La nuova geografia socio-religiosa in Europa: linee di ricerca e problemi di metodo

• Main Author: Enzo Pace
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Rosenberg & Sellier 2011-04-01
• Series: Quaderni di Sociologia
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/qds/649
• ISSN: 0033-4952; 2421-5848

Europe is a secularised society as it is seen and thought? In a recent book by Peter Berger, Grace Davie e Effie Fokas (2008) Religious America, Secular Europe? this question returns to another question, much more intriguing: is Europe an exception in respect of the rest of the world and, above all, in respect of United States of America, following the indicators of the religiosity? (Davie, 2002; Hervieu-Léger, 2003) Or is not this assumed exception an unconditioned reflection of a chronic ethnocentrism of the European sociologists? For Berger we are watching more and more the de-secularisation and also Europe seems to be “round the corner” and to return “to faiths”. However, half of Europeans, following the more recent data of the European Values Study, affirms that they pray or meditate once a week and three fourth of them affirm to feel religious themselves. Maybe, they fail to attend mass, but they don’t renounce to think religiously and they continue to feel the need a sense of their action. At last, the socio-religious geography is rapidly changing: we can linger to make referendum for the opening of a mosque or for the construction of minarets, but the religious diversity is just evident. A well-informed social theory has to confute paradigms, schemes and conceptual matrix of the past. A sociology of religion that studies only the historically prevailing religions – lingering to debate if and what the society if secularised – risks not to understand how the society changes, its religious diversities and what they express.