Steve Bruce explores Scotland's transformation from the largely devout Presbyterian country of 1900, with the church as a major social force, to the diverse, more secular society of today, when less ...than 10 per cent of Scots attend church. He bases his study on a career's worth of historical, ethnographic and statistical research, to provide both a coherent description of Scotland's current religious complexion and a considered explanation of the forces that shaped it. Scottish Gods is both a fascinating summary of over a century of religious and cultural change, and a searing analysis of the state of religion in Scotland today by one of our leading social historians.
In the 1960s, it was taken for granted that modernization eroded religion. In the 1980s, this consensus was challenged by the rational choice, supply-side, or market model proposed by Rodney Stark ...and associates. In particular, they argued that the UK was hardly less religious then than it had been in 1880. Clive Field’s compendium of statistical data allows us to test Stark’s approach to the religiosity of the UK. We follow this with data on Europe and the USA. While we may still argue over some of the precise levers, there is now so much evidence in favor of the secularization approach that we regard it as vindicated.
This paper critically examines the notion of ‘multiple religious belonging’ (MRB). Through an analysis of a recent study by Joantine Berghuijs, it argues that MRB is ill-defined and exaggerates the ...extent of popular religiosity. If MRB is at all common, then the de-legitimating effect of religious pluralism (which is well-supported by the evidence) is challenged. This paper suggests that such a challenge is unwarranted by Berghuijs’s evidence and concludes with an elaboration of the various and very different things that might be encompassed by MRB.
The argument that modernization and secularization are linked in some non-accidental and nontautological
manner is sometimes rebutted with the assertion that the statistical evidence of decline in
...indices of interest in religion in the UK and elsewhere in the modern world is a mere trend that may be
changed by a revival of interest in religion. This essay considers the obstacles to such a revival. It makes the
case that ‘late secularization’ differs in three important ways from ‘early secularization’. The shared stock
of religious knowledge is small, the public reputation of religion is poor, and religion is carried primarily by
populations that are unusual in being drawn either from a narrow demographic or from immigrant peoples.
Given the role of affective social bonds in religious conversion, the alien nature of the carriers of religion
makes religious revival extremely unlikely.
This paper argues that the modern secularization thesis is in the first place an explanation of the past of European societies and their colonial offshoots and that, contra its critics, it was not ...intended as a universal template. Such momentous historical changes cannot simply be repeated if only because, while the secularization of Europe was unprecedented, largely secular societies, that can attract emulation or rejection, now exist. What we might expect, and why, is detailed before the case of Brazil is considered. The paper concludes that, while it is too early to be certain that Brazilian changes fit the expectation that modernization weakens religion, we can probably conclude that they are minimally consistent with that expectation.
Secularization remains one of the most hotly debated topics in the study of religion in modern societies. Steve Bruce elaborates the sociological secularization paradigm and defends it against a wide ...variety of recent attempts at rebuttal and refutation.
At the start of the twentieth century the religious differed from the religiously indifferent largely in being religious. Now they differ in a number of other social and demographic characteristics ...that reduce interaction between the two populations further than simple numbers would require. That some of the main carriers of religion are immigrants or adherents of recently imported faiths reinforces the sense that religion is what other people do. In the context of the stock of religious knowledge being depleted and religion‐taken‐too‐seriously being unpopular, the narrow demographic base of the religious makes conversion unlikely and thus makes the reversal of secularization unlikely.
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