The Secular Mirage:
Modernity, The Postmodern Turn,
and Religious Revivalism

Manochehr Dorraj
Texas Christian University

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between modernity, postmodernity and religious revivalism. Unlike the conventional wisdom that sees religious revivalism primarily as an indigenous, culturally specific and theological problem, this study presents an analysis that situates the issue in its global and social context, as a reaction to the universal syndrome of modernity and the condition of postmodern life. By examining the broad sociological impact of the cultural and moral malaise in postmodern society, the study illuminates how this malaise intensifies a longing for community, connection and moral cohesion that religion provides for the faithful. Seen in this light, religious revivalism must be understood as a part of restoration of identity, culture and community; an attempt to regain meaning and control in a world that seems out of control and heartless.  

Introduction

Since the nineteenth century, the regnant view among the major Western social thinkers has been that due to the forward march of rationalism and science, by the end of twentieth century, religion will disappear as the last vestige of an obsolete institution and social order. Most of those who entertained the possibility of its persistence, relegated it to the realm of irrelevance and anachronism. In fact, the general wisdom of modernization theory among the social scientist until 1970s was that as societies become more industrial, urban, and modern, the secular education and civic values would replace religion as the major source of socialization, and religion would continue to decline as a significant social institution ( Almond & Verba, 1989 ). Therefore, the vengeful return of religion as a major social force in the last four decades and its forceful intervention in this secular age poses major political and philosophical questions.

Some of the statistics in regard to global scope of religious revivalism is startling indeed. In 1970, Barrett and Johnson estimate, there were 1.2 billion Christians, today, they count 2 billion; and Barrett believes there will be 2.6 billion by 2025. The World of Islam is going to grow even faster. In 1970 there were 553 Million Muslims, in mid 2001 there were about 1.2 billion, and Barrett's projection is that by 2025 there will be 1.8 billion Muslims. In 1970 there were 463 million Hindus, by 2003 this number reached 824 million, by 2025 there will be about 1 billion Hindus.  The number of Buddhists has increased from 233 million in 1970, to 363 million in 2003, and it is projected to reach 418 million in 2025.However, the rate of the people who identify themselves as non-religious and secular have expanded from 532 million in 1970 to 774 in 2003and it is projected to reach 875 million in 2025.  Meanwhile, the number of professed atheists declined from 165 million in 1970 to 150 million today ( Martin, 2003: 44 ).

These statistics clearly reveal that as the world becomes more "modern" and "developed", contrary to the wisdom of modernization theory, the level of religiosity expands. This religious resurgence is not confined to the Third World where we have witnessed the tumultuous revival of Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Sikh fundamentalism in the last four decades. The militants from all these faiths who in the name of religion engage in heinous violent crimes and commit acts of terror are now the center of political concern. We can also see the sign of this revival in the West, most notably, in the United States, the heartland of secularism. According to some observers of American political scene, "a religious self-understanding informs our nation's new imperial impulse, explicitly articulated in the Bush administration's 2002 national security strategy" ( Carrol, 2003: 9). President Bush's characterization of Iraqi, Iranian and Korean regimes as “an axis of evil” was an attempt to conjure up religious motifs of good versus evil, righteous versus wicked in order to demonize his political opponents and mobilize the public opinion against these governments. In addition, considering the role that the Christian evangelical vote played in handing George W. Bush his reelection victory in 2004, the revival of religion in the heartland of secularism is of paramount significance indeed (Phillips, 2006).

Hence, increasingly scholars of international relations are realizing that they have to bring back the study of religion into international relations theory in order to make sense of religiously motivated political behavior. Religion is used not only for mass mobilization, but also as an instrument of political legitimation. The incessant presence and the prominent place of religion in private and public spheres raise fundamental questions:  what are the proper relationships between religion and temporal authority, state and the realm of morality and spirit. There is a growing realization among scholars that they have to take the study of culture and religion more seriously and establish a historically centered and socially grounded dialogue about religion and its increasing political significance in international relations (Petito & Hatzopoulos, 2003 and Thomas, 2005). In other words, there is a growing consciousness that the post-modern World is also a post-secular world.

