5 Questions for Alessandro Grazi

By Manfred Sing

The edited volume “Religious Transformations in Europe. Individual Life Paths between Secularism and (New) Religiosity in the 19th Century” is just fresh off the presses. It is number 144 of the series “VIEG Beihefte”, edited by the Institute of European History (IEG).¹ The editors of the volume are Cristiana Facchini and Alessandro Grazi. Cristiana Facchini is Full Professor of History of Christianity and Religious Studies at the University of Bologna, Alessandro Grazi is a senior researcher in the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster and was a researcher at the IEG from 2018 to 2023. The book is the result of a conference held in 2021 in Mainz. We asked Alessandro Grazi five questions about the new book. 

1. What was the initial impulse to deal with precisely this topic and organise a conference on it?

I have known Cristiana Facchini for a long time now, because she is an authority in the study of nineteenth-century Italian Judaism, a field of studies we have in common. Although we never directly worked for the same institution, I have had many fruitful contacts and collaborations with her at numerous international conferences, workshops and various academic events. We have often been talking and exchanging ideas about the Ottocento² and Italian Jews, but also about religion in general in that time frame. We had been sitting for a while on the idea of focusing on individual trajectories, when exploring religious transformations in the Nineteenth Century. When I realized the IEG would provide the ideal institutional context for a conference on this topic, I exposed my ideas to Cristiana, and immediately applied for DFG funds, which we luckily obtained. The rest is history, as they say.

“A fascinating epoch as the long nineteenth century has been a real laboratory for experimenting with religion”

2. What do “Religious Transformations”, “Secularism” and “New Religiosity” in the book title mean? Can you contextualise these terms theoretically and explain how and why you use them?

Cristiana and I moved from the assumption that individual trajectories of change from a religious and traditional point of departure towards multiform manifestations of secularization or reform were not just a well-known phenomenon of the twentieth century, but could already be found in the nineteenth Century. We were convinced, and our conviction was reinforced by the conference, that such a fascinating epoch as the long nineteenth century has been a real laboratory for experimenting with religion. These “experiments” have necessarily produced myriads of different results, spanning from light reform to total atheism. The multiplicity of different outcomes does not conform anymore with the old dichotomy religious/secular. The new, modern, ways of interpreting religion, or alternatives to it, were and are as many as the people proposing them. Hence the individual approach.

But you’re right, even with this premise in mind, it is necessary to define those terms in the title. “Religious transformations” refer exactly to those processes of analysis and critique of one’s religious tradition of birth, determining re-interpretations that inevitably led to change and transformation, in the first place at an individual level but then involved also the entire society. We interpret such processes as moments of transition and border crossing, and we wished to uncover and interpret forms of religious behavior against the broader backdrop of processes of “secularization.”

“We assume that religion retained a strong formative and generative power even in modern contexts.”

And here we come to the definition of the term “secularism” as outcome of a transformation process. This term is inextricably connected to our definition of secularization. In our book, rather than treating secularization as a linear or clear-cut process of religious decline, we explore how the emergence of a more secularized society created space for innovation and creativity. Following Charles Taylor’s³ and other scholars’ insights, we assume that religion retained a strong formative and generative power even in modern contexts, remaining compatible with some of the tenets of modernity.

In this sense, secularization may be understood not simply as a process that highlights the decline of religious observance and practice, but possibly as a path of transformation through which religious motifs and meanings continue to exert influence – even beyond the bounds of traditional religious institutions. Secularization has been one of the most intensely debated issues in the humanities for at least five decades, particularly since Peter Berger’s pioneering work The Sacred Canopy (1967). Scholars have long argued both for and against the validity of secularization as a concept, and even among those who accept its use, there is considerable disagreement over its nature – whether it represents a long-term, gradual decline or a sudden collapse in the relevance of religion. In this way, secularization has come to function as an ideology – or even as a secular form of belief – used alternately by its detractors and defenders.

Moreover, a growing consensus has emerged that the original formulation of the secularization thesis – namely, that modernity inevitably leads to the progressive decline of religious belief and practice – amounts to a myth more than a historical reality. Critics have also pointed to the limited scope of traditional secularization theories, which are often based exclusively on Western, and particularly Christian, societies. They leave out not only non-Western contexts but also the complex internal diversity of religious expression within the West itself. In line with recent research, we treat “secularization” as a multifaceted and context-dependent phenomenon – an evolving set of processes that unfold through diverse mechanisms. Particularly influential here is Charles Taylor’s tripartite conceptualization of the secular: first, the emptying of public spaces of overt religious references; secondly, the decline of belief and practice; and, thirdly, the transformation of the conditions in which belief is held and experienced. It is this third dimension – the changing conditions of belief – that forms one of the core foci of our volume. We are interested not in secularization as the triumph of atheism or the erasure of religion, but in the emergence of non-institutional, personalized, and creative forms of belief that remained deeply religious in nature, even as they broke with tradition.

And here we come to the third definition: “new religiosity”. Acknowledging that as a result of such “religious transformations”, we do not only have forms of secularism, we needed to come up with a term that may convey aspects of religion persisting at the end of the transformation trajectory, and yet would not replicate the meaning of religion as an institutional or communal form. We believed the term “new religiosity” could thus well describe many of the forms of religious transformation we are presenting in our book. 

3. Was there a moment in your research or in the organisation of the conference that grabbed you personally? Did something particularly surprise you and change your view of the topic?

