Social Forms of Religions in Contemporary Society 55
their activity is oriented. As such, they can give concrete and representative form to
intrinsically partial and abstract functions, goals, ideas, and categories. In a complex and
pluralistic social environment, organizations are social structures well suited to carrying
out differentiations that would otherwise be unsustainable or simply not recognized
by many or even most members of the society. They range in their strategies from
including some members of society totally to including all members of society for
certain purposes and at certain times or in certain places. Most are located somewhere
in between. Their internal structure can be quite clear as in formal organizations like
business corporations, state bureaucracies, or universities. They also can take more
informal shape, shading off in the extreme case into mere social networks centred
on some purpose or idea.^6 The modern category or idea of religion(s), ambiguous,
contested, and relatively recently constructed as it has been, benefits greatly from the
possibilities afforded by the organizational social form. Indeed, without it, religion, like
virtually every other major functional sphere, would have little hope of operating as a
differentiated social domain at all. That, of course, includes the state.
2. Politicized Religion
As noted above, the carriers of religion in the contemporary world sometimes resist the
category because it implies acceptance of the secularization of nonreligious domains
and thereby the restriction of religion to its own domain. A common direction for
this resistance to take is the politicization of religion, which is to say making the state
and its legislative, legal, administrative, and military structures instruments for collec-
tively enforcing the precepts and practices of the religion in question. This direction
can yield a distinct social form of religion in contemporary society to the extent that
religious structures become an express aspect or arm of the state; or, what amounts to
the same, the state becomes an expression of the religion. The capacity of the state to
set collectively binding norms for the people within its territorial boundaries and thus
its ability to make a particular religion an unavoidable part of these people’s daily lives
lends the religion a clear presence as a religion over and beyond what nonstate religious
organizations can do in this regard (e.g., Beyer 1994). Today, this way of giving religion
form is most radically evident in certain Muslim countries like Iran and Afghanistan,
but varying degrees of it also can be found in a number of other countries where state
identities or ideologies include a particular religion. Examples of the latter would be
Israel, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Zambia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, Russia, and,
to an increasingly less effective sense, European countries like Great Britain, Sweden,
or Germany. One should note, however, that in none of these cases does the religion
in question, whether it is Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or Hinduism, lack
organizational expression as well. State religion, or the use of the state to give social
form to a religion is in that sense a supplementary form. Only through the extreme
use of this possibility, such as in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, can the politi-
cized or state form of religion become the primary form. In other instances in which
organized religion is weak or contested, for example Hinduism in contemporary India,
the involvement of the state apparatus in a vague and general way does relatively little
(^6) For a good overview of the ranges that the form of organization can cover, see McCann (1993).