Ulrich Beck’s ‘Reflecting Faith’: Individualization,Religion and the Desecularization of Reflexive Modernity

Introduction

In 1995, James Beckford lamented the absence of any serious consideration of religion in contemporary social theory with particular reference to Ulrich Beck. As Beckford summarized matters, for Beck religion was regarded as essentially alien to ‘second modernity’ and thus treated as an anachronism, a source of personal solace or a simple means of reactionary protest against the dissolution of tradition:

Insofar as religion has any place in Beck’s characterization of the ‘new modernity’, it seems to consist of (a) the symbolization of threats to civilization in the form of malevolent spirits, and (b) radical and fanatical reactions to these intangible threats. (Beckford, 1999: 40)

Since this time, there has been little need to revisit this judgement nor for sociologists of religion to look to Beck’s work for any serious or substantive engagement with religion as a significant feature of the contemporary social world. Thus, the appearance in 2008 of a book entitled Der Eigene Gott: Von der Friedensfahigkeit und dem Gewaltpotential der Religionen (English translation, appearing in 2010 as A God of One’s Own: Religion’s Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence) came as something of a shock. In a remarkable volte face, Beck now embraced religion as a basic constituent of reflexive individualization and a vital support for the cosmopolitan moral and political ‘vision’ necessary in an age of global risk. If reflexive modernity qua the ‘modernization of modernity’ had heretofore been identical, in Beck’s view, with the secularization of secularity, it is the desecularization of modernity that is now the focus. In this essay, I attempt to evaluate Beck’s ‘religious turn’ by, first, rehearsing Beck’s construal of reflexive modernity as the ‘secularization of secularity’ before going on to sketch the key arguments granting religion admission to second modernity, focusing in particular on the ‘individualization of religion’ and its support for a ‘normative cosmopolitanism’ (2010: 175). Shifting to a more critical register, I then consider the credibility of Beck’s analysis by considering the tensions in his account of a ‘reflexive’ religiosity which is, by turns, unavoidably patterned after Protestant individualism, devoid of an affective dimension and recruited to a secular-Enlightened discourse of human rights to which it may not necessarily incline. I conclude by suggesting that, whilst the admission of religion to second modernity is welcome, the analysis is vitiated by the instrumentalizing of faith to serve the ends of a normative cosmopolitanism.

Reflexive Modernity: The Secularization of Secularity

To begin, however, we might recapitulate some of the most salient features of the argument for a ‘reflexive modernity’. With Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (German publication, 1986, English translation, 1992), Ulrich Beck reoriented the social-scientific engagement with ‘modernity’ in departing from the postmodernist consensus of an exhausted and monolithic ‘Enlightenment project’ and situating the social and cultural transformations of late 20th-century western society within the very processes of modernization itself. To live in the contemporary world was not to have left modernity behind but to encounter the unintended consequences of thoroughgoing and ‘successful’ modernization, confronting them with the very principles they claim to uphold. As Beck stated in the Preface to Risk Society:

Modernization within the horizon of experience of pre-modernity is being displaced by reflexive modernization. In the nineteenth century, privileges of rank and religious world views were being demystified; today the same is happening to the understanding of science and technology in the classical industrial society, as well as to the modes of existence in work, leisure, the family and sexuality. Modernization within the paths of industrial society is being replaced by a modernization of the principles of industrial society. [ … ] The thesis of this book is: we are witnessing not the end but the beginning of modernity – that is, of a modernity beyond its classical industrial design. (1992: 11)

Thus, focusing particularly on the man-made environmental consequences of advanced industrialization, Beck was able to show how such ‘modernization’ intensified the experience of uncertainty and risk contrary to classical modernity’s objective of the ‘perfect control society’ (Beck and Willms, 2004: 29) and, as a result, threw into doubt the hitherto-unquestioned features, assumptions and ideals of ‘modernity’ itself. In the process, the technocratic regime of scientific-administrative expertise was in large part de- legitimized with the eruption of ‘risk conflicts’ pitting experts and lay-people against one another and the moral and political dimensions of risk definition laid open to question. A ‘pre-modern’ faith in the priestly caste of scientists gives way to recognition of the partiality of institutionalized techno-science and a grasp of the fallibilism of scientific reasoning.

