This is one of a series of articles which document religious change in Britain by updating the data contained in classic British sociological and anthropological community studies,. The statistical ...and impressionistic observations on religion in Banbury in 1950 and 1967 in Margaret Stacey's Tradition and Change are augmented with data collected in 2010. The article identifies significant problems in interpreting the original Banbury data and offers some general observations on the advantages and difficulties of piggy-backing on previous research.
In a recent issue of Critical Research on Religion, Mary Jo Neitz presents a four-cell Locations Matrix created by the two dimensions of the status of the religion studied, as dominant and marginal, ...and position of the researchers vis-à-vis that religion, as insiders or outsiders. Her subsequent arguments about the influence of researcher standpoint perhaps work in the US setting where religion remains popular. This paper points out difficulties in applying the Matrix in the UK setting where religion is unpopular and uses the patently disinterested nature of much of the research conducted by professional sociologists of religion to retrieve the possibility of objective and value-neutral research.
Dating the decline of Christianity in Britain has a vital bearing on its explanation. Recent work by social historians has challenged the sociological view that secularization is due to long-term ...diffuse social processes by asserting that the churches remained stable and popular until the late 1950s and that the causes of decline lie in the social and cultural changes associated with the 1960s. We challenge this interpretation of the evidence. We also note that much of the decline of the churches is explained not by adult defection but by a failure to keep children in the faith. Given the importance of parental homogamy for the successful transmission of religious identity, the causes of decline in one generation may well lie in the experiences of the previous generation. We focus on the disruptive effects of the 1939-45 war on family formation and use survey data to argue for a staged model of decline that is compatible with the conventional gradual view of secularization.
Evidence that there are small areas of stability and growth in UK church life has been presented as refutation of the secularization paradigm. This would only be valid if the secularization paradigm ...required that decline be universal, even, and rapid. This essay argues the secularization requires none of these things, clarifies the ambiguity in phrases such as 'church growth,' and demonstrates that local growth falls far short of compensating for much larger areas of decline. It also considers what sorts of changes would be required for any reversal of secularization in the United Kingdom and demonstrates their unlikelihood.
A 2014 sociology of religion conference invitation asserted that it is 'A long-standing assumption in the sociology of religion ... that there is a correlation between religious resurgence and ...intense moments of political, economic and socio-cultural crisis.' We test this proposition against various post-1900 British or uk church adherence data and find no evidence to support the claim. On the contrary, the trajectories of decline are remarkably smooth. We suggest that such smoothness better supports the sociological view of secularization as a long-run process with amorphous and deep causes than it supports the claim that religious change is a response to specific events.
The contrast between institutional and popular (or folk) religion is used by some social historians to rebut the sociological secularisation thesis. This article uses a re-examination of religion in ...the north Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes to consider how some elements of popular religion change with the decline of institutional religion. It concludes by suggesting that, far from enduring despite the decline of the Christian Churches, popular religion is doubly vulnerable to secularisation: it is directly eroded by secularising forces and it is indirectly undermined by the decline of the Churches. Without an institutional core, a popular religious culture cannot be sustained.
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