Preliminary Programme

Most interpretations and definitions of the concept of secularisation agree that secularisation is a process. Nevertheless, periods, events and even technologies are sometimes singled out as pivotal. This paper will focus on a particular time, one of increased modernisation, scientific progress and religious enthusiasm: the mid to late nineteenth century and will pay specific attention to the Evangelical revivalist movements.
The point of departure for this paper is Charles Taylor’s undisputable claim that something happened in the Western world between approximately the 1500s, when belief in God was unchallenged, and today, when religion is just one option among many others. Peter L. Berger follows a similar thread and emphasises pluralism as the key concept for understanding the changing role of religion throughout history up until today.
In the process of increasing pluralism and possibilities of choice, different revivalist movements have played a paradoxical role – on the one hand in attempting to oppose modernity and rationalism, and on the other by emphasising religious individualism, and thus in effect following modern thinking. For example: the revivalist movements, in line with Lutheran thinking, fostered a worldview founded on individual religious conviction, but consequently also induced doubts. They also favoured religious democracy, but organised new religious institutions based upon faith rather than a sense of community. Furthermore, by dividing people into believers and non-believers, nineteenth-century Evangelical revivalist movements furthered religious and ideological polarisation. Despite their good intentions, this helped undermine established structures, and consequently contributed also to fragmenting the religious landscape.
This paper will discuss the Evangelical revivalist movements as a part of, while also contributing to, modernity as well as increasing plurality – and consequently transforming the role of religion in society. The paper will demonstrate that nineteenth-century revivalist movement itself was integral to the process of secularisation.
Taylor, Charles (2007). A secular age. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Berger, Peter L. (2014). The many altars of modernity: toward a paradigm for religion in a pluralist age. Boston: Walter De Gruyter. (Show less)

After the end of the Spanish Civil War, the Catholic Church and the authorities of Franco’s dictatorship collaborated in order to establish a religion of fear based on the strict control of moral and customs and an external and superficial worship. The renewed influence of the Second Vatican Council promoted a transformation towards a more personal and thoughtful religiosity built on a God of love. However, the conservative turn of the Catholic hierarchy from the end of the seventies constituted a blow to progressive Catholics. The aim of this article is to analyze how a group of Catholic women who has been living in the Basque Country (Spain) experienced these transformations. The oral history, particularly useful in the study of identities construction, will be employed in this paper. It will be particularly emphasised the position placed by the Second Vatican Council in the life stories of these women and how their updated faith encouraged them to change from obedience and passivity to protest and criticism. (Show less)

Secularisation remains an important theme in historical social science research, and ever more sophisticated theories are still being developed and imagined. While its empirical basis has been fundamentally questioned, the debate has only intensified, suggesting stakes are not just academic, but existential. I want to ‘return to basics’ and revisit the long term uses of the concept from a global and long term perspective, taking into account recent revisions of religious and political history in early modern and modern Europe and its colonial contexts. The interpretation that I would like to advance refers to the changing relationship between Church and State, returning to more original uses of the term ‘secularization’ as appropriation of church property, and emphasizing the conflict between Church and State, or the dispute about proper State and Church roles, as a main issue also beyond the French Revolution. This perspective also allows me to take in account the varieties of secularization in Europe and (North) America as well as the colonial experiences, which most if not all ‘secularization theories’ largely ignore. (Show less)

In 2008, UNESCO added the "Baha'i holy sites in Haifa and the Western Galilee" to the list of world heritage sites. The statement referred to 26 buildings, memorials, gardens, cemeteries, homes and offices, and more. Those compounds, considers to be sacred to the Baha'is and are centers of pilgrimage for the believers, including sites as the Shrine of Baha'u'llah near Acre and the Shrine of the Bab on the slopes of Mount Carmel used for religious and spiritual insignificant. other sites, such as the memorial Gardens in Haifa, connect the pilgrim with the memory of central figures in the Bahai religion. Other thresholds, such as the pilgrims' houses from the east and west, are key heritage sites in the history of the Baha'i Faith and the World Center buildings demonstrate the power and performance of the Baha'i religion as a world religion.
Of the 26 sites, six areas directly related to the life of Baha'u'llah, prophet and founder of the Baha'i Faith, who arrived in Acre as a political exile in 1868 and lives in the city and the region around it until his death in 1892, these areas include the cell at the city citadel where he was imprisoned, the Garden of Ridván, his Shrine and his three residential buildings – the house of Abbúd in Acre, Mazrui's mansion and Bahj'i mansion outside the city.
In contrast to other Bahai sites, these three sites, at least in the eyes of a non-Bahai observer, combine three areas of reference: the site as a religious site in which Bahá'u'lláh lived and his presence in it transferred to the site his sanctity, the site as a heritage site that tells the story of the development of the Baha'i religion, and the site as a museum that transfers the life of Bahá'u'lláh, the principles of religion and the expansion of the Bahai religion in the world.

In my presentation, I will demonstrate how, those sites are built to tell, in chronological order, the story of the development of the Bahai religion from a marginal eastern religion to a modern world religion. (Show less)