In parallel, the unintended consequences of the practices of the institutions of social and political modernity usher in a widespread sense of their undemocratic norms. The individualizing effects of the labour market, welfare state and mass consumerism illuminate and dissolve the pre-modern residues still clinging to social class, family and gender relations and the nation-state. Social class loses its communal and customary character, giving rise to a ‘capitalism without classes’ (1992: 88) and an ambivalent individualism in which people are, effectively, ‘forced to be free’. Most significantly, this individualization has methodological implications for social theory which set Beck’s account against classical theorists who identified the same processes with ‘modernity’ tout court. This is not an individualism which can be ‘collectivized’ by shared norms or transcendent values (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 13). Individuals are left to manage the risks to which they are exposed as a result of reflexive modernization without authoritative institutional support and with no basis for a secure ‘re-embedding’ (Beck, 2009: 54). These same processes transform gender and family relations, releasing women from ascribed gender roles and second-class citizenship but, whilst opening up the possibility of self-determination, leave it to individuals alone to bear the burden of structural transformations and institutional upheaval, effectively reinventing the meaning of intimacy, sexuality and family forms without the authority of nature or tradition (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). Finally, and the theme of much of Beck’s work in the last decade, the nation-state and citizenship are transformed by the processes of globalization – reflexive modernization on a planetary scale. Recognition of this demands a shift of both ethico-political and social-scientific methodological perspectives from a national focus to a ‘cosmopolitan vision’ which acknowledges the demise of the ‘container-nation society’ (inter alia Beck, 2006) and grasps the fact, and consequences, of social relations with ‘cultural others’ whose proximity is transformed by migration and mediatization.

Central to Beck’s conception of a ‘reflexive’ modernity, then, is the forced confrontation with the un-modern practices of the principal institutions of the age of industrialization. The governing metaphor is the classical sociological model of the dissolution of tradition by modernity. Beck’s notion of ‘traditional modernity’ deliberately invokes the quasi-religious spirit legitimizing the key institutions: a providentialist belief in a linear narrative of historical progress – ‘the secular religion of modernity’ (1992: 214) equated to an attitude of unquestioning faith in science whose priestly practitioners promised ‘redemption through science’ (2009: 218); the deification of the nation-state (with the concomitant anathematizing of national and cultural others); and the reliance on a ‘God-given’ natural order of sexual difference underwriting the norms of personal intimacy and family forms. In short, for Beck the modernization of modernity is not only the disenchantment of disenchantment but, equally, the secularization of secularity. As Beck puts it, ‘simple modernization becomes reflexive modernization to the extent that it disenchants and dissolves its own taken-for-granted premises’ (Beck and Willms, 2004: 29); ‘demystification spreads to the demystifier and in so doing changes the condition of demystification’ (Beck, 1992: 156). Or, yet more emphatically, ‘truth has taken the usual route of modernity. The scientific religion of controlling and proclaiming truth has been secularized in the course of reflexive scientization’ (1992: 166). Reflexive modernization is reflexive secularization: the residual traces of a religious attitude transferred to the institutions of modernity, enabling their insulation from rational-critical, sceptical scrutiny, are now dissolved in the acid bath of their own unintended consequences. Unsurprisingly, religion per se – as was noted by Beckford – was largely absent from the account. With the advent of Islamist terrorism, Beck effortlessly incorporates it into the litany of ‘global risks’, reiterating its status as a ‘counter modern’ reaction to a culture of reflexive secularization and cosmopolitanization (see inter alia Beck, 2002). The political ascendancy of the religious Right in the USA is taken as further proof, as evinced by its response to climate change. As Beck states the matter, ‘(r)isk enters the global stage after God has made his exit’ (2009: 72) whilst:

For those who believe in God, risk is not risk because it is also or in essence ascribed to God’s (or the devil’s) transcendence and does not spring (only) from human actions. In this sense there is a close connection between secularization and risk. Risk presupposes human decisions. [ … ] Those who believe in God are risk atheists. Correspondingly, the contradictory certainties of a religious and secular understanding of the world clash in the conflict over risk. (2009: 72–3)

The Individualization of Religion: The Religion of Reflexivity

With the publication of A God of One’s Own: Religion’s Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence Beck redraws the map. By positing a split between institutionalized religion and individualized religiosity he can continue to treat religion as ‘a problem’ yet, most importantly, he can now hold it up as a possible solution – a support for civilization in an age of multiple global risks. The ‘God of one’s own’ of the title is the religious expression of the ‘life of one’s own’ reflexively constructed by each individual, removed from the dictates of tradition and nature (Beck, 1997; Beck and Gernsheim, 2002) whilst the subtitle of the book underlines the degree to which the text not only seeks to address the resurgence of religion within the framework of Beck’s overall theory but, more urgently, attempts to define the ‘two faces of religion’ (2010: 47) in the age of the crises of global interdependence where global religiously inspired conflict is apparently endemic. ¹ The contest is between adherence to an exclusive ‘truth’ and a commitment to an inclusive ‘peace’. On the one side there is, then, the intolerant dogmatism of the religious institutions, each jealously guarding its possession of absolute Truth – reaching its apocalyptic extremes with the call to global Holy War – and on the other, the possibility of a religiously informed drive to universal and mutual recognition without concern for gender, ethnicity, nationality or social status. Thus, central to the admission of religion to the theory of reflexive modernity is Beck’s alignment of the institutions of religion with all the other dissolving institutions of classical modernity, releasing individuals from their protective and prescriptive hold, as well as the identification of religion throughout its existence with the two key features of reflexive modernization: cosmopolitanization and individualization. In Beck’s view, the ‘world religions’ have, throughout their history, both transcended national or communal boundaries in their appeal and made their address to the individual conscience such that religion can be considered the ‘co-builder of modernity’ (2010: 180) and its marginalization in first modernity a brief hiatus within the longue durée of modernization. In this way Beck can sketch a sociological account of the religious dimension and sources of modernity and its reflexive critique and self-questioning which, focusing on the central concept of ‘individualization’, opens onto an exploration of the ethical resources provided by religious belief to a cosmopolitan perspective necessary in the era of globalized risks. The world religions are truly at home in ‘second modernity’.

