English Summaries

Introduction: Normative Dietary Concepts

The field of food and religion has traditionally been dominated by questions of dietary rules, ritual food sacrifices, and fasting practices, but has currently gained new importance in the context of global sustainability debates. The introduction to the thematic focus “Normierte Ernährungskonzepte” (normative dietary concepts) was created as part of our work in the interdisciplinary collaborative project “Nachhaltige Ernährungsstile” (sustainable diets) and presents contributions to the research on normative dietary concepts. It problematizes the significance of normative dietary concepts for the study of religion and provides a cursory insight into the history and state of research. In addition to a typology of nutritional normative concepts, the research and results of the interdisciplinary collaborative project are presented and the contributions to the thematic focus are introduced.

But what is meant by normative nutritional concepts and how can they be researched in religious studies? Normations as the setting of standards and the sanctioning of their observance establish the norms of social groups; they are part of the regimes of social coexistence and are intended to ensure conformity. They regulate people’s everyday lives and are also highly significant for the shaping of a life determined by religion. What, when and how people eat and drink, how they deal with food, how they produce, market, and process it, are also subject to a variety of dietary normations. Normative dietary concepts motivate or justify individual and collective dietary behavior. They are implicitly or explicitly interwoven with traditions, beliefs, and customs that socio-culturally determine the arrangements of meals, preparation and production methods, and the classification and selection of food. In addition, we give a short overview of relevant publications, which can also be counted among the state of research in Religious Studies.

The relationship between religion and nutrition (diets) can be thought of in two ways: diet in religions or diet as religions. Dietary rules in religions can be divided into commandments and prohibitions. Furthermore, different dimensions of (religious or cultural) norming of diet can be distinguished.

Between 2018 and 2021, we participated in an interdisciplinary research network on the topic of “Plant-based diets as the key to sustainability” (in short: “Nachhaltige Ernährungsstile”, NES) and brought the discipline of Religious Studies into the collaborative research, together with Agricultural Economics, Nutritional Sciences, Crop Sciences, and Livestock Sciences. Cooperation partners were the Universities of Göttingen and Hannover. The joint project was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture in the research program “Sustainability”. In the project, different dietary styles were compared from a comprehensive, also intercultural sustainability perspective, including human health and performance. Fundamental to the project was also the question of whether these dietary styles can be realized by people in the long term and thus whether long-term sustainability progress can be achieved. Since the sustainability of nutrition in Lower Saxony is to be improved based on the research results of the collaborative project, e. g., through optimized food offerings and target group-specific nutrition communication, it belongs to the field of applied sciences.

“The Saviour provides all I need: Preliminary Study on Religiously Justified Abstinence from Food in Modern Catholicism”

This paper examines the ways in which modern European societies dealt with religiously framed female abstinence from food and considers the conditions for the persistence of this contested practice during this period. The subject of the case study are food-abstinent Catholic women in Western Europe in the period from 1780 to 1980. In the emic perspective, abstinence from food had the meaning of not being able to eat or not wanting to eat, or not feeling the need for ‘earthly’ food at all. Catholic framed food abstinence usually belongs to a cluster of bodily practices and psychic states such as stigmatizations, religious ecstasies, prophecies, etc., which are negotiated among (church) historians as modes of passion piety, mysticism, and asceticism. Many of these women were not only in permanent or recurrent pain and bedridden because of abstinence from food or the stigmatizations. Rather, their vitae suggest that it was antecedent accidents and specific chronic illnesses that led to permanent pain, to which were added over time the other “signs” interpreted as religious. Catholic cult communities of varying duration were formed around these women during their lifetime, and they were venerated as so-called “living saints”. Within these cult communities, the confessors or spiritual guides of these women played a central role in the interpretive work. The symptoms of the varying illnesses and the pain were attempted to be reinterpreted as religious signs of potential sanctity and remodeled as a salvific practice, employing theological concepts like “vicarious suffering” for other believers. Additional conditions for this reinterpretation to work “properly” were imposed on the women, e. g., the visible subordination of the laywoman to ecclesiastical authority and the performance of bearing the pain without complaint.

