Religious revivalism refers to a renewed and intensified assertion of religious belief, ritual and authority — typically involving a call to return to a purified or original form of the tradition, a heightened public visibility, and new organisational vehicles for spreading the message. It is a sociological phenomenon rather than a theological one: what interests sociology is why such reassertions cluster in particular periods and places, who leads and joins them, and what they do to the wider social order.

The concept matters because it unsettles a central expectation of classical sociology. Comte, Marx, Durkheim and Weber all anticipated, in different idioms, that industrialisation and rational calculation would shrink religion's public role. The late twentieth century instead produced the Iranian revolution, the American Christian right, political Islam, Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Hindu nationalism in India — leading Peter Berger, once a proponent of secularisation, to speak of the desecularisation of the world.

Four distinctions

Precision here earns marks. Revivalism is the reawakening of an existing tradition among the already faithful, often through preaching, congregational worship, pilgrimage and reform of practice; it need not be political. Fundamentalism, in the sense established by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, adds a claim to inerrant scriptural or doctrinal authority, a defence of that authority against modernist reinterpretation, sharp boundaries against outsiders and, often, a project of remaking public law. Communalism is different again: it is the political mobilisation of religious community against another community, and its target is a rival group rather than laxity within one's own. Ordinary religiosity — festivals, fasting, temple or mosque attendance, new gurus and healing cults — is simply religion being practised, and to call every rise in observance revivalism drains the term of meaning.

Why now: the drivers

Several forces are usually cited. Globalisation and rapid urbanisation dislocate people from settled communities, and religious networks supply identity, mutual aid and moral order where kin and village once did. Insecurity — economic liberalisation, informal work, migration, competition for state benefits — makes ascriptive solidarity attractive. Identity politics turns religion into a currency of electoral arithmetic, since religious community is legible to parties in a way that dispersed class interest is not. Media have transformed reach: printed tracts and cassette sermons gave way to televised epics, satellite channels and now social media, which allow standardised doctrine to bypass local clergy. Diaspora funding and long-distance nationalism link migrants seeking a portable identity to organisations at home. Finally, revivalism often responds to state action itself — to reform legislation, to school curricula, to court judgments on personal law.

Indian illustrations

The Indian record spans communities and centuries. Nineteenth-century reform and revival were intertwined: the Brahmo Samaj and Prarthana Samaj reinterpreted tradition, while the Arya Samaj called for a return to the Vedas and, through shuddhi, to reconversion. The Deoband and Ahl-i-Hadith movements sought scriptural purification among Muslims, and the twentieth-century Tablighi Jamaat built a vast lay preaching network. Singh Sabha reform reshaped Sikh practice and institutions. In the late twentieth century the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign converted religious symbol into mass political mobilisation, a process Christophe Jaffrelot and Peter van der Veer analyse as religious nationalism rather than simple piety. Alongside these run Christian evangelical growth in the north-east and among tribal populations, and the expansion of satsang movements and television-mediated devotion among the urban middle class. T. N. Madan's argument is that Indian secularism, by treating religion as a private residue, left the field of public religious meaning to those willing to occupy it.

Consequences for the secular state

Revivalism strains a secular constitutional order in specific ways. It politicises personal law and makes reform a matter of community honour, as the Shah Bano episode showed. It pressures education, over textbooks, prayer and the writing of history. It converts contested sites into non-negotiable claims. And it makes the state's promise of equal distance from all faiths harder to perform, because any intervention is read as favour to one side. José Casanova's more measured reading is useful here: what we observe is not the reversal of secularisation but the deprivatisation of religion — religion re-entering the public sphere while differentiation of the economy, law and science from religious authority largely persists.

For the UPSC answer

Begin by separating revivalism from fundamentalism, communalism and everyday religiosity, since most weak answers collapse them. Explain the drivers in sociological terms — dislocation, insecurity, electoral mobilisation, media and diaspora resources — rather than as a moral failing. Illustrate across communities, not only one, using the Arya Samaj, Deoband and Tablighi Jamaat, Singh Sabha reform and the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign. Close with the theoretical stake: cite Berger on desecularisation and Casanova on deprivatisation, and Madan on the Indian secular state, to argue that religion has become more public without the world becoming less modern.

References & further reading

  1. Berger, P. (ed.) (1999). The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Eerdmans.
  2. Casanova, J. (1994). Public Religions in the Modern World. University of Chicago Press.
  3. Marty, M. and Appleby, R. S. (eds.) (1991). Fundamentalisms Observed. University of Chicago Press.
  4. Madan, T. N. (1997). Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India. Oxford University Press.
  5. van der Veer, P. (1994). Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. University of California Press.
  6. Jaffrelot, C. (1996). The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. Columbia University Press.