For those who see secularism as part of modernity, and modernity as fundamentally progress, the last few decades have been painful and bewildering. Powerful political mobilizations that appear to center on religion seem to betoken a return of what had already been safely relegated to the past. Religion seemed to be wreaking a terrible revenge for its previous marginalization, not only in the world at large but even in the most powerful Western liberal democracy, the United States. Liberals spoke darkly of a relapse into the medi- eval, into irrationality.

There is some truth in this picture. The notion of revenge here does point to the way in which these religious mobilizations are reactive, at times feeding on a previous process of secularization perceived as a threat. But in general, this common view suffers from a defective understanding of both modernity and secularization. There is not one thing, called “religion,� which previously receded and is now coming back, like some raging tsunami. What we call secularization is a process that deeply destabilized and marginalized earlier forms of religion; but, partly as a consequence of this, new forms have arisen. The forms that are now “returning� in strength are thoroughly modern, and we cannot understand either them or modernity if we ignore this.

Ironically, the most obvious site of novelty lies in what are called, in the rough and rather confused language of media commentary, “fundamentalisms.� These are usually so called because they see themselves as harking back to earlier, purer forms of religion, beyond the recent compromises of modernism. So Protestant fundamentalism sees itself as returning to the purity of the Reformation sola scriptura (by scripture alone), which in turn saw itself as a return to primitive Christianity. Influential Islamicist Sayyid Qutb proposes to return to the principles alive in the first polity established by the Prophet and his companions. The irony and pathos here lie in the fact that precisely these attempts to return to purer forms are the sites of the most startling innovations; what is more, they feed on those innovations that are usually seen as quintessentially modern.

Thus the notion of literal Biblical inerrancy, with its clear distinction from and hostility to the figurative, is plainly part of the culture that has developed around modern positivistic science. Evolutionary theory has to be opposed by “creation science.� Augustine, one of the great reference figures for Western Protestantism, would be bewildered by this discourse, recognizing as he did many levels of meaning in the Biblical text. Protestant fundamentalists deviate from age-old Christian orthodoxy precisely in their wholesale acceptance of this modern positivist literalism, all the while loudly proclaiming their fidelity to the original pure form of Christianity.

In this essay, I want to explore some of these contemporary forms of religion, which are modern partly in that they involve what we can call mobilization. What do I mean by mobilization here? One obvious facet of its meaning is that it designates a process whereby people are persuaded, pushed, dragooned, or bullied into new forms of social and religious association. This generally means that they are induced through the actions of governments, church hierarchies, or other elites not only to adopt new structures but also, to some extent, to alter their social imaginaries and sense of legitimacy, as well as their sense of what is crucially important in their lives or society. Described in this way, mobilization was already taking place during the English Reformation and the French CounterReformation of the seventeenth century. But these changes were taking place within a wider social context, that of the political kingdom and church, which were seen not as the products of mobilization but, on the contrary, as already there, the unchanging and unchangeable backdrop of all legitimacy.

But in an age of mobilization, this backdrop is no longer there. It becomes clearer and clearer that whatever political, social, and ecclesial structures we desire must be mobilized into existence. This eventually becomes evident even to “reactionaries,� whose paradigms are found in the ancien régime. They are often forced to act on this understanding before they can bring themselves to recognize it. But sooner or later, their discourse changes, and the features of the old order that they want to reinstate become forms to be established — eternally valid, perhaps, because willed by God or in conformity with Nature, but still an ideal yet to be realized and not already there. As this understanding dawns across the political and ecclesial spectrum, we enter the age of mobilization.