As will be clear by now, Beck’s ‘religious turn’ is very much in keeping with the broader shift in contemporary social theory towards the conceptualization of ‘post- secular’ society, expressed most influentially in the recent work of Jürgen Habermas (2008). In the context of an apparent resurgence of religion and of its claim to public/political import, Habermas and others have demanded a greater reflexivity on the part of secularist self-understanding and sought to guide this, in part, through sensitizing opinion to the continuities of religious values and legacies in contemporary political life (Harrington, 2011). Beck’s approach represents an attempt to align explanation of the religious ‘revival’ in the West of the last 50 years with the analytical framework and political imperatives of the theory of reflexive modernity. The account draws on sources in the sociology of religion which qualify the ‘secularization thesis’ ² and which inform the basic line of arguments which follow from this: ‘secularization’ is a largely (Western) European phenomenon whose effects, where it does occur, are paradoxical to the extent that they produce an individualized and de-institutionalized ‘religiosity’, freed from complicity with, or compromise by, state and scientific institutions, and whose seat is the ‘sovereign self’ (2010: 25). This is a ‘post-secular’ settlement which accords nicely with reflexive modernity, as Beck sees it, for ‘the paradox of secularization’ brings the account within the framework of Beck’s thesis of ‘risk’ and ‘reflexivity’ and ties together the persistence of religion and its renewed moral force. As Beck puts it, ‘(r)eligion is both empowered and disempowered by secularization’ (2010: 24) for it has both freed religious institutions of the obligation to legitimize the political and cognitive-scientific authorities which reflexive modernization has thrown into crisis and granted religion the power to inform their interrogation.

In ‘non-linear’ fashion, the secularization of secularity corrodes the modernist faith in science and the state as it exposes the counter-modern consequences of their actions, leaving them subject to a ‘disenchanted’ critique that – however paradoxically – can draw on principles rooted in the religious sanctification of the human individual given greater saliency due to the church’s independence of these agencies. Yet, in line with the same processes undermining the authority of the ‘secular religious’ institutions, the established churches have found themselves undermined by the power of reflexive individualization and unable to resume their position of authority. Hence, ‘secularization does not mean the demise of religion and faith, but instead the development and massive dissemination of a religiosity that is based on individualization’ (2010: 29) in which it is the individual herself who authenticates her own religious belief and practice. A central constituent of this is the pluralization of faith in the age of migration and global media, ‘disembedding’ individuals from the taken-for-granted communal-cultural context of their beliefs, presenting them with alternatives and (as a result) a need to justify their ‘choices’ in the everyday practice of faith. However, the Janus face of religion in second modernity – its capacity for peace and potential for violence – is itself the result of ‘reflexivity’. The churches attempt to police the boundaries of orthodoxy with the effect of reinforcing inter-denominational and inter-cultural differences and – fearful of the dissolution of the meaning and authenticity of doctrine by DIY religiosity, bland inter-faith ecumenism or excessive concession to global consumer culture – giving rise to a ‘reflexive fundamentalism’ (2010: 169) which addresses individuals’ need for security by reaffirming the power of the institution alone to legislate for truth, drawing on traditions which are not merely invoked but ‘reflexively’ mined for reasons.

