Religious diversity and pluralism is increasing all over the world, and globalization is creating a widespread awareness of that. The growing influence of religions in public politics and culture around the world is contradicting conventional narratives of secularization. Indeed, the resurgence of religions in all the continents is tangled in different ways to modernization processes. The main argument of this chapter is that this religious change toward pluralism can be fully understood in the context of multiple modernities theory, provided that it be revised and modified. The key understanding of changes must come from a better insight of popular religions worldwide. Latin American, Eastern Asia and Islam regions are good examples of popular forms of religious revitalization that contrasts with the Northern European case. New ways of producing sense and spiritual search in non-Western areas are framing specific relationships between religion and modernities and bringing about pluralisms. The interweaving of old and new religious traditions is accentuating interculturality and is generating great conditions for the emergence of new types of syncretism and/or sociocultural and even material (and violent) conflicts. The consequence is the development of religious patterns within societies that have a specific and distinctively form of modernity of their own.
Part of the book: Culture and Identity