers to join sufficiently in the reconstructive enterprise, it is far more difficult to maintain that what observers see are anything more than labels of convenience for the sake of analysis. This has been the fate, thus far, of “Confucianism” and the religious traditions of most aboriginal cultures around the world: There is much behind these labels that may well be religious, but their carriers do not generally consider or practice them as religions.

A third key factor in the historical differentiation of religion and religions has to do with developments outside this domain, in “nonreligion.” As with all socially significant categories, the identity of religion depends to some extent on the difference between what counts as religion and what does not. European society at the time of the Reformation had a double compatibility in this regard. On the one hand, the visibility, power, and clearly religious identity of the Roman Catholic church provided a concrete institutional model that could stand for religion positively. On the other hand, however, early modern Europe also was a time of the gradual development of other institutional domains that increasingly, over subsequent centuries, established themselves as independent of religious tutelage and eventually even of religious legitimation. These included above all the capitalist economy, the sovereign political state (together with its administrative and military arms), the related domain of positive law, modern science, and later also academic education, medicalized health, art, mass media, and sport. The rise of these nonreligious systems was critical for developing and treating religion as something distinct and different. Not only did religion appear in contrast to these nonreligious social spheres, the different spheres, including especially religion, modeled themselves to some extent on each other in the process of their institutional (re)construction. What religion and the religions have become, what social forms they now typically take in today’s world society has occurred in the context of this modeling.

It was largely on the basis of the technical efficiency and power that these differentiated domains afforded them, that the Europeans were able to extend their influence around the world between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. They had better and better weapons and means of transportation/communication. With increasing efficiency, they could mobilize human and nonhuman resources. And the logic of these systems drove them further and further in search of markets, resources, power, knowledge, and souls. Their imperialist drive constitutes half the reason for the intensified globalization of society over those same centuries, in particular the last two. The other half consists in the responses of those on whom the Europeans imposed themselves and their vision of the world.

In every part of the globe, local people were faced with the question of how to react to the increasing power to the Europeans. In many cases, their options were quite restricted, especially in those regions that the conquerors succeeded in colonizing, notably the Americas and Australasia. There, the indigenous people that survived the onslaught usually tried to carry on their religiocultural traditions to some extent, but over time the prevailing pattern was conversion to Christianity, albeit not infrequently a Christianity syncretized with an array of aboriginal religious elements and styles. The reconstruction of indigenous traditions as distinct religions did occur in some cases, such as the Longhouse religion founded by Handsome Lake in early-nineteenth-century North America. These, however, remained quite limited in their impact and size. Of significance in the Americas also were the religious traditions brought by Africans in the

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context of the slave trade. Especially in the later twentieth century, the descendants of these involuntary colonists have become the prime carriers of a number of increasingly distinct religions such as Vodoun, Candomble/Santer´´ıa/Yoruba, Umbanda, and Rastafarianism, all to a large extent based on a reconstruction and reinvention of African traditions. During this same period, the prevailing approach of aboriginal peoples in the Americas has been, as noted above, to refuse reconstruction of their religious traditions as religions, insisting instead that these are undifferentiable dimensions of aboriginal culture.

In other parts of the world, with the limited exception of parts of Southern Africa, European colonization was not an option. It is these areas that have been witness to the (re)construction of all the other so-called world religions, almost invariably as key aspects of the responses to European power. Whether we are dealing with the invention of State Shinto in post-Meiji Restoration Japan, the crystallization and solidification of Hindu and Sikh religion in South Asia, the increased orthodoxification of Islam from Northern Africa to the Indonesian archipelago, the reimagination of a unified Buddhism in East Asia, or its nationalization in Sri Lanka, the movements toward the clearer identification of these various traditions as religions have been an important dimension in the attempts of people in these regions to respond to European power by appropriating and adapting the latter’s dominant instrumentalities, including that of “religion.” Moreover, in most cases, this appropriation of distinct religious identity has occurred in tandem with the assertion of national identities as the basis of founding modern sovereign states. Even where indigenous elites expressly refused to imagine local traditions as a religion, such as in China with “Confucianism,” this happened as part of strategies for constructing a strong nation and state that would allow China to become great again. That possibility, in turn, points to some rather important ambiguities in this entire historical development, ambiguities that concern the boundaries of religions, their relations to each other, but also critically the status of thus reconstructed religions with respect to the other, “secularized” domains or systems. It is to a discussion of these ambiguities that we now turn.

