In the almost half-century since Bryan Wilson published Religion in Secular Society, the secularisation paradigm has gone from take-for-granted orthodoxy to passé intellectual dead-end. It is now ...common to talk of post-secular Europe and de-secularisation. This article presents a very large body of data to demonstrate that despite the change in intellectual fashion, secularisation continues apace in Britain. Religion has become more contentious; it has not become more popular.
Fifty years after its publication, Bryan Wilson's 'Religion in Secular Society' (1966) remains a seminal work. It is one of the clearest articulations of the secularisation thesis: the claim that ...modernisation brings with it fundamental changes in the nature and status of religion. Steve Bruce updates Wilson's work with a summary of common criticisms and a review of changes in the nature and status of religion in the UK and USA since 1966.
The author uses a range of contentious assertions about contemporary religion and spirituality to show the limits on what can be extrapolated from ethnographic work and to argue for the centrality of ...empirical positivistic social science to claims about the popularity and social significance of religious and spiritual phenomena.
Matthew Wood’s recent article in the European Journal of Sociology is a useful addition to the secularization debate. There is value in studying ways in which religious organizations now attempt to ...re-enter the public arena and the secularizing consequences of such activity. However, there is no justification for framing that case as an indictment of either Bryan R. Wilson’s original 1966 presentation of the modern sociological secularization theory or the subsequent work of others in the same paradigm. This rejoinder explains Wilson’s apparent assuming rather than demonstrating the declining influence of religious institutions and concludes that his work can be augmented without asserting that he had missed something which fundamentally alters the secularization approach to religious change.
As a contribution to our understanding of secularization in Britain, this paper examines the role of religious patronage. It illustrates nineteenth and early twentieth century support for the ...churches from rural landowners and major industrial employers, considers its benefits, and explains its rapid disappearance. The paper argues that the end of the expectation that high status individuals and major employers would actively promote organized religion is both significant evidence of secularization and a cause of further decline.
This article examines the evidence that largely secular societies are experiencing a process of re-sacralisation. It first dismisses four diversions: taking examples from societies that have never ...been secular; exaggerating the demographics and religiosity of migrant minorities; missing the fact that religious institutions can only hope to have public influence if they can make a secular case for their preferences; and mistaking notoriety for popularity. It then shows that adherence to Christianity continues to decline apace as does specifically Christian belief. None of the candidates for replacement-non-Christian religions, new religious movements and alternative spirituality-has come at all close to filling the gap left by the Christian churches. Furthermore there is no evidence that governments wish to reverse the standard accommodation to religious diversity and secularity: anything in private; little or nothing in the public sphere. There is no evidence that the population at large wishes it were otherwise. On the contrary. As religion has become more controversial, religion enjoying public influence has, like religion itself, become less, not more popular. Finally, the article argues that the current scarcity of religious people, and the unusual characteristics of those who remain religious, make it ever less likely that there will be a religious revival. So that sufficient detail can be presented, the argument concentrates on the United Kingdom.
Este artigo defende que a tese moderna da secularização é, acima de tudo, uma explicação do passado das sociedades europeias e de seus territórios coloniais e que, contrariamente a seus críticos, não ...foi concebida como um modelo universal. Tais mudanças históricas relevantes não podem ser simplesmente repetidas porque, embora a secularização da Europa não tenha tido precedentes, atualmente existem sociedades amplamente seculares que podem atrair emulação ou rejeição. O que se pode esperar e por quê, é detalhado antes de se considerar o caso brasileiro. O artigo conclui que, não obstante seja cedo para garantir que as mutações brasileiras se encaixam na expetativa de que a modernização enfraquece a religião, provavelmente podemos concluir que são minimamente consistentes com essa expetativa.
After addressing the post-modern argument that defining religion is impossible, bad or both, the case is made that functional definitions of religion are generally not definitions but assertions ...about the consequences of religion substantively defined. A substantive definition of religion is proposed. The relationship between ordinary and sociological language is discussed. A review of recent debates in the sociology of religion makes the point that our arguments rarely concern the definition of religion; they are much more often about the practical identification and measurement of the features of the social phenomenon which we want to study and those problems are not peculiar to the sociology of religion.
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