Religion in Society: New Paradigm and New Challenges

In the early decades of the XX century, religion, as a social fact, was considered a dying agent. Social scientists had settled for the upcoming death of religion and the gradual secularization of society and individual minds. In the late decades of the same century, though, a radical shift shook that paradigm: field observation showed religion was still present within society and individual minds, it was only hiding behind new patterns and principles that social sciences’ mindset of the time could not grasp:. It was becoming more individual an experience, less rigid, more spiritual, and relegating religious institutions and prominent religious figures to a very limited and narrow dimension of social life. In short: it is individual religious experience, as a lived reality, that mutated. This mutation drove with it new issues and challenges for social scientists to explore—especially lawyers, sociologists and political scientists—and warrants new interdisciplinary approaches for scholarship in the domain.