Although Marx, Freud, and Weber had predicted religions would progressively disappear from society for the expansion of modern institutions, we watch not only religions that reject to away from society but also see the emergence of novel sensibility of religions and spirituality in late modernity. ‘Why should this be?’ ask Giddens who then finds Durkheim’s affirmation that religion has ‘some thing eternal’ namely ‘symbol of collective unity’ (Giddens, 1992: 207).
Will religion truly disappear due to massive spread of modernity? Were the question directed to Hefner, he would answer that the absent of religion in modern time is just temporary. Every society needs ‘collective moral consciousnesses’. Durkheim, as noted by Hefner, “believed that this lost of religion was but a temporary dysfunction of early modernization (see also Beckford, 1989: 25). No society can survive without a collective moral consciousness. The lost of social power of certain religions will be followed by the emergence of a new ‘civil religion’ replacing social role of the earliest. Such a civil religion is able to “provide coherence and stability even in the absence of a theistic canopy” (Hefner in Heelas, 1998: 150). Berger (1992) and Cox (1990) also predicted that the availability of spirituality in modern and even post-modern time is clearly potential (Hefner in Heelas, 1998: 150). This because, as Mellor says, “societies have a sui generis reality that is collectively represented in religion”. Furthermore, “Religion is more than the mere cement of social solidarity”, it “continues act as an emergent, dynamic and creative force in societies” (Beckford and Wallis, 2006: xv).
