Turning 'Society' into 'Religion': A Processing Approach

Actors become what they are in society, through processing clues from the surrounding environment. Hence, we need to explicate how this processing is done. That is the basic idea behind the processing approach. For example, after 1800, the Catholic Church rebuilt itself anew as a centralized church organization by taking up and processing the organizational opportunities that modern society was offering.
The first part of this article analyzes the religious agents, the creative actors who process their environment. The second and main part deals with the 'processing processes' that agents are performing. It compares processing with kindred concepts such as inculturation, appropriation, translation, and process. The process of processing is subdivided into six analytical steps. Strategies to detect the main substantial processing processes of an agent in a society - in this case, the Catholic Church in modern society - are discussed. In the third part, some broader consequences for theorizing history are drawn, such as the inescapability of the present and the anarchic character of history.