“Discuss the factors leading to growing religious revivalism in the contemporary world.” (2012)
Religious revivalism means a renewed commitment to faith, ritual and religious identity within established traditions. Classical theorists from Auguste Comte to Max Weber expected modernity to “disenchant” the world. Its visible reversal since the 1970s, which Gilles Kepel called The Revenge of God (1991), has causes that are social rather than purely spiritual.
1. Disillusionment with secular modernisation
- Secular projects promised prosperity and justice: Nasserism, Soviet communism, and developmental states in Asia and Africa. Where they failed, religion offered an alternative moral order. Iran’s revolution (1979) and the Islamist turn after the Arab defeat of 1967 fit this pattern.
- Kepel argues that revivalists blamed “the emancipation of reason from faith” for the ills of the twentieth century.
2. Existential insecurity and demography
- Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (Sacred and Secular, 2004) found religiosity highest where lives are most insecure. Such societies also have higher fertility.
- As a result the world grows more religious even while rich societies secularise. The Pew Research Center (2025) found that Muslims grew by 347 million between 2010 and 2020, to 25.6% of the world’s population, mainly because of a young age structure.
3. Globalisation and the search for identity
- Anthony Giddens (Runaway World, 1999) argues that globalisation detaches tradition from place, so people defend tradition more self-consciously.
- Manuel Castells (The Power of Identity, 1997) sees religious fundamentalism as a resistance identity built by people bypassed by the network society.
- After the Cold War, identity replaced ideology as the language of conflict. Samuel P. Huntington read this as a “clash of civilisations”; Edward Said and Amartya Sen (Identity and Violence, 2006) criticised him for treating civilisations as single, fixed blocs.
4. Migration and diaspora
- Steve Bruce‘s cultural transition: temples, gurdwaras, mosques and churches anchor migrants in unfamiliar societies.
- Olivier Roy argues that migrants cut off from their home culture adopt a “pure”, portable religion.
5. Deprivation and the religious market
- Karl Marx called religion “the sigh of the oppressed creature”. Pentecostalism spreads fastest among the urban poor of Latin America and Africa.
- Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge add a supply side: competitive religious “firms” offer compensators and services such as healing, networks and welfare.
6. Media and technology
- In India, Arvind Rajagopal (Politics after Television, 2001) showed how the televised Ramayan (1987–88) created a shared national devotional public.
- Satellite channels, social media and apps now carry sermons, pilgrimages and darshan to vast audiences.
7. Political mobilisation
- Mark Juergensmeyer shows that parties and movements find religion an effective idiom for nationalism: in India, Israel, Turkey, Sri Lanka and the United States (the evangelical “Christian Right”).
Limits of the trend
Western Europe continues to secularise, and the religiously unaffiliated made up 24.2% of the world’s population in 2020 (Pew, 2025). Revival is therefore uneven, and often expresses identity more than personal piety.
Conclusion
No single cause explains revivalism. It arises where insecurity, identity anxiety, media reach and political entrepreneurship meet. As José Casanova argues, religion has not returned from the past. It has adapted to modern conditions and now competes openly in the public sphere.