What explains this new surge of interest in religion globally? What are the social forces that animate it? Why is it happening in this particular historical juncture? These are some of the pertinent questions that we would try to answer in this paper. To understand the social roots of religious revivalism of our age, we must comprehend the moral and cultural dilemmas posed by modernity and post-modernity.

Modernism and Its Crisis

The secular age is associated with modernity. The modern culture carries with it the seeds of its past and harbors the contradictions of its present. The dynamism of modern culture can be explained in terms of perpetual motion and the struggle of the forces of past and present. The outcome of this unceasing tension ultimately charts the future course of social and ethical developments in the society. To trace the intellectual antecedents of modernity, we must briefly discuss the three cultural and social upheavals, which ushered in the modern era.

The Sixteenth century gave rise to reformation and Calvinist ethos, which replaced "medieval pluralism" with state absolutism based on puritan ethics. The Eighteenth century introduced enlightenment and rationalism, which culminated in parliamentary republics. The Nineteenth century ushered in the romantic era, which was associated with such polar political ideologies as conservative nationalism and radical Marxism. Twentieth century modernism, in contrast, never produced a clear political outcome. The most distinguished political legacy of the modern era was the creation of the nation versus the community of the faithful and the secular state versus the church.  The most enduring impact of modernity however, seems to be cultural rather than political. The salient feature of modern culture lies in its revolt against the puritan culture. ( Cantour, 1986:1-6; Featherstone, 1990 ).

The Victorian era replaced pluralism with the absolutism of the state and the Church. The ascendancy of rationalism led to the cult of the individual.[i] Therefore, Fichte, following his mentor, Kant, asserted that everything that is not "I" is the product of the "I" ( Thorlby, 1966 ). Thus, placing the individual in the center of the universe. First, God was relegated to the realm of irrelevance, and later, Nietzsche brought the news of God's death, leaving us with the specter of the "overman" to take its place ( Curtis, 1962: 73-101; Kaufman, 1986).

The modern age, in contrast, ushered in the cult of the masses and “the embodiment of the common will”, the state, and the exultation of the collectivity, the nation. While quite divergent in their political programs and goals, in the two totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century that glorify nation- state, Communism and Fascism, an underlying commonality can be discerned, the dissolution of individual identity in an organic whole, i.e., the collectivity, the party and the nation-state. Sociologically, this is one of the most significant traits that these ideologies have in common with religion. Their messianic demeanor and utopian vision also lends some credence to the study of these ideologies as political religion.

Many scholars have argued that Fascism was an attempt to create a new faith. The predominance of the themes of national solidarity in their propaganda, their elaborate cult-like rituals, and their attempt to integrate the nation in a corporate unit, all attest to this reality. The religious element of Fascist movements in Eastern Europe and the Balkan states were particularly strong. The Iron Guards in Rumania adhered to a militant brand of Catholicism.  The Rexist movement in Belgium espoused the renewal of Christian life ( Carsten, 1980: 181-193, 211-218 ).

Marxism espoused to overcome fragmentation, alienation, and oppression and restore human existence as whole beings. Marx believed that the proletariat would ultimately deliver the masses to the Communist utopia, in which the class conflict has been abolished and man lives in harmony with his fellow man and nature. No longer alienated and exploited, he leaps from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, thus returning to himself as wholly human, he is reunited with his human essence. What emerges at the end of the Communist utopia is a human being as a unified whole. The proletariat takes the place of the prophet as the deliverer, and the heaven is replaced by the future reign of justice and virtue, the Communist utopia. In this sense, one can make the argument that partially, the reason behind the mass appeal of Marxist precepts is due to the fact that it is crafted on our religious consciousness. Among scholars who draw parallel between Marxism and political religion, McLaughlin, citing Tawny, asserts: "Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the sixteenth century what Marx did for the proletariat of the nineteenth....; the doctrine of predestination satisfied the same hunger of an assurance that the forces of the universe are on the side of the elect as was to assuaged in a different age by the theory of imperialism." (McLoughlin, 1978: 3 ).  As the secular state began to strip the powers of religion, lacking a strong ethical sanction; it became increasingly vulnerable to the limitations of modernity. Hence, as secular nationalism culminated in the two devastating World Wars of the Twentieth century, and the national boundaries and the nationalist leaders began to fall one after another; nationalist loyalty proved fallible and weak.