Concerning the first question, I would like to relate about a moment that grabbed me personally in the organization and the development of the conference. The conference took place at the end of 2021, in the middle of the Covid 19 pandemic. This presented several difficulties from an organizational view point, because it was the first hybrid conference organized by our institute. Never before did I have to deal with the technical equipment a hybrid conference required: making sure the microphones worked, the cameras were pointed in the right directions, the internet connection was solid and fast. Not to mention having to moderate a group of scholars at home and some of them in the room with me, with all the existing rules at the time, concerning social distance, masks and so on. All these things, at least the technical ones, became normality from then on, but back then it was the first time for us.

If I had to judge only the technical and organizational aspects, I’d say the conference went very well… up to a certain moment: the moment in which we were informed that one of the participants in person was tested positive to the Corona virus. I remember very vividly how I had to suddenly leave the conference and go talk and negotiate with local public authorities and the venue’s managers, in order to find the best, and legal, solution to continue our conference.

I had to suddenly go back into the room and interrupt the talk of my friend and colleague Noemie Duhaut, who was connected from Austria, to tell everybody that we needed to immediately interrupt the conference and send all the present people either home or to their hotel rooms in isolation. Luckily, with everybody’s efficient collaboration, we were able to switch the conference from hybrid to entirely online within a couple of hours and to listen to all the talks. A very formative experience, I would say.

“Individuals, institutions and societies intertwine in multiple ways, so that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to untangle the knot.”

As regards the second part of the question, I think both Cristiana Facchini and I realized two things in particular, that somehow reinforced our conviction the subject we chose was important and definitely understudied. The first thing is that our call for papers was in many cases interpreted, as though we intended to have a conference on secularization per se or on secularization processes. While secularization and secularization processes were certainly present in our conference, they were not so much the object of our intended investigations, but rather some of the “tools”, if you will, enabling or enhancing the individual religious transformations we wanted to explore. Secondly, several contributors inevitably ended up talking about institutional or transformation processes in society in general, rather than in individuals. This was a further confirmation on the one hand that this micro historical approach is still insufficient and, at the same time, of another perhaps obvious thing, that is, that individuals, institutions and societies intertwine in multiple ways, so that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to untangle the knot. But I believe that both these realizations do not undermine our starting assumptions, on the contrary, they reinforce them.

4. What kind of story do you and the other authors tell in the book? Is there a happy ending?

As we presented many different individual life trajectories, it is difficult to put all of them under one umbrella and decide whether there’s a happy ending. Some of them ended well, others did not. However, there was of course some sort of overarching paradigm re-uniting all of the stories we presented and that is, we hope, the sense of the book.

All the stories presented in the book are, in the first place, stories of dissatisfaction, internal turmoil, and wish to act upon it. All the characters presented in the book became at some point in life unhappy with the religious tradition, in which they were born and in which they grew up. So unhappy that, in rather different ways, they decided to change the status quo. The decision to change was at time a spontaneous consequence of a series of events and facts in their lives, while other times it was the result of years and years of reflections, readings, experiences and indecision.

In the second place, all the stories we presented are stories of entrepreneurship in a way. All these individuals have in common that their dissatisfaction was followed by action. They initiated an itinerary of transformation of their religion, sometimes quite literally, from within and from without. As I have already mentioned in the first question, these trajectories of change reached very different results. In our book we try not only to understand these different results brought about by these processes of change, but also the mechanisms and dynamics leading to them.

“Religion and secularism are by no means mutually exclusive.”

5. What would you like readers to take away from the book?

My main hope is that readers are convinced by our premise, that is, that paths of individual religious transformation, either towards secularism or towards “new religiosity” are not a new phenomenon of the twentieth century but can be already traced back to the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, I would like the readers to take away the concept that religion and secularism are by no means mutually exclusive. The contributions gathered here dismantle binary oppositions such as belief versus secularism or tradition versus modernity. Instead, they underscore the extent to which religious change operated as a multidirectional process, often negotiated at the crossroads of personal experience, scholarly inquiry, political commitment, and cross-cultural exchange. From Swami Vivekananda’s spiritual cosmopolitanism to Roman Dmowski’s nationalist moralism, from the reimagined Mosaism of Joseph Salvador to the scholarly radicalism of Moritz Steinschneider, these case studies demonstrate the astonishing variety of forms that religious transformation could take – individual and collective, reformist and radical, secular and spiritual. Crucially, the volume highlights the global and entangled dimensions of religious thought in this period. The circulation of ideas across continents, the reworking of traditions in dialogue with others, and the hybridization of spiritual vocabularies challenge the Eurocentric narrative of secularization as a unilinear, Western process. Whether in the universalist visions of the Saint-Simonians, the ethical theism of Luigi Luzzatti, or the cross-cultural feminization of religion in Ruth Harris’s portrait of Vivekananda’s circles, what emerges is a transnational and pluralistic map of modern religiosity.

We would like the readers to leave also with some open questions about the place of belief in public life, the ethics of pluralism, and the creative tensions between identity and universalism.

Dear Alessandro, thank you very much your explanations.

Zum Buch geht es hier: https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666571480

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The questions were asked by Manfred Sing, research coordinator of the IEG.

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Header image: Alessandro Grazi. © IEG Mainz, photographer: Angelika Stehle.

Appendix

1. Cristiana Facchini/Alessandro Grazi (Hg.): Religious Transformations in Europe. Individual Life Paths between Secularism and (New) Religiosity in the 19th Century, Göttingen 2025 (ISBN 978-3-525-57148-4, eISBN 978-3-666-57148-0), Open Access publication: https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666571480. ↩︎
2. The term “Ottocento” refers to the Italian nineteenth century and the art, literature, and culture of this period. ↩︎
3. Charles Taylor: A Secular Age, Cambridge, Mass. 2007. ↩︎

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