RELIGIONS, CONTESTED BOUNDARIES, AND MATTERS RELIGIOUS OUTSIDE RELIGIONS

Although the last few centuries have indeed witnessed the sort of revisioning of religions just outlined, this has not occurred without contestation, and even open opposition. Aside from direct clashes between religions, such disputes have followed the lines discussed at the beginning of this chapter: Struggles over the distinction between religions, contention about the relations between religion(s) and other domains of social life, and disagreement about the value of that which is meant by religion. Often enough, more than one of these have been at issue. Since here cannot be the place for a thorough discussion of the complex ways in which these conflicts have manifested themselves, a brief overview will suffice to give an idea.

Struggles over the distinction between religions are perhaps best exemplified in the case of Hinduism versus Sikhism. Sikh traditions had their origin in the sixteenth century, when Muslims ruled the subcontinent. In that context they from early on focused on the difference between Sikhs and Muslims. Only in the later nineteenth century, under British rule, did Sikhs begin to insist with increasing consistency that

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they also were not Hindus. The historical situation in which this occurred is of course quite complex, but critical for the development were aspects of British colonial policy that encouraged the identification of distinct religious communities and, in that context, the simultaneous elaboration, reconstruction, and imagining by Hindu elites of Hinduism as a unified and distinct religion that could subsume Sikhs. Given various Muslim movements that also sought to articulate Islamic identity, and in light of Christian, Muslim, and even Hindu efforts to convert Sikhs to these religions, a series of Sikh movements such as Singh Sabha and the Akali movement progressively consolidated the institutional, symbolic, and ritual bases of a clearly separate Sikhism (e.g., Jones 1976; Kapur 1986; McLeod 1989). Typical for such processes, the reconstruction of Sikhism as a distinct religion was not so much the invention of something new, as it was the selective recombination of long established elements with new items. Distinction from other religions in effect required the “orthodoxification” of Sikhism to an extent that had not occurred before. The upshot is that today the specifically Khalsa Sikh identity has become recognized almost universally among Sikhs as the standard of Sikh orthodoxy. And any efforts by others, such as more recently the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Vishva Hindu Parishad, to publicly claim Sikhism as a variant on Hinduism, have been vigorously opposed by Sikhs. Other examples of problematic lines of demarcation between religions would be the above-mentioned cases of Baha’i and Islam in Iran, Hinduism and variants such as the Brahma Kumari or even the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Hare Kirshna), and the status of groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Unification Church with relation to Christianity. In each of these cases, the dispute is over questions of “orthodoxy” but, with the exception of the Iranian example, translated into distinctions between religions (that is, religion/religion) rather than that between religion and antireligion (that is, religion/heresy).

Without doubt, the most frequently contentious issues with respect to religion in contemporary society have had to do with the boundary between religion and nonreligion. Disputes of this kind generally follow one of two directions: Either they concern the restriction of religion to its “proper sphere,” in other words, the secularization of putatively nonreligious spheres along with the privatization of religion; or they are about what social formations will count as religion. The clearest examples of the former are religious movements and orientations that not only advocate the relevance of religious precepts in all spheres of life, but go further to insist that religious norms and often also religious authorities should directly control the operation of all these domains. Religion from these perspectives cannot be only a private affair of individuals and groups; it also must be public and collectively obligatory. Much discussed examples of this possibility are various militantly Islamic movements in countries as diverse as Algeria, Nigeria, Iran, Afghanistan, and Indonesia; Christian rightism in the United States; some forms of Sikh separatism in India; and certain directions among religous Zionists and ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israel (Beyer 1994; Kapur 1986). The degree to which such movements advocate the “de-differentiation” of religion and other spheres varies enormously, but one aspect that is strikingly consistent is that they almost always seek to define, deeply influence, and very often take over modern states or subunits of them.

