“Give your comments on the growth of religious revivalism in the present-day context.” (2021)
Religious revivalism is the renewal of faith, ritual and religious identity within an existing tradition, often as a mass, emotional and public upsurge. Classical secularisation theory expected religion to fade with modernity. The present-day world shows the opposite: religion has returned to public life, though in new forms.
Evidence of growth
- Global: Gilles Kepel (The Revenge of God, 1991) dated a worldwide turn around 1975, visible among Christians in the USA, Jews in Israel and Muslims across the world. Peter L. Berger, once a leading secularisation theorist, conceded in The Desecularization of the World (1999) that most of the world is “as furiously religious as it ever was”. Pentecostalism in Latin America and Africa, and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan (2021), are very different revivals.
- Numbers: the Pew Research Center (2025) found that 75.8% of the world’s people were religiously affiliated in 2020. down only slightly from 76.7% in 2010.
- India: the Maha Kumbh at Prayagraj (2025) drew an officially estimated 66 crore visitors. Pilgrimage circuits, the consecration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya (January 2024), Tablighi Jamaat networks and fast-growing Pentecostal congregations in Punjab all show intensified religiosity across communities.
How sociologists read it
- José Casanova (Public Religions in the Modern World, 1994) calls this “deprivatisation”: religion re-enters public debate without undoing the institutional separation of religion and state.
- Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge give a supply-side reading: demand for religious “compensators” is constant, and competitive, media-savvy suppliers (gurus, televangelists, apps) meet it.
- Steve Bruce points to cultural defence and cultural transition: religion intensifies where identity feels threatened or migrants need an anchor.
- Anthony Giddens links revival to a globalised “runaway world” in which uncertainty pushes people back to tradition.
Comment: a double-edged growth
- Integrative side: in a Durkheimian sense, revival rebuilds community, gives meaning and runs welfare networks such as langars, mission hospitals and relief work.
- Divisive side: revival often becomes political. Pew’s 2021 India survey found that 84% of Indians value respect for all religions, yet 86% of Hindus said their close friends were mainly Hindu. T. N. Madan had argued that religion cannot be kept private in South Asia. The practical challenge is to stop revival from sliding into communalism or fundamentalism.
- Not uniform: Western Europe keeps secularising, so revival is uneven rather than universal.
Conclusion
The present-day growth of revivalism does not refute modernity. It is modernity’s product, driven by globalisation, mass media and identity politics. Sociologically, the key question is less whether religion is growing than which form it takes: plural, ethical and service-oriented, or exclusive and politically mobilised.