Social Forms of Religions in Contemporary Society 51
they also were not Hindus. The historical situation in which this occurred is of course
quite complex, but critical for the development were aspects of British colonial pol-
icy that encouraged the identification of distinct religious communities and, in that
context, the simultaneous elaboration, reconstruction, and imagining by Hindu elites
of Hinduism as a unified and distinct religion that couldsubsumeSikhs. Given vari-
ous Muslim movements that also sought to articulate Islamic identity, and in light of
Christian, Muslim, and even Hindu efforts to convert Sikhs tothesereligions, a series
of Sikh movements such as Singh Sabha and the Akali movement progressively consol-
idated the institutional, symbolic, and ritual bases of a clearly separate Sikhism (e.g.,
Jones 1976; Kapur 1986; McLeod 1989). Typical for such processes, the reconstruction
of Sikhism as a distinct religion was not so much the invention of something new, as
it was the selective recombination of long established elements with new items. Dis-
tinction from other religions in effect required the “orthodoxification” of Sikhism to
an extent that had not occurred before. The upshot is that today the specifically Khalsa
Sikh identity has become recognized almost universally among Sikhs as the standard of
Sikh orthodoxy. And any efforts by others, such as more recently the Hindu nationalist
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Vishva Hindu Parishad, to publicly claim Sikhism
as a variant on Hinduism, have been vigorously opposed by Sikhs. Other examples
of problematic lines of demarcation between religions would be the above-mentioned
cases of Baha’i and Islam in Iran, Hinduism and variants such as the Brahma Kumari
or even the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Hare Kirshna), and the
status of groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Unification Church with relation
to Christianity. In each of these cases, the dispute is over questions of “orthodoxy”
but, with the exception of the Iranian example, translated into distinctions between
religions (that is, religion/religion) rather than that between religion and antireligion
(that is, religion/heresy).
Without doubt, the most frequently contentious issues with respect to religion in
contemporary society have had to do with the boundary between religion and nonreli-
gion. Disputes of this kind generally follow one of two directions: Either they concern
the restriction of religion to its “proper sphere,” in other words, the secularization of
putatively nonreligious spheres along with the privatization of religion; or they are
about what social formations will count as religion. The clearest examples of the for-
mer are religious movements and orientations that not only advocate the relevance
of religious precepts in all spheres of life, but go further to insist that religious norms
and often also religious authorities should directly control the operation of all these
domains. Religion from these perspectives cannot be only a private affair of individuals
and groups; it also must be public and collectively obligatory. Much discussed exam-
ples of this possibility are various militantly Islamic movements in countries as diverse
as Algeria, Nigeria, Iran, Afghanistan, and Indonesia; Christian rightism in the United
States; some forms of Sikh separatism in India; and certain directions among religous
Zionists and ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israel (Beyer 1994; Kapur 1986). The degree to
which such movements advocate the “de-differentiation” of religion and other spheres
varies enormously, but one aspect that is strikingly consistent is that they almost always
seek to define, deeply influence, and very often take over modern states or subunits of
them.
As concerns what will count as religion, here again, the states and their legal systems
are frequently involved in helping to determine these parameters. The vast majority