Religious revival flourishes where rapid social change destroys established identities

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Keck/Sikkink and social identity literature, and to the reader’s recurring interest in how urbanization erodes community — echoes the trade-fair community-building material from Milgrom. — connects to: Rapid change can itself be the mechanism producing deep social standstill. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 109
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that rational interest calculation itself presupposes a prior identity — that you cannot pursue self-interest until you define the self — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting inversion of rational-choice assumptions.