Community Religion and Individualistic Religiousness – Antagonism or a Complementary Approach?

Abstract

The paper comprises a theoretical outline of the concept of individuality and community in relation to religion as such. With regard to classical and contemporary sociology and, in particular, to the sociology of religion, it depicts religious reality and individual-social activity undertaken for religious motives in an individual and social dimension. An important methodological and epistemological key to the analysis is the perception of sociology in the dimension of its reflectiveness. Religion and religiousness as well a sociologist’s approach to these dimensions of transcendent reality from an individually-socially expressed perspective refers in part to the idea of reflective sociology. The paper points to how the individual and social needs to express a religious need merge and exclude one another. Religion is a reflection of the natural need of self-determination (even if it refers to a higher authority of religious nature) as well as of the need to undertake activity based on the experience of community. In both cases there is a reference to transcendence. The goal of the paper is to delineate a horizon and an idea emerging in its background that community and individuality, despite the difficulty regarding their correlation, complement two realities of religious life rather than comprising two coexistent antagonised worlds. The analysis focuses primarily on the perception of this complementarity within the experience and expression-related forms of identity and modes of expression that constitute and are displayed by an individual and to a lesser extent on the beliefs and forms expressed by social groups and communities.