If you’d told a sociologist of religion fifty years ago that some of the most vibrant religious communities would exist primarily in digital spaces, that young men in secular Scandinavia would be turning to Christianity while their female peers drift away, or that “organized secularism” would start looking suspiciously like a religion itself, they might have questioned your credentials or sanity. Yet these are exactly the kinds of puzzling developments I witnessed at the 38th biennial International Society for the Sociology of Religion conference, co-organized with COREnet COST Action in Kaunas, Lithuania, where hundreds of scholars are grappling with phenomena that refuse to fit our traditional categories.
The Failure of Containment
The deeper problem isn’t just that our theories are outdated—it’s that they were built on a false premise. We assumed religion was something that could be contained: in private spaces, individual hearts, or traditional institutions. But researchers show us otherwise. Religious people don’t compartmentalize their faith because religion is inherently private—they do it because they’ve learned to read social situations with sophisticated intelligence about when religious expression will “work.”
This isn’t adaptation; it’s strategic navigation. And it suggests that secularization theory has been measuring the wrong thing. Instead of asking whether religion is declining, we should be asking how religious actors are becoming more socially intelligent. The fact that deeply religious people can seamlessly switch between secular and sacred modes of interaction doesn’t indicate weakening faith—it reveals strengthening religious competence in pluralistic societies.
Digital Religion as Theoretical Disruptor
The digital transformation of religious life isn’t just changing how people practice—it’s exploding our analytical frameworks. Daniel Nilsson DeHanas‘s research on Gen Z Muslims reveals how young people use digital platforms to create “augmented reality” religious experiences that enhance rather than replace embodied faith. This challenges the substitution logic that dominated early digital religion scholarship.
More provocatively, Tuomas Äystö’s work on “political male wellness influencers” exposes how religion is being weaponized in digital spaces we didn’t even recognize as religious. When figures like Andrew Tate blend masculine grievance, prosperity theology, and algorithmic amplification, they’re not secularizing religion—they’re creating new forms of religious authority that bypass traditional institutions entirely.
This points to a larger theoretical blindness. We’ve been so focused on institutional religion that we’ve missed how religious logic and symbols are being repurposed in supposedly secular contexts. The algorithm isn’t neutral technology—it’s becoming a new form of religious mediation that shapes spiritual exploration in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
Migration as Creative Destruction
The real action in contemporary religion isn’t happening in traditional centers of religious power—it’s occurring in the spaces between societies, where migration forces creative reconstruction of religious identity. Tuomas Martikainen‘s work about the shift “from diversification to re-homogenization” captures something crucial: immigrant religions aren’t just adapting to new contexts, they’re actively reshaping what religion can become.
But here’s what’s analytically interesting: migration reveals that religious innovation was always happening—we just weren’t looking in the right places. Whether Thai Buddhist women in Nordic countries or Georgian Orthodox women in Italy creatively navigate between cultural preservation and social integration, they’re not anomalies. They’re exemplars of how religion actually works: as a dynamic resource for meaning-making rather than a static belief system.
Kees de Groot‘s research on “liquid diaconia” in secularizing welfare societies makes this point even sharper. Faith-based organizations aren’t compromising their religious identity when they adopt secular professional standards—they’re demonstrating religion’s capacity for institutional bilingualism. The more interesting question is why our theories assumed religious and secular logics were incompatible in the first place.
The Post-Secular Trap
Perhaps the most theoretically unsettling development is the emergence of what David Koussens calls “organized secularism” that looks suspiciously religious. When secular humanist organizations develop ritual practices, moral communities, and meaning-making systems, they’re not accidentally becoming religious—they’re revealing that the religious/secular distinction was always more unstable than we admitted.
This creates a theoretical trap. If secularism can become religious and religion can become secular, then what exactly are we studying? The answer might be that we need to abandon the binary entirely and focus instead on how different meaning-making systems compete and collaborate in pluralistic societies.
The Gender Disruption
Nothing reveals the inadequacy of our existing frameworks quite like Kimmo Ketola and Kati Tervo-Niemelä‘s findings about young men’s increasing religiosity in Nordic countries. This isn’t just an interesting empirical discovery—to me it’s a theoretical earthquake. If Christianity is becoming a “counterculture for young men” in the world’s most gender-equal societies, then everything we thought we knew about religion, gender, and modernity needs revision.
The pattern suggests that religion isn’t declining—it’s becoming repositioned as cultural resistance to liberal modernity. Young Nordic men aren’t turning to Christianity despite living in secular societies; they’re turning to Christianity because they live in secular societies. Religion is functioning as symbolic rebellion against dominant cultural narratives.
This has profound implications beyond Nordic countries. If religion can serve as counterculture in secular contexts, then secularization doesn’t eliminate religion—it transforms it into something potentially more politically potent.
Toward Relational Religion Theory?
What emerges from these disparate findings is the need for entirely new theoretical frameworks. Yes, we might postulate this after every major conference. The most promising direction involves what we might call “relational religion theory”—understanding religious phenomena as emerging from dynamic relationships between people, technologies, institutions, and cultural contexts rather than as properties of individuals or organizations.
This approach helps explain apparent contradictions: how religion can be simultaneously globalizing and localizing, traditional and innovative, private and public. It also suggests why our old categories are failing—they assumed religion was a thing rather than a process, a possession rather than a practice, a belief rather than a relationship.
The Stakes
These aren’t just academic debates. How we theorize religion shapes how societies navigate religious diversity, how institutions accommodate pluralism, and how individuals make sense of meaning in complex social worlds. If our theories can’t account for liquid religion, digital spirituality, migrant innovation, and post-secular hybridity, then we’re not just intellectually impoverished—we’re practically irrelevant.
The sociology of religion stands at a crossroads. We can cling to theoretical frameworks that make the world seem simpler than it is, or we can develop new analytical tools adequate to contemporary complexity. The research emerging from recent scholarship suggests the field is choosing complexity—and that’s where the most interesting discoveries await.
