Feminism, religion and modernity

<p dir="ltr">This thesis provides an alternative explanation of women's religious experiences to those proposed by the conventional accounts of the sociology of religion. It explores theoretical issues of significance to feminism, religion and modernity. It approaches the issues of feminism and the politics of knowledge by exploring fundamental issues about women's religious agency and argues that this agency has been underconceptualised by social theory in religion and Western feminist scholarship. It explores the location of religion in modernity with an explicit focus on the contribution of Max Weber and postcolonial theories. In particular this thesis looks at the Christian foundations of modernity and the paradox that gender poses for Weber's theory of rationality, religion and modernity. At an empirical level, an ethnographic methodology is used to examine the social construction of religious meaning by women in a feminist religious group, Women-Church. Hegemonic understandings of religion in modernity are underpinned by the discourse of secularisation, which, I argue, is a social construction that produces ideological understandings of religion in the modem world. This thesis is a critical examination of the way in which women's religious experiences have been constructed in modernity discourses and the limitations of such discourses. Hence, the hegemonic discourses that construct understandings of women and religion are the primary objects of my theoretical investigation. I conclude that it is possible both theoretically and in practice to deconstruct these discourses and in tum, to construct alternative understandings of religious emancipation.</p>