![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The article is based on empirical research on humanist (individualized and mostly secular) weddings conducted in Poland between the years 2016 and 2020. As an emerging new form of civic rituality, humanist marriage ceremonies affect the ritual landscape of Poland, and by doing so they change the status quo. One can perceive their appearance as a sign of secularization and detachment from the institutionalized religion of the dominant Catholic Church, but also other religious transformations encompassed by the term of re-enchantment, such as the emergence of less formalized, alternative spiritualities, and changes in the field of institutionalized religion, namely its privatization. In my analysis, I go beyond such binaries as religious/secular, sacred/profane, sacred/secular and demonstrate that humanist wedding ceremonies deploy four different kinds of the sacred (the character of these categories is analytical rather than substantial): religious-sacred; nonreligious-sacred; spiritual-sacred and secular-sacred.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to all the couples I met during the research for sharing their stories with me and to the celebrants for helping me during my fieldwork. The article also greatly benefited from insightful comments from anonymous reviewers and the editors of the issue and of the journal.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that Alexander substantially rereads and reworks Durkheim (see Lynch Citation2012).
2 ‘Religious’ in the Durkheimian sense of the word. As Durkheim claimed, through religion society is actually worshipping itself, and that in fact religious symbols represent social structures (see Lynch Citation2012, 20–25).
3 Some definitions of nonreligion, for example, that were proposed by Lois Lee (Citation2011, 2), do not include humanism (and other phenomena such as rationalism or naturalism), because they are ‘ontologically autonomous from religion’ (Lee Citation2012, 131; cited in Quack Citation2014, 447). However, as Johannes Quack (Citation2014, 447) argues, humanism and humanist groups ‘have distinct relationships with religious traditions’ and therefore should be included in the scope of research on nonreligion.
4 This practice is considered the starting point on the Buddhist path. By following this, a practitioner expresses his/her commitment to Buddhism.
5 I treat not-religious as a broader term that includes both secular and non-religious phenomena (see Quack Citation2014).
6 Sacred is expressed not only in relation and in opposition (Thompson Citation1990, 179) to profane, evil, or impure, but also in relation and in opposition to mundane, emotionally uncharged everyday life (see Alexander, Lynch, and Sheldon Citation2013, 10; Caillois Citation1959; Hertz Citation2009).
7 For example, after the interview they gave me gemstones along with brief instructions on how to prepare gem-infused water to drink, and how to ‘charge’ the gems with energy.
8 Due to the couple's religiosity and the expectations of the groom's parents (who are Polish, but moved to the United Kingdom, where Adam was brought up), initially they had considered a Catholic ceremony. However, because Anna was already divorced, they did not have this option.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Agata Rejowska
Agata Rejowska is an assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. In 2021 she was a visiting assistant in research at Yale University, Center for Cultural Sociology. In 2022 she received the Ministry of Science and Higher Education scholarship for outstanding young scholars. She has authored several peer-reviewed publications, including in the journals Sociology of Religion and Social Compass.