Within the article a history of knowledge approach is advocated. The production of knowledge and the categories in which this production takes place will be examined. With this instrument, hybrid epistemologies of the historical actors can be reconstructed, which cannot simply be assigned to the categories “natural” and “supernatural” or “saint” and “simulant”. In fact, one can see how theological, popular religious, medical, psychoanalytical and legal semantics were used simultaneously and mixed with each other in the meaning making processes of the various interpretive communities. These female devotional practices irritate and fascinate not only the immediate local religious milieu but also other actors in the wider social environment, especially contemporary experts and scholars such as clerics, physicians, psychiatrists and lawyers. As a result, not only church policy measures but also medical or legal interventions could occur.

It turns out that large concepts of process (secularization, modernization, functional differentiation) cannot adequately capture the complex social contexts of the groups of actors involved.

Societal micro and meso processes need to be looked at more closely in order to grasp change diachronically but also to identify processes that provide continuity given the contested nature of these practices. It is rather likely that particular religious and gendered body images and conceptions of the self (“the porous self”), the rise of new medical professions and their diversification, the dynamics of competing sanctity models (“heroic virtues” versus/and “mystical” bodily performances of the living saints), particular local and regional practices of piety as well as gender and class hierarchies need to be taken into account as well to explain the relative persistence of these practices despite the ongoing controversies.

The text is also intended as a contribution to the research subject of bodily modes and ways of piety as part of a history of modern Catholicism (in Europe), which is also a religious history of the suffering body and of religiously intended pain beyond a “finalist” narrative of modernity. The Catholic discourse on pain produces a wide variety of meanings, and the practical following of Christ, especially with regard to his suffering body, plays a relatively stable role in it. Abstinence from food would be a bloodless variant of imitatio Christi, not always made “visible” on the surfaces of the body, which can produce all the more ambiguity and struggles for authority.

Other Gods, Other Sacrifices: Debates on Vegetarianism and Religion in Turkey as Exemplified in the Works of Hasan Ferit Cansever and Asaf Halet Çelebi

In recent years, debates on the issues of vegetarianism and veganism have also gained importance in Turkey. From the question of the Islamic acceptability of vegetarian and vegan lifestyles to issues of animal welfare, nutrition-related topics are frequently discussed in traditional and new media. What is less well-known is that, already in the first half of the twentieth century, prominent intellectuals and literary figures discussed vegetarianism from ethical, religious and ideological perspectives. Interest in Indian religions, neo-pagan currents and alternative lifestyles, right-wing ideologies and Islamic reformism were some of the intellectual and political developments that nurtured those debates.

In this article, I examine the works of nationalist thinker and writer Hasan Ferit Cansever (1891–1969) and of poet and scholar Asaf Halet Çelebi (1907–1958). I analyse the vegetarianism-related discourses of both writers in the broader context of their work, through a critical study of their relevant writings, in particular of Cansever’s monograph, Tevrat’a Göre Yakın Şark’ta Yamyamlık (Cannibalism in the Near East According to the Torah, 1952), as well as of the biographies and articles dedicated to them, including printed testimonies of their contemporaries.

After a brief introduction to both authors and their engagement with vegetarianism in the early Republican context, I discuss, in the second part, the problem of the instrumentalization of antisemitic themes in Cansever’s literalistic interpretation of the Bible, on which his thesis about the evolution of carnism into cannibalism is based. The hostility towards Judaism, like the Christianophobic pronouncements of other writers in literary or other texts in the first decades of the twentieth century, allows the author a veiled critique of Islamic monotheism and its worldview, which is fundamental in his questioning of anthropocentrism. The condemnation of an allegedly “primitive” and “contradictory” Judaism enables the author to examine critically the conditions in Turkey and, in particular, the influence of Islam in Turkish society. Thus, in the context of the criticism of religion, Cansever’s anti-Jewish discourse has a significance that goes beyond the antisemitism that is characteristic for extreme-right nationalism.

In the third part of my article, I show how Cansever sees parallels between the roles of prophets and that of physicians in their condemnation of cannibalism and carnism, respectively. It is important here that he repeatedly questions anthropocentrism by basing himself on physiological arguments. Striking is his refusal to distinguish between humans and animals, an attitude that takes the author outside the relatively flexible confines of Islamic thought and theology. Indeed, this approach challenges the anthropocentrism that is at the heart of much of traditional Islamic thought. This approach is an important aspect of his work because he argues that there is no “physiological or biological” difference between the carcass of an animal and that of a human.

