ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the concept of modernity and its relationship with secularism and religion. Drawing on Castoriadis and Eisenstadt’s theories of social autonomy and modernity, it explores the historic course of societies towards secularism and modernity. It explores the creation of multiple modernities that stand apart from the program of modernization of the West. It additionally demonstrates how world religions have incorporated modernity within their structure to promote their own models of globalization as well as the way in which the postcolonial societies of the Global South entered modernity and further absorbed its elements for reshaping their own cultural identity. It thus reveals how contemporary modernized religions are able to provide an ideological base for the construction of imagined identities of the postcolonial societies in the Global South.