Yet the illusion of the death of God lived on for a while. Intoxicated by his God-like power to explain social and natural phenomena and develop some measure of control and mastery over nature, rational man attempted to relegate religion to the realm of private life. The modern state, the institutional embodiment of technocratic rationality, now stood above the society. In its march to centralize and consolidate its power, the state abrogated many public functions of religion. The state began to regulate education, culture, morality and other spheres of life that once were in exclusive domain of religion. . As Victorian values were replaced with an unabashed hedonism, materialism, and consumerism, the moral foundations of modern civilization was in crisis, and with it the guardian of this civilization, the modern state. Therefore, the assertion of Habermas and other members of the school of critical sociology that the major crisis of the modern state is a crisis of legitimacy is indeed an apt diagnosis of the moral and social malaise which plagues the post-industrial, postmodern state ( Habermas, 1987; Sitton, 2003).

The Cultural Dilemmas of Modernity

Weber asserted that instrumental rationality in modern life destroys individualism. The impassionate reign of bureaucratic institutions produces neither heroes nor men with great ideals or visions. ( Weber, 1979: 141-143; Nicholas, 2002).  The golden age of the romantic era with its heroic figures had now been replaced by a hegemonic technocratic consciousness that demands homogeneity and subservience as the key to success in modern bureaucracy, a phenomenon Weber described as a"mechanized petrification" ( Weber, 1958: 182 ).

Weber also asserted that Calvinism and the protestant ethic produced the modern bureaucratic rationalism of occidental industrial Capitalism, yet instrumental rationality engendered agonistic social relations. This faithful dilemma created inextricable tension between the moral and the emotional side of man on the one hand, and the rigidity of bureaucratic existence on the other. Modern bureaucracy, as Weber noted, requires specialization and the specialist is physically and spiritually consumed by his/her activity. The routine mechanism of bureaucratic machinery and the functionaries that it creates, condemns human beings to a fragmented existence. What is lost is the pre-modern human existence as a whole being. The pervasiveness of feeling of inner emptiness and emotional isolation in modern life is an indication that human ontological completeness has been lost forever. It is the loss of this ontological completeness that projects the outside world as alien, rendering the human search for self- actualization a futile attempt. This frustration becomes accentuated by the fact that the individual in modern society has to assume different roles and persona in which one engages in pretending, flattery, elaborate mannerism and other pretenses of public life. In such circumstances, the individual can only experience self-realization and come in touch with the self in the private and the spiritual realms of life. Religion and religious values provided a path to this self-actualization in the past. However, the ascendancy of instrumental rationality which directed human orientation toward material success, relegated religion to the realm of the "irrational", thus creating stupendous tension between the profane and the sacred, the rational and the religious realms.

Instrumental rationality reproduces itself in all realms, imposing its own logic on cultural and ethical life. Efficiency and profit motive become the highest values propelling modern society forward, thus demanding a subordinate position for the emotional, spiritual, aesthetic and creative dimensions of human existence. Such confinement of exhilarating and powerful human impulses and emotions is potentially conducive to either a violent negation of the status quo, or a total embracement of religious faith, or a confluence of the two; total devotion to political religions that promise deliverance through social transformation or provide a compensating redemptive outlet to deal with the problems of modern life.

Another dilemma of modernity stems from the intrinsic nature of modernist ideology. Modernization promises liberation from material needs and the ascendancy of the era of abundance, yet in the same material realm of life it engenders new modes of exploitation, bondage and impoverishment. As it creates new affluent social groups, modern society also condemns millions to the sub-human existence and poverty.

Another contradiction of modernity lies in what it promises and what it delivers.

Modernity promises “intellectual, moral, and political emancipation. Yet, it delivers an Iron Cage. Modern persons aspire to express themselves as autonomous individuals, even as their choices are firmly channeled into paths laid down by the modern market economy and bureaucratic state.” ( Madsen, 2002: IX ).

