The Other Believers: Reflextions Concernig of the Muta and the Religious Market on an Esoteric Association in the Contemporary Chile

Abstract

The theory of secularization has presented a society drifted by the movements of modernization, with the presence of the religious phenomenon (RP) confined to the private sphere. Against its predictions, the research in the contemporary Chilean society, regarding the state and influence of the RP, has proven that far from disappearing, it has endured by means of a mutation mechanism shaping a new connection between individuals and the RP. This situation has generated a new scenario where individuals are consumers and the believers are the offers: the religious market.
In parallel, statistics demonstrate the existence of a group of individuals that do not declare their affiliation to any traditional religion, and thus have been classified under the category of “others.” Here, under the approach of the postmodern society theorizing, we correlated the religiosity of the individuals and concepts such as religious mutation, religious market, secularization, and religiosity à la carte, by analyzing an esoteric organization named Suddha Dharma Mandalam, present since 1927 in Santiago de Chile, which may well be labeled under the “others” label. This revision will try to find thecorrelation between the religiosity of the subject and some of the concepts foreshadowed above, such as mutation and religious market, secularization and religiosity on demand, through the view of some authors that have proposed the existence of a postmodern society.