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This chapter pursues comparative investigation of the ways the study's two focal traditions have undergone processes of evolution specific to the southern Caribbean, such as the parallel convergence of structural form, especially with the subaltern privatization of trance performance and related devotional practice; comparable dynamics of pantheonization and syncretic amalgamation; resonant heterodox marginalization and sociocultural stratification; congruent patterns of transracial recruitment; and progressively therapeutic reorientation. It develops the concepts of “structural convergence” and “subaltern liberalization” in order to account for the complex sociocultural processes undergone by Shango and Shakti Puja in their histories of colonial and postcolonial transculturation.

This chapter is divided into the following sections: the prestige of science, attacks on ‘truth’, toleration and truth, and the public sphere. There are many pressures for the complete privatization of religion. In examining the main currents in contemporary thought challenging the public recognition, an obvious one is a respect for science and scientists as the sole source of established knowledge. The second section shows the attack on the universal rationality of science. It illustrates the growing dissatisfaction with the claims of science, and other over-arching grand narratives that sketch out what is universally true based on rational principles which hold everywhere. The third section argues that disagreement is the life-blood of science, and the bed-rock of democracy. The last section clarifies the terms ‘public’, and ‘private’ for religion and science.

The long-term effects of the Protestant Reformation on modernity, understood as an ongoing transformation of beliefs, ideas, behaviors, and institutions, have included the formation of powerful, sovereign liberal nation-states that protect individual freedom of religious (and irreligious) belief and practice. The liberal-progressive narrative of the Reformation’s influence on modernity, whether in a Protestant or secular form, emphasizes the Reformation’s discontinuity with the Middle Ages and its continuity with modern rationality, autonomy, and material prosperity. The revisionist-confessionalization narrative of the Reformation’s influence, more important in recent decades of scholarship, stresses ideological continuity with the Middle Ages and discontinuity with secular modernity. By combining aspects of both narrative and reintegrating the radical Reformation with the magisterial Reformation, we can see how the commitment to the principle of sola scriptura unintentionally sowed the seeds for the individualization and privatization of “religion,” within modern liberal states, as something separable from an eventually secularized society.

The conclusion underscores the impressive achievements of the Women of the Wall in their long struggle, of which arguably the most distinctive is leading the Israeli government and courts to make substantial changes in the prayer arrangements and physical reality at the Western Wall, the most sacred prayer site for Jews worldwide. It should be noted that when the WoW began their struggle (1988), the idea of establishing the egalitarian third plaza at the Western Wall, seemed as implausible as an outlandish science-fiction premise. However, the current fierce debate and split within the WoW regarding the “third plaza” proposal demonstrates, as is argued in this monograph, the need to abandon this solution, and the evenhanded model it reflects, in favor of the context-sensitive privatization model.