However, as I show in part four, his promotion of vegetarianism and his criticism of anthropocentrism had only a very limited impact on the nationalist milieu in which he was active. What most interested ethno-nationalists was that Cansever, as a medical doctor, was concerned with the “question of racial health” and believed that a diet based on animal products, especially meat, was harmful to humans. Cansever claimed that the demise of Central Asian Turks was due to their exclusive consumption of animal products, while Near Eastern Turks rose because their diet was grain-based.

In the fifth part, I focus on Asaf Halet Çelebi. I discuss his interest in Buddhism and the writings in which he discusses dietary norms. The poet’s scholarly interest in Buddhism and Indian religions is well documented, as he published extensively on these subjects. That his interest was not simply based on intellectual curiosity, but was part of his own spiritual quest, seems to be confirmed by his poems, which often deal with Buddhist concepts, and by some statements in his interviews. He was also vocal about the importance of wine in classical Ottoman Turkish poetry as a symbol of rebellion against religious authorities and as an expression of personal freedom. In some texts, Çelebi seems to advocate a worldview that challenges anthropocentrism. Unlike Cansever, this is not expressed through a reduction of the human corpse to “flesh” that would be indistinguishable from an animal corpse, but it is based on compassion for animals, an aspect that is not entirely absent of Cansever’s reflections. Like Cansever, Çelebi denies the principle of human uniqueness in creation, but unlike the doctor, who uses materialist and physiological arguments, the poet is most likely inspired by his study of Indian religions and Buddhism. For both, this has implications for the type of diet they advocate.

However, their stance also has consequences for scholars focusing on the cultural and religious history of Turkey. It is a reminder that the dichotomous interpretations of modern Turkish history, which contrast secularism and Islam, do not do justice to the wealth of ideas and experiences in Turkish intellectual and literary history. By considering Cansever’s and Celebi’s critical approaches to monotheism and their active vegetarianism, it becomes possible to reflect on a history of religions in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkey that goes beyond the study of the diversity within Islam, the status of Christian and Jewish minorities and the rise of secular ideologies. The study of dietary normativity in the case of Turkey offers an opportunity to contribute to an alternative history of religions in Turkey.

Standardisation Regarding Food in Shin Buddhism: The Relationship between Conventions and a Sect-specific Understanding of Buddhist Teachings

We can call the prohibition on eating meat a characteristic of Buddhist eating customs that has particular significance. Although previous research drew attention to the subsequent development of food regulations and infringements, meat renunciation remains an essential value within the discourse that impacts conventional and divergent customs. Japanese Buddhism presents prototypes in this context since, currently, a majority of monks and nuns openly do not follow the prohibition. However, does this situation simply mean that those times in the daily life of a Buddhist when they do not follow Buddhist food regulations are not counted as being part of their Buddhist life? In this article, I show how Shin Buddhism implemented its own standardisation concerning the usage and consumption of food that most Japanese Buddhism sects still observe. That norm decidedly differs from a vegetarian and strictly ritualised way of eating. In my analysis, I refer to offered food, eating for special occasions, and saying grace before and after a meal. Thus, I show how these standardisations express the Shin Buddhist understanding of Buddhism to a significant extent.

First, I discuss the meaning of food offered at an altar. In contrast to the food’s function of gratifying a specific deity or deceased person, Shin Buddhism emphasises the function of food as creating a connection between the believer and the central Buddha of Shin Buddhism, namely Amida. Since this sect presupposes that a human being cannot perform any religious practice, the offering has no meaning with regard to proceeding on the Buddhist path. Instead, its function is to promote people’s awareness of Amida’s power. A crucial mediator of Amida’s working is the founder, Shinran. Therefore, one more function of a food offering is to commemorate the founder’s virtues by referring to distinct episodes from his life. Second, I focus on eating for special occasions. In the context of Shin Buddhism, this refers, first, to the Hōonkō (‘Meeting for the Return of Gratitude’). In this context, a critical function of food is highlighting the importance of the Shin Buddhist saṃgha. For this purpose, Hōonkō uses donations from followers to provide the main meal served during the ceremony. Meals usually include a lunch box that the believer can share with family members who could not attend the ceremony. Third, I analyse the phrases that should be said before and after each meal. Shin Buddhism emphasises being aware of the grace bestowed by Amida and the founder. To highlight this contextualisation specifically to Shin Buddhism, I also investigated aspects of the essential phrases within Shin Buddhist history and clarified that the decision to use the contemporary version resulted from an attempt to show the difference between Shin Buddhism and other Buddhist sects in Japan and Christianity.

