David Martin
Religion is associated with empire and with resistance to empire. This encompasses the resistance of religion under the heel of a religious or secular oppressor all the way from Christian resistance in Europe to Islamic religious imperialism to Islamic resistance to European secular imperialism. In addition religion is either associated with, or resists, the Enlightenment(s), and copes with the rise of nationalism and the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Less than half a millennium ago Islam was more advanced than Christendom and once again advancing into Christendom, as far as Vienna. Over centuries the Ottoman Empire in Europe encountered what we would now call post-colonial resistance.
Between the seventeenth century and the twentieth the balance of power tipped the other way and European countries, some of which became explicitly secular or secularist, advanced into North Africa and the Middle East, and stimulated a post-colonial religious reaction. In the earlier centuries of this European counter-attack Christendom advanced into Iberia after nearly a millennium of Islamic imperial domination and then exported Catholic Christianity to Latin America, where it eventually stimulated another post-colonial reaction from 1820 on. In the nineteenth century Protestant England and Catholic (later secularist) France exported Christianity to Africa and Asia, stimulating a post-colonial reaction, above all in India and China.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century much of northern Europe accepted the Reformation, in three forms: one coextensive with the nation, another which created voluntary bodies separate from the state, and yet another creating radical sects and utopian communities. This fragmentation heralded modern pluralism, inside a state church, outside in voluntary denominations, radical sects, and utopian communities. A highly personal piety emerged in Protestant northern Europe, but only achieved critical institutional expansions in Britain, in two waves, the Puritan Revolution and the Evangelical Revival, establishing a pattern of state church faced by religious voluntary bodies. This was exported to Britain’s “first empire” in North America, where pluralism emerged without a state church, and then to its “second empire” in Canada, Australasia, and sub-Saharan Africa. In all these cases Protestantism worked in partial alliance with several moderate Enlightenments and also with nationalism.
In Catholic Europe the “Counter-Reformation” maintained a monopoly against fragmentation, resisted the Enlightenment, and even resisted nationalism, except where Catholicism was aligned with an oppressed national consciousness, as in Poland and Ireland. The struggle between the Enlightenment and Catholic Christianity, more particularly in France, was exported globally, often by the intelligentsia, to Belgium, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and Latin America. It was also exported to Turkey, and in the historicized form of Marxism to Russia and China, and then re-exported by Russia to eastern Europe post-1945. There it generated a “post-colonial” reaction, especially wherever Catholicism or Orthodoxy had historically been aligned with nationalism. The Enlightenment initially expanded with French, Austrian, Prussian, and Russian autocracy, but then with a French revolutionary and nationalist imperialism that sparked off German and Russian nationalism. These imperial expansions and post-colonial responses over half a millennium provide the essential background for Europe and North America today.
They also frame the Agrarian, Industrial and Post-Industrial Revolutions and associated migrations. The first migrations occurred over a whole millennium: successive “folk-wanderings” and invasions into the heart of Europe, some pagan and some Islamic. The movement then reversed. Islam retired towards the southern Mediterranean, towards the borders of Turkey, mainly by Russian pressure southward, but also Russian pressure eastward, till it sparked off post-colonial reactions in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Global migrations out of Europe occurred from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, propelled by a mixture of economic and political motives and the search by Protestant, Catholic and Jewish dissidents and refugees for “living room,” above all in North America. Over time the pressure for conformity shifted from religion to nation, race and political ideology: Jewish populations were under pressure up to and beyond the European holocaust; ethnically Muslim populations were expelled from the new nations of southeastern Europe; ethnically Christian populations were expelled from the new nations of Turkey, North Africa, and the Middle East. In Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere ethno-religious homogeneity was reinforced.
In the post-industrial period, as European fertility drastically declined, Europe ceased exporting labor and started to import it, often from ex-imperial territories: Caribbean, African (and eastern European) Christians, and North African, Turkish, Middle Eastern and Asian Muslims, as well as Hindus and Sikhs. Arab states did the same, so that proportions of Muslims in Europe and Christians in the Gulf edged to between 4% and 7%, and in parts of European cities, for example London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, Muslims edged towards 20%, generating political reactions all the way from Greece to the Netherlands. Emigrants to North America were mostly Christian, including those from the Middle East and Korea, though a sizable Indian middle-class diaspora also emerged. Hispanic migration and some West Indian and African migration substantially altered the character of the American “melting pot,” giving a boost to the Democratic Party and casting the Republicans in the role of a party with disproportionate white and Evangelical support.
