Why are well educated middle class young people interested in old fashioned religion? Why do they actively pursue a religious practice and identity that differs from the common norm? (Appeal of the Gregorian chant)Religious option is attractive to many and reinforces the tendency of judging social life in moral terms.Habits of the heart by robert bellah, a famous American sociologist who looks at the rise of individualism in American society and the loss of a civil consciousness common in the past. Some of his ideas may apply to your thesis. (Society has become more individuated and sense of community has been lost)HABITS OF THE HEARTWhat is good is what one finds rewarding. If ones preferences change, so does the nature of the good. P.6His description of his reason for changing his life and his current happiness seem to come down mainly to a shift of his notions of what would make him happy.can be justified as idiosyncratic preference rather than as representing a larger sense of purpose in life. P.6With the freedom to define oneself anew in a plethora of identities has also come an attenuation of those common understandings that enable us to recognize the virtues of others. P.48In fact, the culture is deeply ambiguous. It represents both the easing of constraints and dogmatic prejudice about what others should be and an idealization of the coolly manipulative style of management. P. 48In our society, with its sharply divided spheres, it provides a way for a beleaguered individuals to develop techniques for coping with contradictory pressures of public and private life. P. 48most groups today embody and element of community as well as an element of lifestyle enclave. The distinction is more analytic than concrete. P. 74Thus even those who would most like to think of our society in organic and communitarian forms cannot avoid the lifestyle enclave as the effective social expression of our personal lives. P. 74Modern individualism seems to be producing a way of life that is neither individually nor socially viable, yet a return to traditional forms would be to return to intolerable discrimination and oppression. P. 144Much is said about the cultural diversity and pluralism of American life. But perhaps what divides us most is not that diversity, but the conflict between the monocultures of technical and bureaucratic rationality and the specificity of our concrete committments. P. 152But since the end of the nineteenth century, the American landscape has been forever changed by urbanization and industrialization. Though urban Americans still get involved in an astounding variety of voluntary association, the associational life of the modern metropolis does not generate the kinds of second languages of social responsibility and practices of commitment to the public good. P. 177The metropolitan world is one in which the demands of work, family, and community are sharply separated and often contradictory, a world of diverse, often hostile groups, interdependent in ways too complex for any individual to comprehend. P. 177Religious membership was no longer unified. Even in the smaller communities, it had become highly segmented.

Chant is discovered into a more secularized setting that hints the shift into the profane from the sacred (digital orality)