sectionWeek 2 reading response [9a3455f7]

The competing narratives of secularization this week seem to be akin to blind men reaching for the elephant: each individual feels a different part, and tends project their understanding off of such. Taylor, for example, begins with by introducing the concept of "closed world system", which is a relatively beign rehashing of the concept of a "closed form solution". Taylor tells us that there exists internally consistent models whose abstractions may not map distinctly to the real world, yet these imperfect models are still widely adopted and lived in different ways. Gregory views one of these models as the economic model: that there exists a sufficient level of abstraction such that people can begin to see all things as something to be consumed, which in turn begins as a contagion into other spheres, leading to the secularization we see today. Berger and Casanova offer explanations aligned with the state, Berger talks about the interactions of religious insititutions and their attempts to differentiate one another upon the state managed laizze fair religious market, and Casanova ties religion to the soverignty and the decline of monarchic systems.

Yet we have still not arrived at the entire elephant. Theories about the "curious fact" of the Westphalian system are well discussed. Arguments about how secular nationalism replaced ethnic and religious identity for a national identity based on civic and secular norms are common, yet they are somehow orthongal to the discussion of modernity. If we limit the concept of modernization to when the state began to exert control (either directly or by creating a free market for religion), the contemporary world then offers a variety of examples on how this process is handled, from India to Uruguay to Malaysia, which would then appear to refute this freefloating idea of "religion" offered up by readings this week. Berger and Taylor assumed that there is a substance to religion that can be traced and compared across time and space in order to measure its shape. As Azba pointed out, there is a discontinuity between how academics theorize religion and how people make use of religion. If we think about the fact that states and people do not arbitrarily use religion, I wonder if the models proffered this week are workable.