Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

274

From New Age and Spiritualities to Different World Views: Individualized Religious Beliefs, Autonomy Values and Individualized Morality

RC22 Sociology of Religion (host committee)

Language: English

We would like to invite papers linking the research traditions of “new age” and “spiritualities” with the study of value orientations and moral attitudes. Both adherents of secularization theory and of religious individualism, privatization and revival share an interest in both causes and consequences of these broad trends. While the decline of church religiosity has often been linked with changes in moral preferences, comparatively less attention has been paid to the impact of religious individualization on morality.
What is the impact of individualized religious beliefs on attitudes towards family norms, gender, sexualities, beginning-and-end-of life issues (to name but a few)? To what extent do people change their worldviews with their individualized religion? How do religious beliefs and values interact in defining people’s morality (Beckers, Siegers and Kuntz, 2012)? And to which degree and in which directions do and will societies change as a whole by the impact of individualized beliefs? And vice versa: In which ways do these changes in values and morality also contribute to the rise of bricolage religiosity and spirituality?
Earlier research (Siegers, 2012, 2014) has shown that at the individual level, self-expression values (which conflict with church religious morality) foster spirituality. This result underscores the importance that subjective individualism has played in the emergence of spirituality. There may also be interactions between self-expression values and religious socialization, e.g.: if individuals emphasise self-expression values, religious socialization increases the probability of spirituality.
We accept theoretical and empirical papers from different methodological domains, including quantitative and qualitative approaches. Posters: