Multiple Modernities: The Role of World Religions in an Emerging Paradigm

Abstract

This article contributes to the emerging multiple modernities thesis and its treatment of world religions. Using a cross-continent comparison of evangelical Pentecostalism, it argues that religion can have cross-cutting implications for modernity’s extension in the Global South. The social patterns and networks of national evangelical Pentecostal communities in different contexts vary, allowing them to help modernizing societies pursue unique goals and identities. However, Pentecostalism also introduces remarkably similar sets of formal organizations to its host societies, which are maintained by isomorphic pressures operating in transnational organizational fields. Religion thus promotes heterogeneity and homogeneity in modernizing contexts. These findings further nuance the multiple modernities thesis and show the potential utility of the thesis for the sociology of religion.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, the Hauser Center at Harvard University, the Religious Research Association, and the Society for the Social Scientific Study of Religion for the funding that made this project possible.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Offutt

Stephen Offutt is a sociologist of religion and an assistant professor of development studies at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, USA. His primary research interests include religion and development as well as global Christianity. CORRESPONDENCE: Asbury Theological Seminary, 204 N. Lexington Ave, Wilmore, KY 40390, USA.