Post-secular faith: Toward a religion of service

Modernity is frequently called the "secular age"; following Max Weber, modernization is equated with secularization. However, recent decades have seen a strong resurgence of religion in many parts of the world. Frequently, this resurgence takes the form of a reactionary 'fundamentalism" and anti-modernism, with religious leaders trying to recapture the political power they lost in secular modernity. The paper explores the possibility that religion is indeed returning, but in a new "post-secular" form where, traversing modern secularism, religion is freed from the yearning for mastery and domination. This possibility heralds a new meaning of religious freedom and the prospect of (what I call) a religion of service. The paper also discusses the modern insistence on the "privatization" of religion, that is, the confinement of faith to a strictly inward experience (as formulated by William James). Again the notion of a religion of service rescues faith from solitary inwardness without erecting it into a public power.