Reverence And Social Cohesion: How Does Our Relationship With Elements Of “Beyondness” Relate to Our Relationship With Each Other?

Abstract

The past couple of decades have witnessed critical socio-economic, political and environmental changes embedded within late modernity’s structures, worldviews and value systems. Climate change, increased social and political polarization, the rise of authoritarianism, global migration and class precariousness are some of the complex phenomena that have emerged within our everyday spheres complemented by exponential technological advancement and global linkages. Parallel to these upheavals and partially as a response to them, inquisitions and research within academic and policy-making circles have increasingly focused on questioning the fundamentals of sociological tools and methods to find solace in post-neoliberal imaginaries. Concepts like social cohesion, a multi-dimensional construct in itself, have garnered more interest in analytical and conceptual endeavors in response to a lived and perceived risk of increased social fragmentation. Within this growing corpus of research, a common call is that of the (re)integration of elements of relationality, symbolism, shared value systems, and phenomenological analysis of solidarity-empowering virtues such as care and social love. These elements are not new to the sociological discipline, yet have been subverted as if floating next to the sinking ship of our hyper-rationalistic, utilitarian and capitalistic global systems. Within this scope, I developed an emerging “reverence index” to partially ground these virtues and to investigate linkages between social cohesion, on the one hand, and proxies for phenomenological attributes of relationships with a “transcendent” based on respect and awe, on the other. I study the effects of personal indicators, traits and values that relate to reverence and religiosity on social cohesion using secondary data from the 7th wave of the World Value Survey covering 66 countries and run regression analyses to explore these relationships on a global, regional and country level. Results confirm a significant positive relationship between reverence and social cohesion even when controlling for country-level and individual-level variables. Further, a negative interaction between reverence and organized faith in relation to social cohesion is witnessed within the global sample. In specific sub-groups, going to one extreme at the sake of the other—high reverence, low religiosity or high religiosity, low reverence—was relatively detrimental to cohesion. Inter-regional analysis highlighted shifting dynamics of the reverence-cohesion relationship and speaks to both secularization theories—showing how reverence may potentially substitute for religiosity in secular societies and vice versa— and, theories of embedded faith and social reward in high‐religiosity societies. The findings support the multi-disciplinary and emerging call to re-integrate the phenomenological, symbolic and reverential within sociological inquiry.