Religion in Modern Societies. A Cross-Cultural Comparsion

For a long time, the mainstream of European sociology departed from the assumption that modernity and religion are on principle incompatible. Expanding the focus across the boundaries of Europe, but also looking more in detail at the situation of religion in the various countries of Europe, one will find however, that secularization-theory cannot be maintained in this general formulation. In the various cultural areas and countries of modern world there exist widely different forms of religious life, which influence in likewise different ways the social behaviour in the respective societies. Not all, but only certain types of religious beliefs and social forms of religious behaviour are losing ground. And out of the large reservoir of religious and magical-esoteric beliefs and practices of former times and other cultures new religious cults and more privatized forms of religiosity emerge! In this research project we want to field the cross-nationally comparative questionnaire of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 1998 about "Religion" in Austria. These data will be included in the cumulated ISSP- data set, which provides the basis for comparative analyses of religious beliefs and practices in about 20 European and 8 Non-European countries. In the center of this study are the following questions: 1. Which role do traditional forms of religion, i.e. religion embedded in churches and religious communities, play in the various countries? What are the reasons, why in certain countries participation in religious communities has strongly decreased, while in other countries this form of religion is still much alive. 2. Do traditional Christian beliefs lose plausibility in all countries of the Western world, while at the same time the number of people believing in magical and esoteric practices is increasing? What are the causes for this development, and if we find cross-national differences, how can they be explained? 3. Which relations exist between certain forms of religiousness and political and social attitudes and behaviour?

In this project we have studied religious and esoteric beliefs and practice, and the relationship between religiousness and social attitudes, analysing the dataset of the International Social Survey Programme 1991 and 1998 on "Religion" and a cross-national study on "Religion, Esotericism and Political Atti-tudes among Students". Our analysis of more than 20 Christian countries shows that there exist large cross-national differences in regard to the level of religiousness. These differences are not associated with corresponding differ-ences of the level of socio-economic development; rather, they can be explained by three factors: a) specific patterns of religiousness among the members of different churches (Catholic, Lutheran and Orthodox Churches, and smaller protestant denominations); b) the attitudes of the population of a country towards its churches as a consequence of the specific historical relationship between church, state and society in this country; c) the level of social welfare and social security provided by the state. The trends of change from1991 to 1998 indicate a continuation of the shift from institutional towards private religion in Western Europe, while in Eastern Europe a moderate increase of institutional religi-osity could be observed. Belief in esoteric phenomena is much more widespread in Eastern Europe, South America and the United States than in Western Europe. Alternative forms of spirituality (e.g. oriental meditation-techniques) and the esoteric methods typical for the New Age movement have been practiced or tried out by a considerable part of the population, however only a few percent prac-tice such methods more regularly. Christian religiousness and affinity towards esotericism and the New Age-movement are associated with opposite moral and political attitudes. Religious people tend to have more restrictive attitudes in regard to sexuality, family, drugs etc., and are closer to conservative political positions; at the same time they are more involved in charitable activities. Differently from that, persons practicing esoteric methods have more liberal social attitudes, they participate more frequently in political protest activi-ties, and have a stronger affinity towards leftist-liberal parties, in particular towards the Green Party.