Religion amidst Tares and Weeds: A Pentecostal Perspective on the Hegemony of Non-Religious Movements and Scholarship on Religion in the 21st Century

Abstract

Religion is an influential and resilient phenomenon that parades no cryptograms of decline. It incites the deepest obligation, emotion, sharp action, strong dialogues and study for practitioners, opponents and fence-sitters. Any anthropoid who is familiar with the world around them understands that religion is a powerful probing phenomenon that demands better understanding through inquiries. Despite the force of religion, the 21st century has observed nonreligious groups and scholars’ greater influence on religion. This mixed-method study adopts a grounded theory approach to inductively ascertain from collected data, whether religious movements (RM) will survive the heroic tremor from nonreligious movements (NRM) and scholarship. The study discussed how scholars have studied religion and NRM in various academic disciplines and how the activities and engagements of NRM and scholarship have impacted the beliefs, functions and paradigm of RM. The study discoveries bring out that, though NRM and scholarship have vastly altered religious beliefs and meanings, RM will live beyond the 21st century, as far as human beings remain. The study findings additionally acmes that RM should not envision the NRM and scholarship as harmful but also as an expedient tool for favorable and inspired reforms. The study contributes to scholarship by defining religion as anthropoids’ innermost instinct and craving to satisfy certain responsibilities as revealed by a transcendental being or a higher order. The study further contributes to academia with the theory that, religious movements cannot be suppressed by the copious nonreligious schedules and scholarship, nevertheless it has made weighty vicissitudes to the trajectory of religious movements, which is worth stating and noteworthy. Keywords: Religious movements, nonreligious movements, scholarship, atheist, secularists, humanists, and free thinkers.