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Fifty years ago Soka Gakkai was an organization of a few hundred
people, all of them in Japan. Today it is one of the world's most
rapidly expanding religious movements with members in virtually
every country in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia, in most of
Asia, and in several parts of Africa. Increasingly well publicized,
the movement sponsors a variety of cultural and educational causes,
is conspicuous in its work for world peace and the preservation of
the environment, and has established for itself a high profile in
world affairs. Soka Gakkai is also a significant social phenomenon
in its own right, yet it has received surprisingly little attention
from Western academics, despite considerable public controversy
surrounding its development in Japan. Bryan Wilson and Karel
Dobbelaere have undertaken a thorough survey of the UK membership
to try to trace the source of the movement's appeal to its socially
diverse constituency. The results of their questionnaire survey
were augmented by interviews in which members were encouraged to
tell their own story in their own way. Their responses are
liberally quoted throughout the book and add illuminating detail to
its sociological analysis. The decline in belief in an
anthropomorphic deity; the sense that traditional religious
institutions have become hollow; the emphasis on the private nature
of belief and on personal autonomy are all characteristic features
of contemporary Western society. The authors suggest that Soka
Gakkai has found a ready resonance with these changing currents of
modern thought, and conclude that Soka Gakkai's appeal to young
people in particular makes it a faith well in tune with the times.
In an epoch in which religion has explicitly and sometimes
violently returned to the forefront of the global public scene, the
process of secularization that has fundamentally marked Western and
particularly European societies demands attention and analysis.
This book, written from a sociological perspective, takes up that
challenge. The author distinguishes three levels of secularization.
Societal secularization which is a typical consequence of the
processes of modernity, and of programmes of � laicisation promoted
by political parties. Individual secularization that is manifested
in the decline of church commitment; occurring as individuals
re-compose their personal beliefs and practices in a � religion a
la carte; and as the individual's meaning system becomes
compartmentalized and religion is separated from other areas of
life. A third level, organizational secularization, covers the
incidence of the adaptation of religious bodies to secularized
society. The entire work is marked by meticulous description and
analysis of numerous theoretical and empirical studies, and by due
recognition of the intricate relationship between levels of
secularization and the impact of various actors in the many
conflicts over religion's roles.
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