Religion and modernity

the case of the Lourdes shrine in nineteenth-century France

Suzanne K. Kaufman

pp. 92-108

in: Pamela L. Caughie (ed), Disciplining modernism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

This chapter investigates the claim that modernity is synonymous with secularism. The idea has long been an orthodoxy among historians of western Europe and North America. Indeed, many historians of the West have embraced an appealingly simple notion of modern progressive development that runs something like this: As societies modernize, with scientific rationality emerging hand in hand with capitalist economic development and liberal political democracy, they experience what German sociologist Max Weber labeled the progressive "disenchantment of the world" (Weber 155). In this scenario, the emergence of modern life is identified with a set of historical conditions that include the industrial revolution, the transition to urban culture, the rise of the nation-state, and the emerging power of the bourgeoisie, all of which were shaped by and also shaped specific political, intellectual, and cultural discourses around rationality and secularism. In short, the conventional historical narrative of western modernity is predicated on the inevitability of religious decline.

Cited authors

Weber Max