Abstract
This article explores how two seemingly contradictory global trends—scientific rationality and religious expressiveness—intersect and are negotiated in people’s lives in Nordic countries. We focus on Finland and Sweden, both countries with reputations of being highly secular and modernized welfare states. The article draws on our multi-sited ethnography in Finland and Sweden, including interviews with health practitioners, academics, and students identifying as Lutheran, Orthodox, Muslim, or anthroposophic. Building on new institutionalist World Society Theory, the article asks whether individuals perceive any conflict at the intersection of “science” and “religion”, and how they negotiate such a relationship while working or studying in universities and health clinics, prime sites of global secularism and scientific rationality. Our findings attest to people’s creative artistry while managing their religious identifications in a secular, Nordic, organizational culture in which religion is often constructed as old-fashioned or irrelevant. We identify and discuss three widespread modes of negotiation by which people discursively manage and account for the relationship between science and religion in their working space: segregation, estrangement, and incorporation. Such surprising similarities point to the effects of global institutionalized secularism and scientific rationality that shape the negotiation of people’s religious and spiritual identities, while also illustrating how local context must be factored into future, empirical research on discourses of science and religion.
Highlights
Significant critical research has pointed out that the modern categories of science and religion are socially and historically construed notions that date back to early modernEurope (Ferngren 2002; Asad 2003; Beattie 2007; Harrison 2015)
A growing body of sociological institutionalist research suggests that modern institutions such as courts, parliaments, corporations, hospitals, universities, and schools operate as prime sites of scientific rationality and global secularism, restricting religion to a highly personalized space (Lechner and Boli 2005; Meyer et al 2009)
As Thomas (2007) argues convincingly, these seemingly contradictory trends—global secularism supported by scientific rationality and public religious expressiveness—are both intrinsic to our era of globalization and are intensified in and around modern institutions
Summary
Significant critical research has pointed out that the modern categories of science and religion are socially and historically construed notions that date back to early modernEurope (Ferngren 2002; Asad 2003; Beattie 2007; Harrison 2015). The perceived contest between science and religion intensified further in modernity (Evans and Evans 2008), as the domains became institutionalized. In our era of globalization, this perceived conflict has been institutionalized but has diffused across much of the modern world, where religion is perceived as belonging to the private sphere rather than to public life. A growing body of sociological institutionalist research suggests that modern institutions such as courts, parliaments, corporations, hospitals, universities, and schools operate as prime sites of scientific rationality and global secularism, restricting religion to a highly personalized space (Lechner and Boli 2005; Meyer et al 2009). As Thomas (2007) argues convincingly, these seemingly contradictory trends—global secularism supported by scientific rationality and public religious expressiveness—are both intrinsic to our era of globalization and are intensified in and around modern institutions. Local organizations are founded on global “blueprints” (Meyer et al 1997), and so carry and transmit world culture of secularism and scientific rationality
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