Abstract
This chapter questions our past ways of understanding religion and suggests that in the contemporary world, our sociological understanding of religion needs to change and adapt to reflect recent changes. The chapter provides a social constructionist understanding of religion—that it is defined according to a context and a time period, rather than being universal. Emile Durkheim’s functional understanding of religion is then applied in the neoliberal context. This chapter claims that, increasingly, religion is no longer a tool for collective consciousness but is mainly used as a means of increasing individual consciousness with regard to developing, healing, and entertaining the self. Rather than being a social glue for a collective, it is now a social (and personal) glue for the self.
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Possamai, A. (2018). There Is No Such Thing as a Religion. In: The i-zation of Society, Religion, and Neoliberal Post-Secularism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5942-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5942-1_5
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