Modernization itself drives rather than kills religious revival

Evidence

The most obvious, most salient, and most powerful cause of the global religious resurgence is precisely what was supposed to cause the death of religion: the processes of social, economic, and cultural modernization that swept across the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Longstanding sources of identity and systems of authority are disrupted. People move from the countryside into the city, become separated from their roots, and take new jobs or no job. They interact with large numbers of strangers and are exposed to new sets of relationships. They need new sources of identity, new forms of stable community, and new sets of moral precepts to provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose. Religion, both mainstream and fundamentalist, meets these needs. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 265

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the noise/silence reading on modernization-induced stress and the craving for stable identity; also parallels Berger’s ‘sacred canopy’ argument that secularization theory failed. — connects to: The religious-versus-secular millennialism dichotomy no longer holds. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 131
• DEFINE: Inverts the classic secularization thesis: modernity as the cause of religiosity, not its death.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is a paradigm-inverting explanation worth sitting with — it flips the long-dominant modernization-secularization assumption and supplies a mechanism (rootlessness, anonymity, mass scale) rather than assertion.
• SEED: Angle: an essay on why every claim that ‘modernity kills religion’ keeps being falsified — the same rootlessness mechanism appears in Soviet-era atheism’s collapse, mid-century church attendance spikes, and digital-age new-age spirituality.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 265