Reason, freedom, and autonomous self, the three promises of modernity, have been rendered false in the face of new power relationships; the irrationality of the real and the reality of the irrational, the new modes of bondage pervasive in the modern “cage” are our collective postmodern reality.

A more fundamental dilemma of modern culture can be traced to a profound tension between the structural realm and the cultural one. Whereas the very vitality of modern industry lies in constantly revolutionizing of means of production and modes of operation through technological innovations, culture on the other hand, is based on traditions, which are resilient and enjoy a certain degree of sanctity. The fact that such traditions are often safeguarded by strong moral and emotional attachments passed on from one generation to the next, further strengthen their tenacity. Moreover, the tension between essentially sacrosanct socializing norms experienced during childhood socialization and the evolving socio-economic structure constitutes yet another major catalyst of change in modern culture. The uneasy synthesis of old and new, the sacred and the profane, faith and reason which constitutes the very fabric of modern culture, is accentuated by the fact that modern life involves constant moral choices which demands our loyalty to the old or the new. Such moral choices pose profound dilemmas in regard to the value orientation and religious beliefs of individual. To the degree that the Freudian contention that civilization is built upon sublimation of human instincts holds true ( Freud, 1961 ), then it follows that religion either directly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously, remains as one of the most omnipresent and forceful actors in the unceasing battle between human instinctual and civilizing impulses.

Postmodernism: The exhaustion of Modernity and the Fall of Paradigms

The degeneration of Capitalism in Fascism and Communism in Stalinism, culminating in Hitler-Stalin pact of 1938 and the tragedy of the second World War, demonstrated that the civilization that emerged out of the ideals of enlightenment and rationalism had reached a moral and political dead-end. It was now abundantly clear that the rule by bureaucrats, who are guided by institutional rationality and cherish the principles of increased productivity, efficiency and profit as ultimate goals, might be no more humane than barbarian kings who preceded them. It also became increasingly clear that the new sciences and technologies not only carried with them the potential of human liberation from bondage and disease, but, that they also possessed the capability to manipulate, enslave and annihilate human life to an extent unprecedented before in human history. As the magnitude of this new reality began to unfold in a culture that was polarized along the class lines and intellectual tastes, two reactions occurred. As the intellectual elite pronounced the fall of paradigms and the absurdity of human life and took refuge in the lonely religion of existentialism, the masses took refuge in old time religion. While the postmodernist intellectuals pronounced the unwinding and unbecoming of all the established norms and values, the masses took refuge in the certitude that the realm of the sacred provides.

Under the influence of the Nineteenth century rationalism, modern man attempted to replace humanism for religion and history for God. As the faith in humanity was lost and the “limits of rationality” were exposed, the established paradigms began to fall (Brubaker, 1984; Heller, 1999; Madsen et al, 2002).  For such postmodernists as Foucault and Derrida, “all texts and concepts spontaneously fragmented into their intrinsically conflictual segments. All moral affirmations disintegrated into thrusts for power and manipulative domination. There is no ethical system which rises above the corrosive force of total moral relativism”  ( Cantor, 1986: 367 ). Thus, the postmodernists pronounced the end of the moral man and with it the eclipse of Western Liberal and Marxist humanism as the culmination of cultural revolutions that span the era of reformation to enlightenment to romanticism.

Derrida and Focault see the salient feature of modern society as one that is undergoing a constant process of deconstruction, dismantling and fragmentation, What Derrida calls anomic heterogeneity ( Derrida, 1972 ).  Focault, for example, wrote extensively on the history of madness in modern civilization ( Focault, 1967 ).  He not only pronounced the decline of the occident, but the end of all civilizations, as we know them. Where God is dead and reason has failed, all that remain are neurotic impulses and gratification of primal instincts ( sex and violence ) and the boundless spontaneity of the inexorable pursuit of new experiences. For others, such as Baudrillard, postmodernism signifies the fall of established paradigms and the destruction of meaning, rendering all previous social theories obsolete. Therefore, for Baudrillard, the current intellectual tools of rationalism on which the social sciences are based are no longer capable of rendering the new social reality intelligible (Baudrillard, 1983).