The aforementioned analysis of three aspects of food in contemporary Shin Buddhism clarifies that standardisation is an important tool for expressing the Shin Buddhist understanding of Buddhist teachings. This characteristic of material religion also reveals aspects of Shin Buddhism that cannot be derived from the Shin Buddhist canon alone. Moreover, the Shin Buddhist standardisation of food based on the Shin Buddhist understanding of Buddhist teachings provides us with a broader view of what should be called ‘Buddhist food’ or the ‘Buddhist way of eating’. In the Shin Buddhist context, food need not meet the vegetarian requirements or function as a tool to proceed along the Buddhist path. The main point of Buddhist food according to the Shin Buddhist standardisation is remembering the virtues of the founder Shinran and being aware of salvation by the Buddha Amida. I indicate in this article that this Shin Buddhist perspective should not be described as a simple negation of a common standard. Rather, this sect developed—based on Shin Buddhist teachings—a new standard that is inherent in the expression, ‘Buddhist food’.

Veganism and plant-centric nutrition in the current sustainability debate as topics of the study of religions

In the current sustainability debates, we often encounter the call for a plant-based diet. According to recent studies, plant-based diets are a key to sustainability because the consumption of products of animal origin is one of the “big five” drivers of climate change. Is preventing the global climate catastrophe really the central motive for the decision to eat vegan? The study of religions’ research on veganism and plant-based diets in the sustainability debates, enriched by cross-disciplinary collaboration, shows that sustainability for the climate and life on the planet have so far been seen as a side-effect of abstaining from meat and animal products by consumers in German-speaking countries. The motivations for a plant-based diet, including veganism, are often more about protecting animal welfare and health. Some are concerned with an ethically correct way of life that strives for spiritual and physical purity, which goes beyond the question of correct nutrition. The attribution that renouncing animal meat and animal products is asceticism and due to a purity mindset leads to low acceptance in mainstream society. However, ethical veganism has been recognized as a “philosophical belief” in Great Britain and is protected from discrimination by law.

Not least because of the vegan trend and various campaigns by associations and non-governmental organizations, attempts are currently becoming visible in the D-A-CH area and Great Britain that I recognize as a coupling of altruism and hedonism: the efforts to create appetizing food and attractive vegan products that are convincing in terms of taste and food aesthetics. The introduction of these products is often successful and the role of the market is significant because developing meat and dairy substitutes and bringing them to the table in community settings, families and single households is lucrative.

Replacing the preferred meat-based dishes with vegan or vegetarian dishes is also part of the fasting tradition in Christian societies which may have a significant impact on the level of acceptance of meat substitutes in secular settings.

However, a plant-oriented diet is not necessarily sustainable and substitute products are neither necessarily characterized by climate-friendly sustainability nor are they automatically healthy. Moreover, one could also criticize that the fixation on a vegan diet is a luxury issue and that the target group of substitute products are so-called LOHAs (lifestyles of health and sustainability) which are characterized by an above-average income.

Because the market and product development are so central, I take a look at the natural and social sciences, nutrition research and the research on sustainable dietary change. For not only products, consumers, cookbooks, etc. can be studied in the study of religions, but also the paths leading up to the finished (allegedly) sustainable product. Noteworthy here are the scales that researchers develop for measuring different characteristics, such as Aspasia Werner and colleagues. They explore potential mental models of behavior change and ask whether mindfulness and spirituality gleaned from Buddhism support sustainable food consumption. Spirituality as an expression of interconnectedness, as defined in their research, is reminiscent of Bron Taylor’s dark green religion and could be contextualized and considered in the study of religions’ terms. The two approaches reveal similarities, because the boundaries between religion and science are blurred on the part of sociology or natural science.

Critique of spiritual and religious self-awareness and self-development can also be examined in the study of religions, for example the critique of the marketing of mindfulness training as self-optimization and mindfulness as the “new spirituality of capitalism” (Ronald Purser).

