Social Forms of Religions in Contemporary Society 49
carriers to join sufficiently in the reconstructive enterprise, it is far more difficult to
maintain that what observers see are anything more than labels of convenience for the
sake of analysis. This has been the fate, thus far, of “Confucianism” and the religious
traditions of most aboriginal cultures around the world: There is much behind these
labels that may well be religious, but their carriers do not generally consider or practice
themas religions.
A third key factor in the historical differentiation of religion and religions has to
do with developments outside this domain, in “nonreligion.” As with all socially sig-
nificant categories, the identity of religion depends to some extent on the difference
between what counts as religion and what does not. European society at the time of
the Reformation had a double compatibility in this regard. On the one hand, the vis-
ibility, power, and clearly religious identity of the Roman Catholic church provided
a concrete institutional model that could stand for religion positively. On the other
hand, however, early modern Europe also was a time of the gradual development of
other institutional domains that increasingly, over subsequent centuries, established
themselves as independent of religious tutelage and eventually even of religious legit-
imation. These included above all the capitalist economy, the sovereign political state
(together with its administrative and military arms), the related domain of positive
law, modern science, and later also academic education, medicalized health, art, mass
media, and sport. The rise of these nonreligious systems was critical for developing and
treating religion as something distinct and different. Not only did religion appear in
contrast to these nonreligious social spheres, the different spheres, including especially
religion, modeled themselves to some extent on each other in the process of their in-
stitutional (re)construction. What religion and the religions have become, what social
forms they now typically take in today’s world society has occurred in the context of
this modeling.
It was largely on the basis of the technical efficiency and power that these differen-
tiated domains afforded them, that the Europeans were able to extend their influence
around the world between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. They had better and
better weapons and means of transportation/communication. With increasing effi-
ciency, they could mobilize human and nonhuman resources. And the logic of these
systems drove them further and further in search of markets, resources, power, knowl-
edge, and souls. Their imperialist drive constitutes half the reason for the intensified
globalization of society over those same centuries, in particular the last two. The other
half consists in the responses of those on whom the Europeans imposed themselves
and their vision of the world.
In every part of the globe, local people were faced with the question of how to
react to the increasing power to the Europeans. In many cases, their options were quite
restricted, especially in those regions that the conquerors succeeded in colonizing, no-
tably the Americas and Australasia. There, the indigenous people that survived the
onslaught usually tried to carry on their religiocultural traditions to some extent, but
over time the prevailing pattern was conversion to Christianity, albeit not infrequently
a Christianity syncretized with an array of aboriginal religious elements and styles. The
reconstruction of indigenous traditions as distinct religions did occur in some cases,
such as the Longhouse religion founded by Handsome Lake in early-nineteenth-century
North America. These, however, remained quite limited in their impact and size. Of sig-
nificance in the Americas also were the religious traditions brought by Africans in the