60 Peter Beyer
to Soka Gakkai in Japan and Hindu Nationalism in India, is that they seek to have
religious orientations and precepts made the basis of collectively binding decisions and
norms in a given country or region, and even the entire world. Another way of putting
this is that they seek to make religion, and specifically a particular religion, apublic
and obligatory affair, not something restricted to the relativelyprivateproclivities of its
voluntary adherents (e.g., Beyer 1994). Such efforts are commensurate with the typical
claims of religions to be providing access to the most solid and true foundations of all
human existence, in essence to an absolute and transcendent reality. What the high
incidence of religiopolitical movements indicates, however, is that such broad collec-
tive influence for religions is problematic, that it does not occur very often through
the straightforward reproduction of religion among adherents. And indeed, this trend
is not surprising given the combination of the secularization of the most powerful
nonreligious social domains and the institutionalized pluralization of religions.
In terms of the distinctions that have been central to the present analysis, the
religion/nonreligion difference along with the religion/religion distinction push reli-
gion and religions in the direction of a restricted domain in which one can participate
through a large variety of religions, or not at all. Globally speaking, the situation is
somewhat similar with other major collective and globalized categories like nations
and cultures. The former have typically been identified with states and usually stand
for or constitute the particular identity of a state, that which renders it distinct from
all the others. The latter is also a highly contested category that, along with nation, is
often bound up with the sorts of religiopolitical movements that are at issue. In this
light, the politicization of religions is an intermittent but frequent response to the ten-
dency toward the privatization of religion. It does not seem unreasonable to conclude,
therefore, that broad power for religions will remain a concrete possibility in particu-
lar regions where a high degree of politicization succeeds; but that, in the light of the
continued reproduction of a plurality of religions and the constant rise of new ones,
privatization is just as, if not more, likely to represent the dominant trend. Ambiguity,
it seems, is the constant companion of the modern global category and social forms of
religion.