The sacred in the modern world: a psychosocial approach

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This project will explore how sociological concepts of the sacred can make an important contribution to the academic study of contemporary society, as well as wider public discourse about our understanding of deeply-significant meanings, values and relationships. The term 'sacred' is sometimes treated as synonymous with 'religion', but this project will explore an alternative understanding of the sacred originating from the work of Emile Durkheim in which the sacred is understood as a symbol, value, idea or person which is regarded as being of profound significance, and in relation to which emotionally-laden social bonds and practices are forged.Developing a sociological theory of the sacred has significant potential to clarify the focus of the sociology of religion in the West. Since the 1960's, a primary concern in this discipline has been how to understand the study of 'religion' in societies in which increasing numbers of people have little or no meaningful contact with traditional religious institutions or practices. This has led to a wide range of theoretical and empirical studies examining new religious movements, the 'new age', neo-Paganism and Wicca, as well as different forms of spirituality beyond insitutional religion. Whilst valuable, the networks and practices analysed in this literature tend to involve only a very small proportion of the population, often smaller than those involved in traditional religions. By contrast, a sociological understanding of the sacred can provide a conceptual language for analysing socially significant meanings, values and relationships that are embedded into key social structures such as public media and the legal-system, and with which significant parts of Western populations are engaged.The project will examine how ideas of the sacred have been developed in fields beyond the study of religion, particularly in cultural sociology, anthropology and media studies, whilst also considering how recent work in religious studies on religion and intersubjectivity, and the cultural mediation of religion, might generate richer understandings of the sacred in these other disciplines. It will give particular attention to the intersubjective significance of relations with sacred figures, to the historical contingency of sacred forms, to the key role of contemporary media as a structure through which forms of the sacred are rehearsed and contested, and to the possibilities and challenges of collective forms of the sacred in pluralist societies. Case examples discussed through the project will include the significance of the collective, mediated mourning of the death of public figures such as Anna Lindh and Pym Fortuyn, the emergence of the sacrality of the care of children as a key form of the sacred in Western societies which has to a significant degree displaced traditional religious sources of authority, and the ways in which controversy over the BBC's decision not to broadcast the DEC Gaza appeal demonstrates tensions in the role of public media in rehearsing sacred values whilst also maintaining impartiality.In addition to its academic outputs, the project will also seek to encourage engagement with such a sociological understanding of the sacred amongst a range of public audiences through media outputs and other events. This conceptual langugage provides a useful framework for thinking about the roots and implications of our deepest commitments, for identifying operative forms of the sacred in contemporary culture, and for moving beyond simplistic binaries of religion and the secular in defining significant motive-forces in contemporary social life. By introducing these concepts to wider public audiences, this project therefore has the potential to create a framework for a new kind of public reflection about the implications of living in a society characterised by multiple, intersecting and conflicting forms of the sacred.