Reflexive modernity and the religious body

There are a growing number of attempts to reconsider the nature and role of contemporary religion with reference to the issues of ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’. Against these, it is suggested here that efforts to reconstruct the study of religion within the framework of an assumption that we are entering a postmodern social order would be fundamentally misconceived. While the emergence of features within the present social order are acknowledged, which undermine major components of the modern project, and are manifest as problematizations of the questions of reality and meaning which concern the postmodernists, it is not accepted here that this order itself is in a state of decay. Instead, that postmodernity is a fundamentally modern construct is argued, how the very idea of postmodernity becomes possible is explored, suggesting that it is, in part, the product of a process of ‘disembodiment’ which has gradually come to dominate Western cultures since the time of the Protestant Reformation. Postmodernism is characterized by a mentalism which ignores the anthropological in reality of what we term the religious body; the necessary implication of embodiment in the human construction of meaning and identity. It is proposed therefore, that the study of contemporary religion should be shaped not by postmodernism but by an awareness of both the reality‐threatening impulses of reflexive modernity and the continuing anthropological reality of the religious body.