58 Peter Beyer
the formed religions that act as implicit models for religion as such, and therefore any
sort of social activity that bears resemblance to them may on occasion be observed
and treated as religion. The category itself has acquired this expansive capacity. This,
however, raises the question that so many sociologists and other observers have raised
with regard to religion: Are there defining characteristics that all those things that end
up counting as religion have in common?
At the core of the analysis presented in this chapter is that, ultimately, it is the
religions that determine what counts as religion, not a set of defining characteristics in
abstraction from them (e.g., Beyer 2001). Nonetheless, as a general observation, we can
say that almost all those forms that make up religion in this way seem to be centrally
concerned with one manner or another of supra-empirical or transcendent dimension,
realm, or beings which contrasts expressly with the empirical, material, ordinary, or
immanent domain of other spheres of life and is seen from the religious perspective to
be determinative of them. Moreover, almost all those things that fall under the category
of religion exhibit some range of, usually ritual, techniques and procedures that claim
to render communicative access to that transcendent domain. That said, however, the
ways of understanding transcendence and the ways of constructing access to it vary
so greatly among religions and in many ways bear clear resemblance to forms that are
not deemed to be religion, that this formal commonality is by itself not sufficient to
determine the practical boundary between religion and nonreligion. For this extra and
critical step, the contrasts and forms that have been the topic of discussion in this
chapter are much more determinative.
CHALLENGES OF RELIGIONS IN GLOBAL SOCIETY
In light of the variety of forms that religion and religions take in today’s world and the
contestations that are an integral part of that formation, it should not be surprising
that the observation and study of religions rarely yields any sort of unanimity or even
general agreement over what precisely is at issue. The modern category of religion and
the religions is historically speaking a comparatively recent social construction and
therefore attempts to understand “religion as such” are bound to run into difficulty
if they do not take into account the social and historical context in which this con-
struction has come to make sense. Religion in contemporary global society is not a
well-delimited and self-evident form that is simply waiting for critical observation. It is
rather more an important and somewhat arbitrary field of contestation (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992) or differentiated societal system (Luhmann 2000) that gains its form
and meaning entirely within the larger social context in which it operates. In this light,
a more important question to pose of contemporary religion than what religion is or
what it does (the substantive versus functional debate) is the question of what religion
and the religions are becoming. Given that not everything conceivably religious ends
up counting as religion, what kind of religion and religions does our contemporary
situation favor? It is with a consideration of this question that this chapter concludes.
To address this question, one can return to the fundamental distinctions between
religion and nonreligion and between one religion and another. From this perspective,
one of three logical possibilities will inform the directions in which we are headed
in global society. On the extreme ends, religion as a category may lose the distinct
form that it currently has, yielding a situation in which religion will be perhaps an