During the Industrial Revolution there had been immense migrations to the Americas, and from the countryside to the city, which in Europe led to some de-Christianization and political radicalization, notably in areas of working-class concentration and heavy industry. In North America however, the separation of church and state and religious fragmentation stimulated different denominations to adapt to all kinds of status group, while European migrants to the city protected their identity through their original European churches. In the earlier phases of industrialization in both Europe and North America the churches reinvented themselves as social capital, but whereas in the pluralistic conditions of North America they continued to provide social capital, in Europe and (later) Canada, they faltered, and with the rise of a new secular professionalism they lost their functions in education, welfare, communications and media. Western Europe became passively secular with the churches playing the role of residual service stations and residual welfare associations, and as clergy became dissociated from both old elites and new professions the churches engaged in intermittent political critique. Moreover the moral and gender revolution and the cultural relativism that began in the elite in the 1890s, spread down the social scale in the interwar period until it took off in the 1960s with the empowerment of youth, new media and affluence. It affected western European far more than American Christianity. In the immediate aftermath of World War II there was a stabilization of religion that in America maintained itself up to the end of the cold war, whereas Europe was more ambivalent about the confrontation of a Christian America with atheistic communism.
That confrontation ended in 1989 through economic and religious factors and the impetus of glasnost and perestroika. The religious factor was integral to a “post-colonial” reaction in eastern Europe fueled by a historic ethno-religiosity, above all in Poland where a Polish Pope played a major role in association with Solidarity. There was a moment when from L’viv in the western Ukraine to Leipzig and Vilnius change emerged behind religious banners. Much depended on how religion was associated with nationality: positively in Poland, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia, the western Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, and Armenia, confusedly in Albania, Bulgaria, the DDR, and Hungary, negatively in Czech Lands, Slovenia, Estonia and Latvia, where religion often signified German dominance and imposed secularism succeeded.
Confidence in the churches declined as post-Soviet nations stabilized and clergy sought power and influence or argued over assets. In Russia itself some observers have discerned a religious revival filling the vacuum left by communism, though others point to enfeebled practice and a rather formal cultural identification associated with church–state collusion. Maybe Russia is a case of “collective religiosity”: embedded and diffuse folk practices received as a birthright inheritance. Collective religiosity extends beyond Russia to the whole Orthodox world and the Balkans generally. It contrasts with a more individualized and less embedded religion in the secularized plain of post-Protestant Northern Europe from Birmingham to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, and Tallinn.
The contrast between the collective religion of southeastern Europe and the more individualized religion of northwestern Europe (Jakelic 2010) is not so unlike the contrast between the American south and northeast. In the American south the difference is played out in school and courthouse and signals different approaches to religion and nation, religion and state, religious symbols in public space, and religious competition. In Europe the tussle over symbols was played out in the Lautsi case before the European Court of Human Rights concerning crosses in Italian classrooms in which Italy gathered support from Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and the Greek Orthodox Church. Catholic and Orthodox cities and mountain areas are inscribed with religious artifacts whereas in Protestant cultures the presence of religion is more discreet and private. The argument in the early 2000s over whether the European constitution should include an Invocatio Dei broadly pitted some Catholic countries, like Poland, against Protestant countries, and against secular countries, like France.
There are parallel differences, between the Protestant north of Holland, Germany, and Switzerland and the Catholic south. Historically these differences have given rise to culture wars: the late nineteenth-century Kulturkampf in Germany causing considerable migration to the United States; political parties championing the interests of Catholic areas, most notably the German Center Party and (later) the Christian Social Union of Bavaria. In the same way there is a contrast of religious tonality between Alpine areas, sometimes with pilgrimage sites, and the more lowland, urban and secular areas, for example in Austria, notably Vienna, and Swiss cities like Zurich and Basel. Recent evidence suggests that Catholic areas have moved in the Protestant and secular direction, a shift reflected in an informal ecumenism, but Catholic areas, even quite small ones within countries, like Latvia, continue to be more practicing than Protestant ones.
Differences between center and periphery have also diminished with the penetration of metropolitan media, and social and geographical mobility, and this has sometimes meant a shift from religious to linguistic/cultural criteria, as in Wales. The shift from religious criteria to cultural criteria occurs from Wales in the far west to Albania in the Balkans. Wales and Scotland, and their own northwestern peripheries, are less marked by differences of religious practice and tonality than they were, and the same is true of Flanders, Brittany, Jutland, and the Basque country in Spain. Separatist movements are active in, for example, the Basque country, Catalonia, and Scotland, but the religious component is muted and implicit.