Jameson regards postmodernism as the “Cultural logic of late Capitalism”. By means of new technologies and through the global reach of media, multinational Capitalism penetrates previously uncommodified areas of society. This expansive nature of multinational Capitalism leads into penetration in the Third World and the transfer of Western culture. This in turn entices Third World cultural nationalism either in form of religious revivalism or nationalism or a confluence of the two ( Jameson, 1984: 53-92; Barber, 1995; Hopkins et al, 2001:7-32 ).  Other scholars take this idea further and argue that in response to Western cultural invasion of the Third World, there is an emerging religious transnationalism that is “carried by religion from below, by a popular religious upsurge of ordinary and quite often poor, oppressed, and culturally deprived people, rather than religion introduced and directed from above” ( Heober & Piscatori, 1997:3 ).  This upsurge is instigated primarily as a reaction to homogenizing logic of globalization and the fear of cultural extinction and “the death of meaning”. Faced with the annihilation of their culture, for many, cultural survival becomes as significant as physical survival, elevating it to one of the major issues of security in the new millennium ( Hoeber & Piscatori, 1997: 5 ).  Seen in this light, religious revivalism is perceived as a part of global civil society movement for cultural and political empowerment, and restoration of identity and community.

Ernest Gellner regards one of the pervasive features of postmodernism to be relativism. As he puts it, “the relativists, in whatever guise-the postmodernists are but an extravagant, undisciplined and transient mode of this attitude” (Gellner, 1992: 95 ). For Gellner, while the postmodernists do an admirable job of deconstructing the “decorative aspects of modern life”, the role of the media, culture industry, the tyranny of image and manipulation of public opinion, they have no answer to the dilemmas of the postmodern life. The relativism of postmodernists connotes a new nihilism in which there is nothing sacrosanct and no moral ideals worth striving for. In such conditions all that remains is the realm of the senses and neurotic impulses.

The frantic pace of change in postmodern society, now dictated with ever increasing internet speed, the unceasing march of new commodities mediating our lives and rendering human relations ever more impersonal; have all accentuated a longing for continuity and a link with the past. In a world of transient values in which the individual tags along dubious moral norms in order to get ahead in a ruthless, cutthroat and competitive world, the longing for a moral compass intensifies. The retreat of sublime values from daily life, the replacement of traditional religious virtues, like kindness and compassion by random and brutal violence in modern society, conjures up an image of chaos, thus intensifying the desire for a world of moral order that religion represents. As Ahmed has observed, “where nothing is sacred, every belief becomes revisable. Thus, fundamentalism is the attempt to resolve how to live in a world of radical doubt” ( Ahmed, 1992: 13 ).

In the cultural realm, the constant appearance of new fads, the perceived vacousness, and the ephemeral and chaotic nature of postmodern culture, renders it devoid of emotional depth; thus unappealing to those who look for a moral anchor adrift a sea of relativism. It is not only the pace of change that is uprooting and unsettling, but also the direction of change. There is a sense that at the end of the postmodern journey, no grand vision or cosmic ideal awaits the seeker. The intellectual homelessness is permanent, so is the longing for belonging ( Croucher, 2004 ). Hence, in a world of transient values, fragmentations, disconnections, and atomized existence, the identity crisis is permanent, and the desire for its resolution intense. In an automated world in which the organic unity of life is lost, the disconnections are norm: disconnection from the past, the present, the society, and the self. Out of the cultural and the spiritual wasteland of the postmodern life, what may emerge is not a reasoned and enlightened faith, but the reactionary fundamentalism of the ghetto, the culture of the impoverished and the uneducated. Hence, the pervasive prediction of apocalyptic end of history among a sector of the faithful in all major Abrahamic religions is a reaction to this sense of a World gone mad.

The reduction of individuals to passive consumers, caught in a march of fungible  commodities that constantly transform and mediate their lives imbues them with a feeling of powerlessness.  Moreover, the logic of the market- place is one of pleasure and plurality, of the ephemeral and discontinuous, of a great decentered network of desires of which individual consumers are the passing functions (  Eagleton, 1996 ). By providing permanently valid values and continuity with the past, religious faith enables individuals to connect themselves to their past in a world of constant change and turmoil. In a society where individuals are rendered as passive consumers, by allowing the faithful to actively participate in their faith either through the practice of religious rituals or social and political activities, religion imbues the believer with a sense of control and empowerment.

