Rafael Walthert

Fluide Religion : neue religiöse Bewegungen im Wandel ; theoretische und empirische Systematisierungen

Neue religiose Bewegungen sind zugleich Innovatoren und Indikatoren des religiosen Wandels moderner Gesellschaften. Unter den Vorzeichen von Individualisierung und Pluralisierung ist gegenwartig ein Bedeutungsverlust totaler Gemeinschaften (»Sekten«) zugunsten unverbindlicher Formen religioser Zugehorigkeit (»Spiritualitat«) zu beobachten. Dies fuhrt zur Zunahme religioser Alternativen und fordert ihre wachsende Diffusion und Relevanz fur das religiose Feld. Erstmals liegt mit diesem Band eine theoretische Systematisierung dieses Prozesses vor, die durch Fallstudien zu verschiedenen religiosen Gemeinschaften wie Hare Krishna, New Age und evangelikalen Jugendkirchen erganzt wird.

Emotion, ritual, and the individual: the production of community in evangelicalism

This paper asks about the production of religious community in modern society: How can the success of a strict Evangelical community in a secularized environment be explained? To find an answer to this question, an approach to emotion based on Randall Collins’ interaction ritual chain theory is applied to data from participant observation in an Evangelical church in Switzerland. The weekly service as a highly orchestrated event characterized by a mutual focus and rhythmic entrainment imbues the communal symbols with emotions and plausibility. Through ritual interaction, three potentially disruptive communal tensions are transformed into solidarity: (1) highly transcendent theological concepts are translated into a simplified form which can be ritualized and gain immanence in the ritual actions of the participants; (2) the Evangelical emphasis on the individual and its religious decision on the semantic side are structurally transformed into the confirmation and reproduction of the community; (3) through the collectively shared emotions the potentially disruptive individual tendency towards immediate emotional gratification becomes aligned with the norms of the community.