Thinking Outside the West: Religious Change from the Nation-State to the Global-Market Regime

This article proposes to question the sociology of religion’s Western-centrism by taking a sidestep and looking at key religious changes in the non-Western world. It does so by examining religious change in Indonesia and China over the course of the last century. This exercise shows with some clarity that religion in these countries has gone through two radically different historical phases: a first in which religion (as all other social dimensions) was shaped by the nation-state (differentiated and “churched”) and a second in which consumerism and marketization appear as major forces behind bottom-up religious booms. The article argues that this shift in religious regimes can be generalized to global societies, including in the West, thereby significantly refreshing many ongoing debates and diagnoses and enabling a new appraisal of the limits of the “secularization” and “Rational Choice” narratives for understanding religion in the world today.