Sakralisert identitet i moderniteten - en religionssosiologisk analyse av religionen i det moderne samfunnet

Abstract

The modern society represents a new and different reality for the individual. This has consequences both for religion and for the individual’s identity. It has liberated the individual to sacralize, and to sacralize what is relevant for itself. Modernity actualizes the identity at the same time and makes it a relevant theme. We haven’t understood the history of modernity and secularization as the history where the sacred disappeared. We have proposed an understanding of this history that is centered around how the sacred changed, how the sacred moved out of the institution of religion and into secular spheres, and how there came to be a separation between religion and religiosity. We did this by introducing the terms administration and systems of relevance. We turned our focus on the human as a social being with our sociological perspective. A central theme was the dialectic that characterizes the individual, the society, and the relationship between them. We created for ourselves an Archimedean point of departure with a perspective from a sociology of knowledge that has a dialectical social construction of reality as a starting point. Our goal with this was to offer a different and supplementary approach in the understanding of secularization and the individual in the modern society. These are themes that the field of sociology of religion considers important, and we did this by focusing on sacralization. With this dissertation we attempted to make a theoretical framework that prepares for and promotes further empirical studies. We can say that this dissertation in that respect has an empirical focus, although it first and foremost is a theoretical work, A theoretical work with a focus on sacralization seems to be wanted. It is several that are of the opinion that sacralization has been granted too little attention, and it is at the same time claimed that it is an increasingly important area of study. Our perspective where secularization and sacralization is combined is also something that is wanted. At the end of the dissertation we came with a proposition, the individual sacralizes the identity in the modern society, and modernity’s concept of an individual and personal identity is a form of individual and personal religiosity.