Religious and Non-Religious Modes of Coping with Contingency in an Individualised Society

The humanities and social sciences tend to regard dealing with contingency as a primarily religious phenomenon. As a result of such a narrow view, non-religious forms of coping with contingency have not received the systematic examination they deserve. Moreover, the largely theoretical and intellectual-historical analyses of experiencing and dealing with contingency not only lack empirical foundation, but even the kind of conceptual precision necessary to adequately delineate the phenomenon. The present project addresses these desiderata: To this end, the project examines specifically modern experiences of contingency that are caused by current societal developments and which agents experience in the mode of a biographical conception of their lives. The aim is to develop an empirically founded theory to explain the formation, application and effects of religious and non-religious modes of coping with contingency.

The study’s results will serve, on the one hand, to expand our understanding of the functionality of religiousness and non-religiousness in processes of coping with contingency; on the other hand, they will contribute to bringing up to date sociology’s understanding of coping strategies under conditions of late modernity.