The Many Altars of Modernity

Chapter 5: Religion and Multiple Modernities

The late Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt (1923 – 2010) made a very useful contribution to the topic of this book, though like Alfred Schutz he was, as far as I know, not particularly interested in religion. In a 2000 article in the journal Daedalus, he proposed the concept of “multiple modernities,” which attracted widespread attention and which he elaborated further in some later publications. It is, I think, an important contribution to our understanding of modernity, and it is very applicable to the relation secularity and religion in modern societies. The central idea here is quite simple: Modernity does not come in one version only, but in several versions. After World War II, when many ...