As Graham Harvey has emphasized and elaborated, food and foodways should be the central topics of research in the study of religions, because in this way more accurate statements can be made about lived religion than with an orientation towards the cognitive definition of religion.

The Hero’s Journey as Therapeutic Method: Religious Aspects in the Contemporary Coaching and Therapy Scene

Religion-related offers are increasing in the therapy sector. A particularly striking example is the hero’s journey. It is based on mythology researcher Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), who believed that by comparing various hero myths from all over the world, a pattern can be found that is common to all of these narratives. Based on C. G. Jung’s theory of archetypes, Campbell assumed that this so-called monomyth is based on a general structure of the human psyche. The theater actor Paul Rebillot took up the idea, saw its healing potential, and created from it a Gestalt therapeutic, spiritually oriented group seminar. In addition to the hero narrative, it is based on references to ancient drama, ritual processes, and body-related exercises and now has a variety of offshoots in the consulting and coaching scene, the business sector, and clinical practice.

Using the hero’s journey as an example, this analysis aims to work out religious aspects of the contemporary coaching and therapy scene and relates them to theoretical debates on contemporary religious culture. It proceeds in the following steps. After a description of the origin of the hero’s journey as a therapeutic method developed by Rebillot, its central therapeutic elements and different variants are discussed. This is followed by the evaluation of the topic as an object for the Study of Religion, based on four prominent points of reference to the field of research on contemporary religious culture. These are: the aspect of narrativity, the aspect of ritual, the aspect of corporeality, and the aspect of a spiritual turn in the therapy sector. In a final step, the focus is on the question of how exactly this is a case of religion; it is stated that the hero’s journey is suitable as an example for a certain type of contemporary religiosity, its essential characteristics being the relation to therapy and a specific spirituality discourse. The latter is described here as a form of religion that is, content-wise, underdetermined. The definition of the object of the so-called spiritual experience within the therapeutic process is deliberately left open, and as such, the hero’s journey remains compatible with people from very different ideological and religious backgrounds. Even for those who refuse to see any spiritual connotation, the therapy still works, as it can be received as “purely psychological”.

In Germany, approximately one-third of the population is mentally ill once in their life. As a result, the increased occurrence of religious therapy offers is significant in its relevance for current forms of religion. In addition to that, the so-called therapeutization of society—the spread of therapeutic semantics and practices beyond therapeutic domains—must be taken into account as a development that might further reinforce this kind of religion. Also, the hero’s journey has left its original therapeutic domain, being now a tool for self-improvement, business development, or any kind of change management. Therefore, its analysis can serve as a paradigm not only for therapeutic religion but also for the process of therapeutization and its religious aspects.

The Formation of Nation States and Territorial Histories of Religion: Analyses of Switzerland and Austria

In the Academic Study of Religions, the so-called “cultural turn” of the 1980 s and 1990 s has made the point that analyses of religions are hardly conceivable without taking the respective socio-cultural context into account. In this regard, analytical impulses of the study of contemporary societies and cultures proved particularly helpful to emphasize the importance of the political-national context.

The article reiterates the observation that that this now widespread focus is often associated with the danger of methodological nationalism. The authors present the opinion that––while the focus on the political and national context is highly productive––it would benefit from the increased critical analysis of the very concept of the nation-state by present-day historians and political scientists. Although numerous studies have dealt with the state and political contextual conditions for both the older and more recent history of religions, there is a conspicuous lack of critical references to concepts of “the nation” and “the nation-state” as they have been developed more recently in the Historical and Political Sciences.

Along with the historians Florian Bieber and Christian Jansen / Henning Borggräfe, we define nation as a narrative or fiction mutually agreed upon by members of a community, which forms the basis of a process of nation-building. The reception of these more recent debates, as the article argues, holds the potential for new systematic impulses for research in the Study of Religions. It enables Scholars of Religion to move beyond the approach of mutual path dependencies of socio-political context and religious organisations and to add the perspectives of historical depth dimensions, transnational interconnections and intra-religious plurality.

To make this point, the article outlines three research strands of the relationship of religion and nation:

First, as noted earlier, the cultural turn has led Scholars of Religion to increasingly consider the national and political context when studying religious developments. In this regard, the idea of a functional equivalent of the nation as a “substitute religion” has gained particular prominence. In contrast, historians such as Dieter Langewiesche stressed the conflictive interrelation of nation and religion.