There are also historic regional differences, such as the relatively religious and religiously mixed area of Alsace-Moselle, and Italy south of Ancona, at one time the heartland of Christina Democratic party support, and on the other the anticlerical traditions of the ex-papal regions of Emilia-Romagna, once the heartland of Italian communism. The most religious areas of Europe lie at its island peripheries, like Cyprus and Malta. Malta has only relatively recently (2011) legalized divorce whereas Italy did so in the 1970s. Ireland remains an area of relatively high practice, but the rise of secular professional elites, especially in the media, has challenged the dominance of the clergy and exposed unsavory practices to the point where practice and clergy recruitment have both fallen very rapidly. The scandal over paedophilia and associated cover-ups affected the Roman Catholic Church in Europe and North America alike, and weakened its moral authority.
Ireland legalized divorce in 1995 but not abortion. Ulster just about maintains its Protestant majority and remains the most practicing area of the United Kingdom. The “troubles” that afflicted Ulster have mostly disappeared with the removal of anti-Catholic practices and the Good Friday Agreement providing for power sharing, though the province is still marked by the effective separation of populations in many areas, in particular parts of Belfast. Spain went through a similar process to Ireland in the aftermath of the Fascist Franco regime. Spanish law has been liberalized with surprising speed: it legalized gay marriage in 2006 ahead of the United Kingdom. Portugal legalized same-sex marriage in 2010 joining Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
In Europe explicit homophobia is largely confined to the East and the Balkans, though it is also a problem for conservative Christians and for churches with large constituencies in the “global South.” In the United States same sex marriage was first legalized in parts of the relatively secular northeast and west coast, before being legalized on a national basis by a US Supreme Court decision in 2015. In Europe and the United States alike the proportion of those approving of same sex marriage rises in all demographic categories. The culture clashes which in the United States focus on issues like the family, abortion and homosexuality, due to its large Evangelical population and small Muslim migration, in Europe focus more on issues related to the growing Muslim presence. These include: the Salman Rushdie affair in Britain over his purportedly blasphemous, anti-Islamic novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), and the strong reaction to the suggestion that English law might take account of Sharia, the wearing of female headdress in France, the presence of minarets in Switzerland, the rise of anti-Muslim politics in the Netherlands, and the offense to Muslim self-respect provided by the Danish cartoons of the prophet.
The strongest sense of religious difference emerges in sizable countries like Croatia, Serbia, Poland and Romania, many of them located in “bloodlands” where successive incorporations in Poland or Ukraine, Russia or Austria, has brought about chronic conflict and expulsions of populations. Historically Ukraine was a Russian periphery. In the Soviet era religion was unusually resilient in Ukraine, especially in its western region. The suppressed Uniate Catholics of western Ukraine were prominent in the movement for national independence and for links with the West, whereas people in the more Russian-speaking and eastern part of Ukraine had a stronger association with the Moscow Orthodox patriarch and were more ready to see themselves as the Russian Near-Abroad. Church politics are aligned with national and regional politics, including the Orthodox interest in regional geopolitics, for example Russian interest in Serbia and Cyprus.
Each European country and each associated religious confession has constituencies in North America, some of them with spatial concentrations: French Catholic Quebec and Louisiana; Hispanic California, New Mexico and Florida; the Evangelical and Texan South; the Lutheran German and Scandinavian midwest; and the concentrations of Greeks and Ukrainians in Chicago and central Canada, of Poles in Chicago, and of Irish and Italian Catholics in the cities of the eastern seaboard, like Boston and New York. Quebec is a vast territory, with about 45% of the total Canadian population that was historically defined by French-speaking Catholicism, but has in recent years been defined by cultural and linguistic criteria. Broadly in the United States the most religious areas are found in the states of the center with the northeastern seaboard and the western states relatively secular: Vermont in the northeast and Oregon in the northwest have relatively low religious practice.
It seems agreed that in Europe there was a relative religious stability after World War II that lasted to the mid-1960s. From then on there has been constant decline in institutional religion, attributed by some in part to changing female roles (Brown 2000) and by others straightforwardly to an inability religiously to socialize a new generation. The same period has seen a rise in “spirituality,” though debate continues about how far spirituality compensates for the decline in institutional religion or indeed whether spirituality is all that distinct from institutional religion even when people describe themselves as “spiritual and not religious” (Woodhead and Catto 2012). The decline can be illustrated by selected figures from the secular countries of northwestern Europe: France with a long tradition of laïcité, Belgium with a similar laïque tradition in Francophone areas but with a Flemish-French speaking divide, and the Netherlands which was a practicing society up to the 1960s with religion bound up in quite distinct Protestant and Catholic “pillars.” The pillars weakened and secularization followed, beginning with the Liberal Protestants, then the Catholics and finally the Orthodox Protestants (or “Re-Reformed”). The speed of secularization in the Netherlands was only paralleled in Quebec, the only society in North America that replicates Europe.
