Rapid compressed industrialization produces religious resurgence

Evidence

We are agricultural societies that have industrialized within one or two generations. What happened in the West over 200 years or more is happening here in about 50 years or less. It is all crammed and crushed into a very tight time frame, so there are bound to be dislocations and malfunctions. If you look at the fast-growing countries —Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore—there’s been one remarkable phenomenon: the rise of religion. … The old customs and religions —ancestor worship, shamanism —no longer completely satisfy. There is a quest for some higher explanations about man’s purpose, about why we are here. This is associated with periods of great stress in society. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 266 (#expands, via linked claim)

People do not live by reason alone. They cannot calculate and act rationally in pursuit of their self-interest until they define their self. Interest politics presupposes identity. In times of rapid social change established identities dissolve, the self must be redefined, and new identities created. For people facing the need to determine Who am I? Where do I belong? religion provides compelling answers, and religious groups provide small social communities to replace those lost through urbanization. … Whatever universalist goals they may have, religions give people identity by positing a basic distinction between believers and nonbelievers, between a superior in-group and a different and inferior out-group. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 267 (#expands, via linked claim)

I begin with the premise that the once-popular notion in the social sciences that modernity will necessarily lead to a decline of religiosity, the so-called secularization paradigm, is no longer tenable. In the words of a leading sociologist of religion, Peter Berger (1999, 9), “The world today is massively religious, is anything but the secularized world that had been predicted (whether joyfully or despondently) by so many analysts of modernity [including Berger himself in his earlier writings].” Furthermore, it seems clear that this worldwide resurgence of religion has not been the result of a rise in individual religiosity, but rather is due to the increasing presence of religion in the public sphere and its instrumental use in politics. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 1664 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Religion represents the superstructural projection of earlier modes of production — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6154; Rapidly industrializing societies experience compressed cultural dislocation that fuels religious revival — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 266; Modernization itself drives religious resurgence by creating identity crises. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 317 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Rapidly industrializing societies experience compressed cultural dislocation that fuels religious revival #expands (0.95) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 266
• Religious revival flourishes where rapid social change destroys established identities #expands (0.92) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 267
• Religion’s resurgence reflects political instrumentalization, not personal piety #complicates (0.75) — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 1664