For Beck, the ‘desecularization of reflexive modernity’ can be summarized in ten ‘core theses’. First, Beck states, ‘religious belief spreads as a response to the insecurity triggered by radicalized modernization processes’ (2010: 85). But this is not to conceive its resurgence as simply a futile attempt to resist inevitable secularization – as ‘assumed by theoreticians of the first modernity’ – rather, it is ‘a product of advanced modernizations that have started to question their own legitimacy’ (2010: 85). So the persistence of religion is a constituent of ‘reflexivity’ itself; a holding to account of modernity in accordance with its own principles. The ‘secularization of secularity’ demonstrates the end of the ‘either-or’ conceptual framework of classical modernity and the emergence of the ‘both-and’ which Beck sees as the leitmotif of reflexive modernization (see e.g. Beck, 1997: 1–10). The modernization of modernity thus gives rise to further modernization and, at the same time, to ‘respiritualization’ and desecularization. Furthermore, if first modernity sprang from ‘individualization within religion (Protestantism)’ second modernity experiences ‘individualization of religion (God of one’s own)’ (2010: 79), a ‘subjective anarchy of belief’ which exacerbates the tension between ‘(institutionalized) religion and (individualized) belief’ (2010: 85). This is the advent of a new ‘subjective polytheism’ often associated with New Religious Movements but increasingly characteristic of the practices of those still attached to the established churches – Beck cites the case of Swiss Catholics who augment their beliefs with Buddhist conceptions of reincarnation (2010: 129) – and amounts to an orientation whereby one’s own religiosity is enriched rather than threatened by other religious traditions and beliefs. This process is a sign not of the end but of the ‘victory’ of modernity as the principle of individual autonomy that is institutionalized in legal rights and reinforced through the effects of the labour market penetrates to the level of religious conduct and conscience. It is another aspect of a wider process of social individualization accompanying the ‘dismantling of tradition’ (2010: 87) in which the aspects of belief and conduct which were hitherto coordinated and governed according to collectively imposed, overarching norms, are now separated out and made a matter of individual recombination and interrogation (thesis three). The de-institutionalizing of religion means, for the fourth thesis, that ‘the religiosity of the second, globalized, modernity divides into two worlds – the world of priestly religion and the world of individual faith’, such that believers are thereby involved in a ‘double religiosity, double morality, double reality’ (2010: 87). The decrees of the church are at odds with the beliefs and practices of the individuals constituting the congregation – Catholics regard the church’s policy vis-a-vis contraception in the face of AIDS as, effectively, immoral. The ‘faith movements’ arising out of the radicalization of religious choice draw on the stock of religious symbols which were hitherto the possession of the church but which have since been detached from their traditional moorings and made subject to reconstruction and adaptation, involving at the same time disputes about the interpretation and principles involved and permitting the cross-fertilizing of faith.

The fifth thesis reaffirms the de-institutionalization of religious belief in the wider context of ‘social individualization’: declining church attendance coincides with burgeoning religiosity just as the decline in attachment to other institutions, such as trade unions, coincides with individuals’ ongoing engagement with the substantive issues they made their own. Indeed, this engagement with public questions of justice, etc., leads Beck in the sixth thesis to argue that the individualization of religion is not the same as its privatization, indeed, it propels believers into action in the public sphere and global civil society. In a key argument, Beck maintains that the ‘individualization’ of religion is also the religion of individualism, the belief in the universal sacred value of the human person which underpins the notion of human rights. The individualization of religious belief means – as Beck states in his seventh thesis – that the legitimacy of one’s faith resides in personal commitment rather than any conformity to pre-existent truths, with the truth of one’s faith established by way of individual effort. Individual religiosity tends to expression in a ‘minimal creed’ (thesis eight) and, in his ninth thesis, Beck denies that the assertion of a God of one’s own is peculiar to ‘post-modernity’, citing the examples across Christian history of the cultivation of subjective spiritual self-interrogation and religious individualism. Lastly, in the tenth thesis, Beck affirms once more the public role of religion. However, whilst religion is itself an actor in the processes of cosmopolitanization (a transnational agent in global civil society) it must itself be ‘cosmopolitanized’ – something which the polytheistic inclination of individualized religiosity enables in its syncretism and openness to other faiths.

Cosmopolitan Religiosity: The Religion of Human Rights

For Beck, the sociological analysis yields an understanding of religion which emphasizes its eternal ‘modernity’, so to speak, because of the key features of individualization and cosmopolitanism: the address to the individual conscience and its universality. The world religions – precisely because of their global reach, concern with the dignity of the individual and indifference to ‘worldly’ matters of rank and status – might act as champions of the excluded as they underline the responsibility of the wealthy North to the impoverished South, the post-industrial West to the industrializing East. Beck gave some notice of this perspective in his interview with Willms where he describes the Catholic Church as, potentially, a force ‘to shame globalism before the world, to care for its victims, and help the world to perceive its bad consequences’ (Beck and Willms, 2004: 212). Yet this remains to be seen, for just as the individualization at the heart of the world religions is obstructed by the authority of the institutions which define it, so the readiness of the religions to recognize the rights of other faiths is constrained by the authority of the institutional dogma.