As concerns what will count as religion, here again, the states and their legal systems are frequently involved in helping to determine these parameters. The vast majority

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of state constitutions guarantee “freedom of religion,” thus lending religion a high degree of legitimacy and a certain autonomy. To count as a religion affords distinct rights and it can therefore become important to know and to decide which claimants to the category will be acknowledged. Thus, to mention briefly a few examples, in Canada, Wiccans have sought to have their beliefs and practices accorded recognition as a legitimate religion (even though, perhaps somewhat ironically, many of them also reject the category in other respects) in child custody and other legal cases. In China, the government has declared Falun Gong a “cult” (xiejiao = evil teaching),4 expressly denying it the protection of a religion. In Indonesia, the religious traditions of various aboriginal peoples are not recognized as religion (agama) unless they affiliate and identify with one of the five officially recognized religions (Schiller 1997: 109ff). Otherwise, they can only claim the less-privileged category of culture (adat). And in South Africa, there are strong movements to have African indigenous religions recognized formally by the government as legitimate religions, equal in dignity to others, especially the “world religions.” In reverse direction, various religious strands have wished to avoid the category, sometimes as in the case of State Shinto to avoid the limitations that freedom of religion and the differentiation of religion imply; at other times because of a relatively negative valuation of the category.

The positive and negative evaluations of religion in contemporary global society stem from some of the features already indicated, and others besides. On the positive side, a movement or set of beliefs and practices accorded the status of a religion can in most parts of the world claim a certain autonomy of operation and dignity of recognition; even more so now that the former Soviet bloc has disintegrated along with its expressly “atheistic” policies. The adherents of a recognized religion can in that light expect their faith not to be a basis of discrimination in other spheres of life, such as politics, economics, and education. On the negative side, the category of religion may in various circumstances appear as a foreign, especially Western, imposition. It may carry the hue of being considered “irrational,” “ideological,” or “illusionary.” It may imply the unacceptable imposition of outside authority in a domain that is deemed to be highly personal. Or it may carry with it the kind of restriction in sphere of operation that the notions of secularization and privatization imply. The carriers of potential religion may reject the category and seek not to be included under it for any of these reasons. Thus, for example, many Muslims insist that Islam is not a religion, but “a way of life.” Most Chinese reject that “Confucianism” and an array of other traditional “religious” practices are religion or a religion, asserting instead that these things are about ethics, philosophy, or more broadly that they are simply aspects of Chinese “culture.” Followers of the Maharishi Maheshyogi’s Transcendental Meditation and its successor organizations consistently present their beliefs and practices as more science than religion. And, especially in Western countries, a wide variety of seemingly religious practitioners ranging from New Age to human potential movements, from “spirituality in the workplace” to Wicca and neopaganism explicitly reject the term religion in favor of less authoritarian, more individualistic categories such as “spirituality” (cf. Heelas 1996). The latter, along with “culture,” is also more favored by many representatives and practitioners of traditional North American aboriginal practices.

4I thank Dr. Wang Jiwu and Dr. Li Qiang for information regarding this case and the word usages.

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Aside from these various forms of contestation around the category of religion, it is also quite clear that, throughout the world, an important array of beliefs and practices that might count as religion end up escaping inclusion under its umbrella for no other reason than that no movement has arisen to effect such incorporation. In other words, not everything potentially “religious” ends up being included within a religion or being deliberately denied that classification. Under this heading would fall many of the things that appear under the analytic category of “popular” or “folk” religious practices, ranging from the many local temples to various indigenous deities in China, to shamanistic traditions in many cultural regions of the world, to “witchcraft” beliefs and practices in various parts of Africa. If one adds these exclusions from the category to the contestations surrounding it outlined above, the question that inevitably poses itself is, how religion actually acquires social form in these circumstances. What forms give religion and religions concrete expression beyond that of an observer’s category? To some degree, as noted, outside recognition as religion is of course critical. But this cannot be all. For religion to acquire a distinct social existence, there must be ways of giving it structured social form. The next section address itself directly to this question of the social forms of religion and religions.

