Modern Popular Religion

Abstract

Popular religion is a widespread phenomenon among peasants of the Third World, but it is the vitality and force of popular religious expressions in the urban popular milieu of developing countries that pose serious questions for classical secularization theories. The religious sense produced by the lower strata of the urban populace in contexts of subjugation in urbanization and globalization is complex and depends on several factors. In order to analyse it, sociology must abandon its rationalist and erudite background to move forward to new paradigms that allow us to understand how it is that contemporary popular religion - including seemingly more primitive religious expressions - pertains to modernity and is able to be understood as part of the dialectic of current globalization. This article proposes a different way of understanding popular life and faith - another view of the people's religious creativity, syncretism and religious heterogeneity, an appreciation of a `different logic' of the people and the countercultural character of the rationality that they acquire in various contexts.