As was set out in his Cosmopolitan Vision, for Beck this necessitates a recognition of others as others which, therefore, implies both an acknowledgement of the difference of the other and a common identity. The postmodern critique of imperialist universalisms was apposite but ran aground on the shoals of relativism; in the age of global interdependency we are compelled to engage with the fate and predicament of the other, as it is entangled with ours and, as a result, Beck argued for a ‘contextualist universalism’ (2006: 55) which would recognize the local, particular, contextual application and interpretation of ‘universal’ values. As Beck maintained:

… law serves as a good example for contextual universalism and its associated conflicts. Although Western in origin, human rights and their universalistic validity claim are neither alien nor irrelevant to non-Western cultures. Rather local groups connect and affirm local and national sources of power through contextual interpretations that draw on their own cultural and political traditions and religions. (2006: 60)

This would be evident in the adaptability of religions to local conditions and in the extent to which, simultaneously, a reflexive religiosity focuses above all on human rights. Yet it brings out the Janus face of religion in the age of globalization – both cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan. Indeed, anti-cosmopolitanism is now cosmopolitanized in a ‘reflexive fundamentalism’ which defends tradition with greater militancy in the face of the demand for justification, emphasizing the ‘purity of faith’, providing a bedrock of certainty in the face of risk and all the time laying claim to a ‘direct line to God’ (2010: 174). This would be the fundamentalism which reaches its apotheosis with the violence of the ‘cosmopolitan anti-cosmopolitanism’ of the networked Jihadism of Al Qaeda. In Beck’s view, this is the attempt to maintain the authority of the institution by guarding boundaries against any dilution of faith or corruption of doctrine, sustaining a sense of identity precisely through difference from other faiths, anathematizing apostates, unbelievers and atheists. It is from these sources that religion’s potential for violence stems and which, in its cosmopolitan dimensions – through networks of media, communication, migration, etc. – makes it another ‘global risk’ (Beck, 2002). On the other hand, in its fundamental ‘normative cosmopolitanism’, religion might prove itself vital to the aversion of global catastrophe – and here (as in the comment to Willms) it is as an institutional presence wherein lies its power. This is to cultivate a universalism beyond the tribal ties of nationality but also an inter- denominational tolerance which respects other faiths as such and whose motto is ‘conversion is good, missionary work is bad’ (2010: 177). Yet this tolerance must remain bound to the contextual universalism of normative cosmopolitanism such that the infringement of human rights is everywhere and always intolerable.

This concern with human rights is where the themes of cosmopolitanism and individualization most clearly connect. And it is here that a move as surprising as the desecularizing of reflexive modernity itself occurs – the emergence of Durkheim as the presiding spirit of the ‘religious theory of the second modernity’ (2012: 179). As we have noted, Beck had earlier dismissed Durkheim’s relevance to any analysis of reflexive individualization on account of the very ‘religiosity’ of his discourse. ³ Now, for the very same reason, Durkheim provides the model for religiosity in the era of global risk and the means of integrating individualization and cosmopolitanization. Durkheim anticipates ‘the union of individualization and cosmopolitanism’ (Beck, 2010: 96) in his view that the human person – abstracted from differences of sex, status, nationality or ethnicity – is sacred, which is to say ‘that man has become a god for man’ (2010: 96, citing Durkeim, 1969: 26). As Beck states:

… [i]n the language of both Durkheim and Habermas, we ‘believe’ in human rights because in them man’s likeness to God has acquired its secular-cum-sacred form and has even in part been institutionalized in law. Thus, for example, Amnesty International may be said to represent a modern church dedicated to a ‘god of its own’. (2010: 97)

This resolves the problem of mutually exclusive universalistic religions coexisting in relations other than those of distrust or mere pragmatic tolerance. The ‘universalistic minimum’ of human rights provides the common ground: cosmopolitanized religion is a ‘double religion’, the belief in both the universal truth of my particular religion and in the universal validity of the rules governing interaction with other religions. As Beck put it:

… if there can be no such a thing as a pure cosmopolitanism, then the one truth common to all religions must be the cosmopolitan truth based on the recognition of the otherness of other religions, inclusive of their truths.

To formulate this slightly differently: the relations of cosmopolitan truths to one another call for a cosmopolitanism of the religions and that is based not on immutable truths, handed down to mankind, but ultimately on rules, treaties, procedures (human rights, the rule of law, etc.) that have been agreed by people among themselves. (2010: 194)

Mediating relations between the ‘universal’ religions is universal human rights – the ‘universalistic minimum’ to which all cosmopolitan recognition of otherness must accede. As it turns out, each particular religion’s capacity for peace is its readiness to recognize the dignity – the sacredness – of the human individual, regardless of his or her faith. If Beck had previously rejected Durkheim’s relevance to the discussion on the grounds of his attachment to ‘transcendent values’ in an age when integration could no longer be secured, he now embraces a Durkheimian perspective as indispensible to normative cosmopolitanization. If he had wondered earlier whether ‘perhaps individualization and integration are mutually exclusive’ (Beck and Gernsheim, 2002: 17), ‘religiosity’ renders the question otiose.

Piety, Emotion and Reflexive Religiosity: Between Fundamentalism and Cosmopolitanism

The desecularization of reflexive modernity has, it seems, satisfied Beckford’s objections: impelled by events and the ‘post-secular’ shift across social theory, Beck now provides a sociologically sensitive account of religiosity which is integrated, without strain, into his overall theoretical framework through the concept of ‘individualization’ and which allows religion a progressive politico-ethical purchase on the crises of world risk society thanks to its constitutive cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, the emphatic break with any suggestion of a unitary secularization process underscores the non-linear nature of the modernization of modernity which also serves to align Beck’s reflexive modernization with accounts of ‘multiple modernities’ (2010: 39), qualifying the Eurocentric bias for which he has often been criticized. Religious belief is no longer to be associated with an evasion of the challenges of the contemporary world but regarded as an integral constituent of any adequate response: in a post-positivistic age, when techno-science cannot answer the ethical questions which its discoveries and implementation open up, the religious sensitivity to questions of liveability, human dignity, universal justice and so on, assume a new importance. The undermining of faith in the priestly caste of scientists provides space for the resurgence of religion – but, again, not in any way which implies the resurrection of the old institutional power and authority: the ‘paradox of secularization’ has granted religion a different sort of potential, invested in its address to, regard for and residence in the individual conscience. Beck’s individualized God is the ‘God in me’ (Davie, 2007: 98), now more powerful in many ways due to subjective appropriation – and not suggestive of the disappearance of transcendence but an articulation of transcendence (even as the positive index of the very ‘unboundedness’ of risk) ‘within’ immanence. What is more, the admission of Durkheim to the discussion appears to acknowledge – in contrast to Beck’s earlier position – that ‘institutional individualization’ does resolve in anomie unless its claim to realize universal autonomy can be practically redeemed: a task which a post-institutional religiosity is ideally equipped to support. Again, reflexive religiosity would amount to the force of an immanent critique of ‘secular’ modernity, holding to account the claims of contemporary institutions, norms and practices by addressing the ‘humanity deficit’ evident in their outcomes.

Yet the attempt to desecularize reflexive modernity is not without its tensions. In considering these, it is only fair to note that Beck himself acknowledges the incomplete and provisional quality of many of the claims and proposals of A God of One’s Own, noting from the outset sociology’s traditional insensitivity to the subjective dimensions of religious experience and confessing midway through the book to its ‘failure’ on account of the near-exclusive attention to the monotheistic religions. The text bears all the hallmarks of an intervention, by a non-specialist, in a particular sub-disciplinary field as a result of wider social and political exigencies. The shortcomings of the book do not necessarily invalidate the wider theoretical project which is, in its acknowledgement of a reflexively modern religiosity, a welcome development in Beck’s thinking. In the following, I want to focus on the tensions in Beck’s presentation of a ‘cosmopolitanized’ and ‘individualized’ religiosity which are evident, firstly, in an account that is (however self-confessedly) Eurocentric, founded in an understanding of ‘individualization’ that is explicitly Protestant. Secondly, Beck’s model of reflexive religiosity evinces a blindness to forms that are neither ‘fundamentalist’ nor ecumenical-cosmopolitan and are embodied most emphatically in modes of religious self-understanding and expression which place ‘piety’ at the centre of concern. Thirdly, Beck’s ‘reflexivity’ gives on to a cerebral and exclusively cognitive idea of religiosity: related to the downgrading of the institutional setting for contemporary religion, Beck’s theory overlooks the profound importance of the affective dimension to faith in second modernity.

The most glaring and paradoxical distortion in Beck’s analytical lens is the Eurocentric – indeed, ‘Christocentric’ – basis of the account, profoundly at odds with the methodological cosmopolitanism Beck urges on the social sciences and the references to the ‘world religions’ throughout. Beck confesses as much:

… when I speak of religion in this book, what is meant for the most part is Christianity. It is not possible here to include all the (world) religions in a study of the ‘cosmopolitan vision’ and to consider their various interactions under the headings of individualization and cosmopolitization [Kosmopolitisierung (2008: 89) ⁴ ] [ … ] By contrast, however, the Asiatic hybrid religions are largely ignored here. And this remains the case even though they would be an absolutely indispensable complement, as well as a possible corrective, to the sociology of a ‘God of one’s own’ that is supposed to stand at the centre of the book. (2010: 65)

In the footnote to this passage Beck admits that ‘this fact in itself makes it clear that the book is a failure if it is measured by the standard it has set itself, namely to develop a cosmopolitan change of vision and to apply it to the topic of religion’ (2010: 65).

But this failure, if it is such, is explicable on methodological and educational grounds – the cosmopolitan perspective is still under construction. Indeed, the central thesis remains uncompromised for this cosmopolitanization is underway as a result of the shift from institutional religion to individualized ‘religiosity’ – with the happy implication that the cosmopolitanization of religion is also its ‘de-Westernization’ as it opens up a world of religious choice (2010: 49). The non-Abrahamic religions retain for Beck’s argument the status of an ideal of uncontaminated ‘spirituality’ which might purify the monotheisms of their latent violence and, whilst the argument is all too aware of an ‘inauthentic’ consumerist appropriation of Eastern beliefs (2010: 86), there is an undeniably orientalist hue to their invocation in the argument. Furthermore, with ‘individualization’ and ‘choice’ as the watchwords of this reflexively individualized religion, there remains a fundamental ambiguity in Beck’s account as to the Christian patterning of the ‘God of one’s own’. This is more than merely a matter of perspective: the Reformation appears to be the template for individualization, realized initially as ‘individualization in religion’ (2010: 104) and subsequently as the ‘individualization of religion’ (2010: 117).