SOCIAL FORMS OF RELIGION AND RELIGIONS IN GLOBAL SOCIETY

To a large degree, the question of social form is another way of asking how religion/nonreligion and religion/religion boundaries are created and reproduced. Observation and categorization as religion is an important part of that, but various other mechanisms make the category concretely visible in our social worlds. These strategies can be divided into three dimensions, namely spatial, temporal, and social. We can isolate particular places as manifesting what we call religion; we can delimit specific times as religious times; and we can attach religion to certain persons. Thus, throughout the history of human societies, we find the more or less clear identification of sacred places, sacred times, and sacred persons. These have by no means been absolute distinctions: Sacred places can be temporary, sacred times can be vague as to their beginning and end, and persons can acquire and lose sacred status. Moreover, the implicit distinction between sacred and profane that such identification implies may itself be rather fluid given that in many of these social contexts, differentiating the religious from the nonreligious in any consistent way is not that important. For historical reasons, as outlined above, it is precisely this distinction, however, that is at issue in contemporary society. The development of powerful nonreligious social systems such as economy, state, science, or education provides the context for a more visible distinction of religion as something different. The notion of a plurality of religions means that this construction of religion will happen to a large extent as their carriers identify different religions in comparison and in contrast to others. This double challenge of institutionalizing religion as both “something else” in comparison to the putatively nonreligious and as a “different something” in contrast to other religions calls for forms and mechanisms that make clear when, where, and for whom which set of religious rules applies. All three of these modes of demarcation are important, but the “for whom” question in contemporary global society seems to be the one that is most consistently critical and contentious.

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The most widespread social forms of religion and religions in contemporary society can be divided into four types: (a) organization, (b) state religion, (c) social movements, and (d) communitarian/individual.5 The last category is the limiting case that also includes the boundary between religion that is institutionalized as such and that which is at best only analytically distinct. None of the four is mutually exclusive.

1. Organized Religion

One of the more notable features of contemporary global society is the proliferation of organizations in virtually every sphere of social life. Although these are certainly not evenly distributed in this society, any more than is wealth or power, they effect social life in all parts of the world. The most powerful of these are economic and political organizations. Yet, both at the national and the international level, an ever increasing number of nonbusiness and nonstate organizations make their presence felt in our daily lives. Among these is a complex array of religious organizations of greatly varying power, size, internal structure, and degree of stability. More than any of the other forms, it is organizations that give religions the concrete presence that is at issue here. Although the Christian Roman Catholic church (along with its numerous subsidiary organizations such as religious orders) is no doubt the largest and most evident of these, every other recognizable and recognized religion has them. They range from Buddhist monasteries to Hindu temple organizations, from Muslim Sufi brotherhoods (tariqat) to Christian Pentecostal churches, from organizations that run major Muslim, Hindu, or Christian pilgrimage centers to international Daoist societies. Their span can be anything from extremely local to worldwide, from the storefront church in Brooklyn, New York, to the international Orthodox Jewish Agudat Israel. Moreover, organizations are perhaps the most important mechanism for giving form to a new religion, or for concretizing variations in already recognized ones. Some relatively new religions such as the Baha’i Faith or the Church of Scientology, as well as old ones such as the Roman Catholic church, locate organization at their theological core and have successfully established themselves or maintained their presence largely through their concerted organizational strategies.

The great advantage of organization in contemporary global society is that it offers a very effective way of generating social boundaries that need not be all-encompassing. Organizations define themselves by making a distinction between those who belong and those who do not, between social action that is part of the organization and that which is not. They structure that difference through rules that govern belonging or not belonging, inside and outside, especially through social roles such as member, client, office holder, and so forth. Organizations thus tend to be quite clear about who is subject to their rules, when they are so subject, and where their most typical activity takes place. Moreover, organizations almost always articulate a clear purpose to which

5The typology suggested here may seem to bear some relation to the more familiar sociological typology of religious collectivities that distinguishes denomination, church, sect, and cult. While there is certainly an overlap as concerns the organized and state religion forms, the sect and cult have little place in the present scheme. To the extent that they are represented at all, it is under the organized, and to some extent under the social movement and communitarian forms. A precise comparison is beyond the scope of the present chapter, as is a detailed elaboration of the suggested typology.