The retreat of sublime values from social life, the crass commercialization of culture and the pervasiveness of cultural decadence renders postmodern life as a spiritual wasteland, desolated and impoverished. Sorokin, one of the keen observers of the postmodern life, captured the essence of this cultural decay, what he called “the sensate culture”.

“The place of Galileos and Newtons, Leibnitzes and Darwins, Kants and Hegels, Bachs and Beethovens, Shakespears and Dantes, Raphaels and Rembrants will increasingly be taken by a multitude of mediocre pseudo thinkers, science-makers, picture-makers, music-makers, fiction makers, show makers, one group more vulgar than the other. The place of moral categoric imperatives will be occupied by the progressive lyatomistic and hedonistic devices of egotistic expediency, bigotry, fraud, and compulsion……. Even the greatest cultural values of the past will be degraded. Beethovens and the Bachs will become an appendix to the eloquent rhapsodies of advertised laxatives, gums, cereals, beers and other solid enjoyments. Michael Angelos and Rambrandts will be decorating soap and razor blades, washing machines and whiskey bottle.” ( Sorokin, 1941: 700 ).    

Commercialization of culture, the loss of organic unity of life, the impersonality, automation, alienation, regimentation, and the ruthless competition of the market place all render the postmodern society as vacuous and heartless. The retreat of emotional and spiritual realms, the matters of the heart, which either have been repressed or sublimated, leaves a gaping hole in human psyche. This intensifies the longing for transcendence and deliverance from the numbing reality of the mundane life. For the faithful, religion provides a channel to the broader cosmos, meaning, answer to the moral dilemmas of the postmodern life, and it ensures worldly and otherworldly salvation.

The retreat of the sacred, the plasticity of the existing institutions, the fluidity of the marketplace, and the transitory nature of human experience and its corroborating consciousness have engendered an extreme relativism in which individual loyalty is to oneself and the pursuit of wealth and power. This is the essence of the postmodern message. In their neo-nihilism, postmodernists have declared the exhaustion of modernity as a cultural system capable of providing a sense of meaning and cohesion in life. Instead, modernity has created alienated individuals with a “homeless mind” ( Berger, 1973;  Pieterse, 2003 ). In such conditions human relations and institutional representation of them become transitory or, as another observer has stated, “all that is solid melts into air” ( Berman, 1982; Eagleton, 1996;  Wood, 2003 ).

The unprecedented decline of community and civic engagement and civility ( Putnam, 2000 ),  has intensified a longing for community and connection. As Hannah Arendt has observed, “the collective loneliness” which has become explosive in modern society leads the uprooted to total, unrestricted, unconditional and unalterable loyalty to the “organization” that would lend him/her a sense of mission and belonging ( Arendt, 1960 ). Arendt’s perceptive analysis partially explains the appeal of political religions in the modern and the postmodern era.

Observing the universalization of instrumental rationality and its social impact, the premier sociologist of modernity, Max Weber, characterized institutionalized bureaucratic domination as an “iron cage”. Pondering a possible path for the future, he asserted:

“No one knows who would live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals” ( Weber, 1958: 182 ).

The Weberian prophecy has materialized in the postmodern era.  The last two centuries have had more than their share of charismatic leaders purporting to be new saviors. While some prophets of revolution became the source of inspiration for new sacred initiations, and their ideas created new political faith, thus molding national identities, others left behind profound disillusion and permanent disenchantment.

The tumultuous revival and vibrant politicization of religion in the last forty years, especially in the periphery (the global South), is indicative of the depth of the moral crisis and spiritual hunger that lurks beneath the surface. These manifestations are part of a broader and deeper metamorphosis occurring in global culture. The dimensions of this metamorphosis can only be appreciated in social and historical terms. Understood as such, religious revivalism is foremost a reaction to the crisis of modernity and its logical conclusion in the postmodern malaise.