Second, based on this perspective, various sociologists criticised what they called a methodological nationalism. Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller questioned the assumption that the nation state is the natural social and political form of the modern world. They invite their readers to take transnational interdependencies into account. In the wake of this approach, a growing interest in the limits and diversity of nation states (as part of globalisation processes) has also been gaining influence.

Third, various new handbooks on the topic of the nation, nationality and nationalism document a renewed interest in the concept of the nation and align it to the concept of religion. In this regard, Florian Bieber puts particular emphasis onto the historically contingent constitution of the political and religious field as well as the multidimensionality of the interdependencies between these fields. In this regard, the significance of national and religious boundaries become as important as the transnational dimensions of religious exchanges. In addition, such an approach puts the analytical handling of intra-religious diversity (in their respective contemporary socio-cultural contexts) under scrutiny. The differences of intra-religious decision-making processes come into view as well as the differences of authority attributions and claims to representations external to religion.

The authors employ this threefold analytical perspective on two case studies of nation-building: Switzerland and Austria. On the one hand, they make the point that the case of Switzerland is characterised by a high degree of internal plurality of different language and cultural regions as well as by different cantonal forms of the state-church relationship. On the other hand, they characterized Austria as a country with a strong imperial tradition that was formally constituted as a nation state in 1918. Moreover, the Habsburg monarchy repeatedly served as the central antipole for the establishment of national independence within the framework of Swiss national narratives. Based on the current state of research, these two case studies supply interesting data for a close reconstruction of path-dependencies, transnational interconnectedness, and aspects of existing religious plurality. In other words, they help to better understand the influences of the establishment of the nation state on the respective histories of religion.

The concluding sections present three suggestions for further research:

First, regarding the establishment of the nation-state, the two case analyses emphasised the diversity of the processes in question. In Austria, the continuing importance of an imperial self-image and the fragility of the Austrian nation state (after the end of the First World War) are characteristic. In contrast, the Swiss case points to the still influential myth of “early democratic peasant freedom fighters” embedded into strong federal states (the Cantons) that were mono-confessional for a long time, as well as the federal constitution of 1874, which the Swiss historian Josef Lang considered the most progressive of its time. With regard to the history of religion, the case analyses thus underline the usefulness of the more recent concepts of nation state emphasising historically contingent dynamics. They suggest that these discussions should be elaborated further for the analysis of pluralisation processes in contemporary religious culture, and that the long-term historical developments should be elaborated in this context.

Second, the two case studies also suggest that transnational developments should be understood more comprehensively. From one angle, international agreements shaped the formation of the nation states under consideration. For example, the establishment of the Swiss federal state in 1848 with democratic liberties benefited strongly from the revolutionary awakenings in Austria, France and Prussia, which were thus bound by domestic politics and allowed Swiss democratisation to take place. From the other angle, it seems advisable to further emphasize the establishment of transnational religious networks as a constitutive aspect of history. Ultramontanism and the concordats with the Vatican provide a revealing illustration of how these types of networks reinforced the connection between the imperial state and the Catholic Church in Austria. In Switzerland, however, papal encyclicals and the Rome-oriented Church were perceived by liberal democrats as opposing democratisation and liberal freedoms. Diplomatic relations with the Vatican were severed and the transnationally active Jesuit order was banned.

Third, the article provides new perspectives onto the systematics of religious plurality. The case analyses have highlighted the particular ambivalence of the developments in question. On the one side, the case analyses demonstrated how strongly the political frameworks of Austria and Switzerland were shaped by traditional ideas of the relationship between church and state. Early Jewish, new Christian or Muslim communities were confronted with exclusionary discourses—partly promoted by church representatives as governors of religion. On the other side, religions marginalised as non-conformist have gradually oriented themselves to changing concepts of churchiness—which is inter alia documented in legal definitions and legislative processes. Along those lines, the case analyses emphasise the problem of hasty parallelisation between religious traditions—especially regarding the meso level of organisations and communities. This is all the more significant because the widespread intuitive understanding of the social forms of religion in Austria and/or Switzerland is often still based on simple concepts of parochialism—neglecting the strong influence of processes of individualisation. This raises the question to what extent general systematisations are helpful to analyse these processes and to what extent scholars should rather work on more complex typologies of religion that combine religious, political, economic and national/ethnic categories.