The cultural turn in the sociology of religion in France

The decline in the influence of Marxism and structuralism in the social sciences has led to greater attention being paid to both social actors and cultural identities in the sociology of religion. Prompted by debates between republicans (in the French sense of the word) and democrats concerning the status of cultural and religious identities in the public sphere, the sociology of religion in France has increasingly questioned the classic paradigms of secularization. It has turned instead to the approaches of anthropology and the political sciences, revealing both the structures and the dynamics of religious identities in ultra-modernity. As a result, French laicite is increasingly questioned-the more so given the pressures of the European context. No longer is the sociological study of religious phenomena simply an analysis of social determinants; it becomes instead, in France as elsewhere, the study of symbolic mediations, examining their influence on both social bonds and the formation of individuals as active subjects.