Religion, as a social phenomenon, has not always played a central role all societies throughout all times. The period after the Second World War is characterized as such a period. Here religion lost in many modernized societies much of its former social significance. This development was closely bound to the growing atheism and secularism. We argue in this article that religion has been eroded by a series of social transformation. Namely, the industrialization, urbanization, large scale wars, state’s ideological pressure leading to a lack of religious infrastructure and education. Transformation that all could be encapsulated as a sort of modernization.
Numerous sociologists of religion has until recently to some level glorified the end of religion in modernity. However this seems to have been a premature conclusion. In the late eighties and the nineties the social and cultural reality, as wells as the states support to religion, changed, among other reasons, because of new economic and political developments – e.g. in Eastern Europe. Whether by accident or not, in the period after the fall of communism, religion has became revitalized on the social stage.
The revitalization of religion trajects along the same line as globalization and neoliberalism. These two phenomenon seem to have changed the foundations of identity, which in turn affects religion, because religion is often used to form the sense of identity and identification. This article take a deeper look into, how neo-liberalism and globalization has affected religiosity in order to pin out the central determinants and their effect on religiosity.