I Believe in Love

Implicit Religion in Contemporary Society's Construction of Love

Abstract

Love in personal relationships is one of the central issues in contemporary society or maybe the most central of all, as the sociologist Ulrich Beck holds. He claims that love has reached the status of a "secular religion", following institutional religion and class to provide the "focal point" for society. As such, he holds, it serves as a grande narrative to compensate for the process of individualisation, one of the main characteristics of modernity. Beck's theoretical analysis is here reconsidered from the perspective of implicit religion. Edward Bailey's idiographic study of individuals' implicit religion compiles statements about the meaning of life, priorities, satisfactions, etc. It is thus used as an empirical basis for the elucidation of the role of love in today's lives. It will be demonstrated that the contemporary construct of love shares phenomenological and functional features with explicit religion such as being initiated by a transcendent state of consciousness, demanding and providing commitment, and enabling an encounter with the numinous. Love appears as a power that reigns arbitrarily, is worshipped and served. Thus the implicit religion of love emerges as surprisingly similar to a primal religion. Nevertheless, it has neither the scope nor the potential to substitute for Christianity, and it cannot be seen as the only implicit religion in a time of multiple, simultaneously existing, integrating foci.