The bureaucratization and fragmentation of modern life combined with the ascendancy of a well-defined division of labor confines individuals to specific functions and social roles. In such an isolated and fragmented existence, the comprehension of an increasingly complex world becomes an even more arduous task. It has become increasingly difficult to grasp the intellectual meaning of the social universe and the role of individual in it. In his/her incessant need to develop, modern men and women have constantly revolutionized the technology, society and culture, lurching into an unprecedented transformation of human life. Tumultuous forces have been unleashed that we no longer seem capable of comprehending and controlling. The increasing chasm between technological capacity and social consciousness has generated a cognitive lag in grasping the unintended consequences of the technological revolution. In other words, the scientific revolution has spurred tumultuous social transformations that we have not yet been able to fully understand their meanings and ramifications, let alone to be able to control their unintended consequences. Hence, the technological revolution appears as unconscious and out of control, and its prodigy, the postmodern society, stands as something alien dominating human life. As Weber puts it, the result is the creation of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without hearts” ( Weber, 1958: 182 )

A corollary to this fundamental crisis of our epoch is a moral and spiritual crisis. Under the piercing scrutiny of rationalism, the validity of traditional norms is constantly questioned. The new values are not yet defined, the moral crisis is permanent. In a society without a moral anchor, individual lives in a vacuum.  In the state of moral vacuum, one is vulnerable to the lure of different ideological currents purporting to fill the void and redeem the soul.

For Weber the men of conscience who face modernity have two options. They can go back  “to the arms of the old churches” which remain “widely and compassionately open for them”. Or they can “bear the faith of their time” and confront bureaucratic domination and the dehumanization of man in modern society (Weber, 1958: 127-155).  In global religious revivalism and postmodernism, the two dialectically linked reactions of the mass and the intellectual elite to the moral and cultural crisis of the postmodern society, we have witnessed the realization of the Weberian prophecy.

Conclusion

The postmodern religious revivalism has exposed the limits of modernity and it has raised serious questions in regard to the viability of its moral and cultural foundations. In its radical break with traditions and history, the postmodern secular culture has produced its antithesis, the movement of religious revival and renewal. The fragmentation and alienation of modern life is the catalyst for a profound longing for a sense of unity and reconciliation with one’s essence. The constant human struggle to put together the fragmented pieces of his/ her existence, to go beyond the divided self and to become whole again--- what in religious tradition is referred to as reunion with God--- finds its secular corollary in pursuit of political religions. The communal arms of the party or the paternalistic protection of a charismatic leader both provide the same refuge. The emergence of political religions and religio-politics is a hallmark of this age of ideology and mass politics. This is also the key to understanding the appeal of political ideologies of social transformation and collective transcendence and salvation such as Marxism, and the totalitarian and populist interpretations of the faith that particularly abounds in many parts of the Third World.

Although in its call for productivity, efficiency and economic growth, Marxism identifies with modernism, philosophically, in so far as it represents a neo-Victorian creed, it cannot reconcile itself easily with modernism ( Cantor, 1986: 391 ). With the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe however, Marxism has undergone a profound metamorphosis. As Lenin, the great icon of Marxism –Leninism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries first came under criticism and then abandoned all together, there was nothing any longer sacrosanct about the Communist creed or its leadership. The Soviet type of Communism no longer constitutes a sacred faith. As the permeation of free enterprise system in remaining bastions of Communism, such as China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam attest, the entire system has undergone a demystification. After the emergence of Gorbachev, Marxism-Leninism was no longer the messianic and totalitarian political religion that it once was. As Marxism is stripped from its messianic mantle and is relegated to the level of other secular ideologies, new opportunities have opened up for religious organizations to assume an even more overt and assertive political roles. This is particularly true in the Third World where economic, social and cultural polarizations are more pronounced and distinct. Due to the fragile nature of their socio-economic systems, the global South responds to the social and cultural dislocations of postmodernity more intensely and vibrantly. It may well be that the volcanic eruption of the religio-politics in the Third World, may tell us something about the genealogy of the crisis that plagues the global North; but also as to what might emerge to resolve it.

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