Euphemism, Habitus, and the Production of Miracles: Why Won't God Die in Modernity?

In addition to "apologetics," are there any intrinsic mechanisms of religion that enable it to maintain the plausibility of gods under the challenge of secular reason? This article uses the production of miracles in Taiwan's folk religion as a case to undertake this discussion. A miracle involves the emergence of a particular interpretation of an event and the repression of other ones, and therefore it is about the social control of consciousness. This article considers miracles in the context of Durkheim's argument about "how god is conceived as true" and as a problem of how religion produces "misrecognition." It then uses Bourdieu's concepts of "field," "habitus," and "euphemism" to discuss how this "misrecognition" is produced. The discussion proceeds within a diachronic framework by taking into account the consequences of modernity. This article also considers the issue of individuals' predicaments under the modern circumstance of pluralism. The case examined provides significant understanding of how people cope with this situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]