Project Details
Projekt
Religion between Secularization and Fundamentalism - The (Re-)Politicization of Religion
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Political Science
Political Science
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439346934
This project examines how religious organizations respond to the challenges caused by secularization, and thereby possibly contribute to increasing social and political divides in German society. We study religious organizations, since they are especially under pressure, as secularization is not just any crisis for them, but questions their whole existence. We assume that some local communities do traditional business as usual (‘attenuation’), while others opt for politicized responses, be it to adapt to the more liberal-secular mainstream or to actively oppose this trend by accentuating conservative-fundamentalist positions (two strategies of ‘innovation’). We do not expect this to differ between but rather within denominations. Our study will provide important insights on how organizations react to existential stress, and, in a second step, what this does to their internal coherence, including possible gains and losses of members (‘closure’), depending on the chosen strategy. We assume religious organizations’ choices depend on i) the preferences of local professional leadership; ii) the social and political composition of their (active) membership, iii) the preferences of higher-order structures (and the dependence on such preferences) and iv) the socio-political composition of their local environment. We will furthermore shed light on the question of how representative religious organizations (leaders and activists) are compared to the German population in general, in order to analyze whether religious organizations mirror society at large in terms of political attitudes or behaviour, or whether they are political ‘niches, no longer able to impact German society. Our analytical strategy is multi-dimensional, with the local religious organizations being at the center of our attention and forming our most important units of observation. We consider Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish and Free Church religious communities in Germany. Data collection will include original survey data on the single communities for which community leaders and active members will respond to questionnaires, enriched by geographical data on the socio-political environment and the analysis of online text documents published by the higher-order level of religious organizations. Joining the RISS Politicized Identity Survey will enable us to compare active members of religious organizations with the German population.
DFG Programme
Research Units
