Postmodernity, high modernity and new modernity

three concepts in search of religion

James A. Beckford

pp. 30-47

in: Kieran Flanagan, Peter C. Jupp (eds), Postmodernity, sociology and religion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to explore some of the paradoxes that occur in attempts to relate recent changes in religion to the advent of postmodernity, high modernity and new modernity.¹ The starting point is that relatively few accounts of postmodernity and its variants have paid much attention to religion.² This observation may appear to be a strange basis on which to build claims about postmodernity and religious change, but it is actually essential to the main theme of the chapter. For the argument will be that advocates of the idea of postmodernity and its variants face formidable difficulties if they attempt to make sense of religion. It is not therefore surprising that, in all the speculations about postmodernity, serious interpretations of religious phenomena are rare birds.