Beck’s account of ‘individualized’ religion is, itself, problematic, however. This springs no doubt from the counterposing of a dogmatic institutionalized religion to a tolerant individualized religiosity (at odds with reflexive modernity’s logic of ‘both-and’) which, whilst making good polemical sense, robs the account of much of its analytical purchase. In its tendency to anathematize religious institutions, Beck’s construal of religious practice fails to pay detailed attention to its institutional formation, on the one hand, and remains emphatically cerebral, on the other. As a result there is little sense of the ways in which the de-institutionalizing of religion is accompanied by a ‘re- institutionalization’ and the production of new religious subjects (the focus of much of the sociology of religion’s interest in New Religious Movements, the ‘second Reformation’ in Latin America, Islamic ‘neofundamentalism’, etc.). ⁵ This might have been instructive in illuminating the critical and political potency of such individualized ‘religiosity’ but there is, however, little attention paid to the possibility of the religious-institutional generation of forms of individualism that mirror and moralize the flexible ‘self-exploiting’ individual of neo-liberalism (see Beck and Willms, 2004: 74), whose relationship to her church might display the ‘double religiosity’ Beck underlines but in a way that reflects more the short-term contract than moral autonomy, as Bauman (1997) suggested. Indeed, whilst Beck acknowledges the possibility of a ‘reflexive fundamentalism’, this is fixed as a radicalized anti-modernism, happy to use the tools and technologies of globalization against it. What escapes Beck’s notice is the emergence among Muslims and Christians, particularly in the global South and among diasporic communities, of the sort of reflexive religiosity embodied by ‘piety movements’ (Turner, 2011: xxi). These forms of religious expression and organization are not straightforwardly reactionary but are marked by the ‘democratization of faith’ contingent upon urbanization, migration, upward-mobility, expanding literacy and education, the emergence of alternative religious authorities and sources of counsel made possible by mass media and the internet (Turner, 2011: 294). The ‘pietization of everyday life’ focuses reflexively on the applicability of religious doctrine to novel situations and circumstances as they bear, particularly, on personal conduct and relations. For Turner these movements are, essentially, means of negotiating the challenges of second modernity, sources and networks for accumulating social and economic capital to seize available opportunities in deregulated capital and labour markets. In this they are resolutely, ‘world-accommodating’ (Turner, 2011: 280) – less a means of consolation, on the one hand, or political transformation, on the other, they do, nonetheless, impact upon the public sphere as they seek to open up spaces for the realization of their goals and the full public expression of a ‘private’ faith. They bear a ‘cosmopolitan’ imprint by virtue of their insertion into global networks of media, capital and communication but, contrary to Beck’s prognosis, this does not incline them to an engaged political perspective or ecumenical stance.

This gives on to an additional problem with Beck’s account. Just as elsewhere in his work, Beck is adamant that in individualized society we are presented with ‘an integration to be attained “in thought”’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 18) and this is carried through into his conceptualization of individualized religiosity, devoid of communal, practical and affective dimensions. ⁶ This is religiosity ‘from the neck up’, as it were, as disembodied as it is de-institutionalized. Indeed, in its eschewal of ritual and collective expression Beck’s reflexive religiosity is at odds, once again, with the sociology of religion’s empirical findings that indicate the most dynamic and popular forms of ‘resurgent’ religion to be those emphasizing sensation, feeling, emotion (Davie, 2007: 144). Beck partly acknowledges this in his recognition of the ‘minimal creed’ to which believers subscribe in an age of religious choice and disaffiliation (2010: 90). Yet this points to a mode of reflexivity in which ritual is the vital attraction where, as Olivier Roy says:

Feelings are more important than knowledge. An enjoyment of faith, a pleasure in belief, in being in touch with God are clearly manifested. Religious meetings are like festivals in that this religiosity is modern, based on the idea that the self is at the centre of religion. The self and hence the individual is at the core of religiosity. Faith is personal, faith is the truth. Faith is not religion. (2004: 31)

