Social Forms of Religions in Contemporary Society 57
that would fall under this type quite clearly. Examples are Transcendental Meditation,
New Age, neopaganism (Wicca), Tai Chi, and Qi Gong.^7 In each of these cases, although
there may exist organizations associated with them – or, what amounts to the same,
there also exist organized forms of these movements – the dominant form of participa-
tion is episodic, occasional, largely uncontrolled by any sort of convergent authority,
and to the extent that it is regular, quite often individual as opposed to collective.
In certain cases, such as Transcendental Meditation, there has been a move toward
the clearly organized form in recent decades as the movement itself faded. In others,
such as notably the example of Western neopaganism, the movement ideology rejects
organization as illegitimate concentration of what is for them a basically individual
religious authority. Neopagans of this sort will therefore congregate for specific events
like festivals and local circle meetings, but there are few if any “rules of membership,”
let alone well-defined offices of a stable organization. Indicative of the relative distinc-
tiveness of this social form of religion is that even those that wish deliberately to avoid
greater convergence, organization, recognition by the state and other social agencies as
a “religion,” seem to find themselves under a fair amount of pressure to go just in these
directions. In some cases like the neopagans, the primary reason may be the “freedom
of religion” that such congregation and recognition typically brings. In others, such
as Transcendental Meditation, the difficulty of maintaining the dynamism and con-
stant mobilization of a movement may make the concentration and regularization of
organization seem an attractive strategy to follow.
4. Communitarian/Individualistic Religion
The final form, communitarian/individualistic can be dealt with briefly because, as
noted, it represents the boundary “form” between religion that is institutionalized as
such, and that which is religious but unformed as religion except perhaps analytically
by observers. In much of the world today, as in times past in most societies, what we
now call religion is practiced locally and even regionally, but without a strong sense of
the system of practices and beliefs being part of a larger whole or of it being a clearly dif-
ferentiated activity called religion. Contemporary examples may be the local religious
practices in India, China, or different parts of Africa, the religious dimensions of life
among various aboriginal peoples all over the world, the individual and often idio-
scyncratic practices of individuals made famous by Bellah and his collaborators (Bellah
et al. 1985) under the heading of “Sheilaism,” and perhaps a whole array of cultural
practices that have escaped incorporation into one of the religions. Examples of the
latter would be Western “secular” celebrations of holidays such as Halloween, Easter
(bunnies and eggs, not Jesus on the cross), and Groundhog Day. All of these manifes-
tations are religious in the sense that one could and occasionally does observe them
as religion. But they do not belong to that category in any consistent fashion because
insiders do not seek to have them recognized as religion or reject such categorization;
or because no formed and recognized religion successfully claims them. In fact, these
manifestations can appear as religion only by association with the other forms. It is
(^7) These latter two can also fall under Daoism, just as Transcendental Meditation may under some
circumstances be claimed by Hinduism. Since the text is dealing with social forms rather than
again the question of the boundaries of specific religions, I leave that issue aside here.