Religion: The shift from nation-state political regulation to market type economic regulation

This paper presents a reflection on the historical social, cultural and political context against which questions of heterogeneities and inequalities emerge and are articulated. While religion was practically evinced from social scientific debates for decades, recent developments have catalyzed its return among social scientific concerns.
For example, religion figures among the relevant categories in contemporary debates on heterogeneity and inequalities. How is this so? What often appears as the "return" of religion within a post-secular public sphere and academic sphere of discourse in fact hides a broader shift in very "place" and substance of religion in the last half of the 20th Century. Stepping away from the common, secular narrative on religion enables a fresh perspective on religion which highlights some profound changes on the meta-level of our globalizing societies. This paper examines how focusing on religion allows us to see how recent decades show abundant signs of a shift from an essentially political mode of social regulation, carried and enacted by the Nation-State, to an economically driven market-founded regime. After defining both these regimes and their consequence for religion and its place in the social, this paper concludes by suggesting how this framework helps understand how the categories of inequality have multiplied at the same time that issues of recognition have come to the fore of social scientific debate.