Resonance: The Final Dissolution of Religions or the Last Stage of Secularization

Secularized societies allow for all kinds of expressions of human spirituality (or lack of it). However, both the established religions and the more fluid forms of spirituality seem to leave open a specific space for the religious experience as something that cannot be met in any other form of cultural expression. Rosa’s theory of Resonance, we argue, has the potential to empty this specific space of religious experience, advancing secularization to the next level. To Rosa, a religious experience is no longer a unique form of human experience but a simple example, among others, of the variety of experiences of Resonance. Rosa, albeit inadvertently, reinforces Sloterdijk’s analysis, according to which the traditional concept of religion is a misunderstanding that can be overcome. These approaches to religion open the possibility of a third stage in the theories of secularization. In the first, the Enlightenment proclaimed that religion was to be washed away by the impulse of the immanent frame of Modernity. In the second, Taylor, Casanova, and others showed that religion never disappeared and that Modernity merely enabled religious pluralism. In the third stage of the theories of secularization, religion will be seen as a redundant cultural product.