Culturalized Religion: A Synthetic Review and Agenda for Research

Abstract

Scholars have taken a growing interest in what we call “culturalized religion”—that is, forms of religious identification, discourse, and expression that are primarily cultural in character, insofar as they are divorced from belief in religious dogma or participation in religious ritual. This article aims to clarify our current thinking about these phenomena so as to facilitate future theoretical and empirical work. Drawing on recent work in the sociology of culture, we distinguish between culturalized religion as a form of constituted culture, a form of pragmatic culture, and a form of identity; and theorize three principal types of relations connecting each of these modalities: reinforcing relationships, resource relationships, and destabilizing relationships. In so doing, we develop an inclusive and dynamic approach to studying culturalized religion that clears the ground for further research into its diverse modalities and manifestations, as well as their points of intersection and interaction.