The very liberal-ecumenical forms of religiosity on which Beck grounds his argument are those in retreat in ‘second modernity’ – unless one is simply to dismiss these festivals of religious enthusiasm as last-ditch fight-backs by institutions doomed to extinction as a result of individualization and to look, therefore, to a de-institutional religiosity for an authentic cosmopolitan ethic. At the same time one might note that – aside from the potential for informal, egalitarian and ‘individualized’ religiosity to give rise to an untrammelled authoritarianism unchecked by doctrinal and institutional regulation (Heelas, 1999: 73) – the public-political efficacy of this reflexive religiosity is dubious (see for instance, Bruce, 2006). In contradistinction to a privatized spirituality, however, Beck very much allies his conception of religiosity to his commitment to the power of global civil society and NGOs (so, thanks to the deployment of Durkheim, we have Amnesty International depicted as a ‘religion’ in the pages of A God of One’s Own) and one is reminded that religiosity is to provide a moral underpinning of human rights discourse. However, it is worth pausing to consider whether a de-institutionalized religiosity constructed of the mass-mediated fragments of world-religious symbols and creeds can do anything more than substantiate liberal-democratic doxa in the most vapid fashion. Indeed, Beck’s de-institutionalized religiosity has an uncomfortably ‘ideological’ ring when it appears to uncritically affirm the stripping away of the mediating institutions of ‘first modernity’, among which the churches might be numbered. It is instructive that Beck associates the fate of the churches with that of the trade unions, noting that, despite their decline, ‘new forms of morality, politics and religiosity’ (2010: 88) are emerging which (it is implied) are relevant to the changed circumstances of second modernity. Aside from the implication that the declining significance of trade unions is the result of anonymous processes of ‘modernization’ rather than concerted effort on the part of capital and the state, Beck’s analogy draws attention to the achievements of these new forms in addressing the substantive concerns of their antecedents. The heirs to the labour movement have, for the most part, not fared well in combating global inequality – it is unclear how an individualized religiosity might acquit itself in global civil society.

Conclusion

In fine, the desecularizing of reflexive modernity traces the resurgence of religiosity to the individualization of religion understood as a constituent part of institutional individualization, and which in its reaffirmation of the religious roots – and ethic – of individualism, reinforces the critique of instrumental-rational, technocratic modernization in the name of substantive values of human dignity. Religion is cure/poison, for the danger lies in the response of the institutionalized religions to individualization – a last-ditch defence which might endanger the planet. Hence, people of faith must ‘separate dogma and practice on the world stage in the search for pragmatic solutions to the challenge of the “world risk society”’ (2010: 198). The task of religion is one of ‘replacing truth with peace’ (2010: 166) and thus, ‘peace acquires a new priority vis-à-vis truth because the one truth jeopardizes not just truth but the continued existence of humankind’ (2010: 191). Beck has turned to religion, then, as a means of lending substance to the discourse of universal human rights – the civil religion of reflexive modernity. Reflexive religiosity takes shape, therefore, as the ‘reflecting faith’ which Kant identified in Protestant Christianity – less an institutionalized cult, more a form of moral action inclining believers to the full exercise of autonomy and responsibility (Kant, 1998; Turner, 2011: 5). The problems with Beck’s account, it might be said, lie in its urgent instrumentalizing of religion which results in an understanding of the phenomenon that is simultaneously flattened-out and over-invested. Religion is either a mode of cosmopolitan engagement with cultural others or a form of tribal exclusivism whose non-negotiable claims to truth make it a threat to human existence. This has particular consequences for the permissible political expression of religiosity in reflexive modernity which underscores the problems that this perspective must have in treating of contemporary developments. A God of One’s Own attends to the place of religion in the public sphere and criticizes classical-modern conceptions of its ‘privatization’, but Beck’s cosmopolitan anxiety as to its political potency means that religion must remain an adjunct and support to a liberal-cosmopolitan discourse of human rights – if not privatized, then at least domesticated – lest in appearing as religion it unleash the dogs of holy war. This evades the challenges to laïcité which come, not from fundamentalists opposed to the separation of church and state, but from a ‘pietistic’ religiosity which – in continuity with the ‘both-and’ logic of reflexive modernity – would throw into question the either-or boundaries of public and private.

In sum, any evaluation of Beck’s ‘religious turn’ has to weigh the desecularizing of reflexive modernity against the construal of reflexive religiosity. Whilst his attending to the place and character of religion in second modernity is welcome, the project itself is undermined by its desire to utilize religion as a moral reinforcement for cosmopolitanism such that it provides a tendentious and skewed analytical account oriented around a schematic and abstract opposition of a potentially pacifying religiosity to a belligerent religion. In addition, the flaws apparent in the account of religion in second modernity are refractions of those in Beck’s critical theory – namely, the disjuncture between the analytical and normative dimensions of the argument results in the latter short-circuiting or prejudging the former. Without any doubt, Beck’s ‘religious turn’ is a welcome development: social theory has remained indifferent to work in the sociology of religion for too long – it is remarkable that religion has been largely absent from so much of discussion of late, liquid or reflexive modernity – and the ‘individualization of religion’ is a fruitful ground on which the two can now meet. Yet the project will misfire if the results of a critical analysis of the institutional and normative consequences of reflexive desecularization are second-guessed by the hopes invested in a salvific cosmopolitanism.