The French data show that in 1952 four in five of the population identified as Catholics and this stayed stable until the early 1970s when it fell consistently, until in 2009 the proportion was under two in three. This compares with the drop in those self-identifying as Christian in the UK from seven to six in ten between the censuses of 2001 and 2011and in weekly church attendance from roughly 15% in 1952 to 6/7% in 2012. Mass attendance in France dropped from one in four in 1952 to one in seven in the late 1970s and to one in sixteen in the late 1980s with slight declines thereafter (IFOP 2009). The declines are towards no religion (28% in 2009), though Islam rose from 3% in 1987 to 5–6% two decades later. Among self-identified Catholics there was a skew towards the more elderly while among practicing Catholics there was a sharp skew towards the non-employed, females and the elderly. De-Christianization has not affected the geographical distribution of Catholics: strongest in the northeast and east on the German and Swiss borders, the west, and the Massif Central; weakest in the Paris basin and some south-central areas. Politically, non-practicing Catholics have been somewhat to the right of the population as a whole while among practicing Catholics nearly 40% have identified with the centrist UMP compared with 25% of Catholics as a whole. Catholics have been firmly of the center and center right with few either on the extreme left or the extreme right.
In Belgium around half the population identify themselves as Catholics with some 6% identifying themselves as Muslim, about a quarter of whom live in Brussels. A surprising 4% was claimed by Evangelical and charismatic Protestants. Traditionally Catholicism provided a marker of Flemish identity but mass attendance in Flanders more than halved between 1998 and 2009: from 12.7% to 5.4% while in the country as a whole it dropped from 11% to 5%. If one takes the longer view, Sunday mass attendance was 42.9% in 1967, with baptisms 93.6%, while by the early twentieth century mass attendance was 5% and baptisms something over half the population. Roughly half the Belgian population describe themselves as “religious” and rather less than half believe in God. In other words in both France and Belgium about half the population identifies with Catholicism, and one in twenty are practicing Catholics, skewed to the older age groups.
In the Netherlands religious identification and practice have declined sharply, though faith is often discussed, in particular how to integrate or live beside several diverse Muslim communities. Secular tendencies first emerged in northern Protestant areas and then in Amsterdam. Without animus and without regret people stopped going to church. The Catholic Church experienced a period of theological afflatus in the 1960s which soon faded into disillusion and disengagement: the Catholic proportion of the population dropped from 40% to 25% and mass attendance to a little over 1% each week. Of those under thirty five 70% have no religious affiliation. Muslims comprise about 6%, and it is hypothesized that like Christians they experience more lax and individualized religious practice in the younger generations, though the social solidarity of a minority and a worldwide Islamic revival in which educated youth return “to the sources” clearly counter secularization in Muslim minority contexts, and not only in the Netherlands.
A study of belief in the Netherlands suggests that people still have conceptions related to religious worldviews but increasingly individualized (De Graaf and Te rotenhuis 2008). The Dutch are religious consumers. Some one in four retains belief in God and one in three professes belief in “a higher power.” There is a growing category of the “spiritually unaffiliated,” in particular among well-educated urban dwellers. Such people conceive of a transcendent dimension and seek a harmonious relation to the environment. Orthodox belief and belief in the supernatural have declined in tandem but the former has declined somewhat more than the latter. The same study throws doubt on the Inglehart/Norris thesis (2004) about the negative effect on religion of greater existential security. The decline of welfare exacerbated insecurity but secularization continued.
This overview of three highly secular societies focuses on different aspects. A final example, Lithuania, concentrates on history and culture to show how they assisted or retarded communist indoctrination. Among the three Baltic countries that were for some decades absorbed in the Soviet Union (and today retain Russian minorities), Estonia ranks with the Czech Republic and the former DDR as the most secular country in Europe. In Estonia, Latvia and the Czech Republic religion is associated with German-speaking domination. In Estonia belief in God is confined to one in six. The traditionally dominant Lutheran Church affects roughly the same proportion and is even less vigorous than the Orthodox Church among the Russian minority. There was no overlap between nationalism and religion, whereas in Lithuania, as in Poland, they almost coincide. The Roman Catholic Church took the lead in Lithuanian resistance under the Soviets and was singled out for persecution. In Lithuania 80% adhere to Catholicism. One in two believes in God, with one in three believing in a higher power and only one in twelve without belief. About one-third of the population claims to attend church on religious holy days and another third at least once a month. Pilgrimages to holy sites are also popular, and crosses in public space are cherished as symbols of faith and nation, and protected as “non-material heritage.” The massive difference between Estonia and Lithuania is not explained by differences in existential security following the Inglehart/Norris hypothesis, any more than is the difference between East Germany and either “West” Germany or Poland. The difference is historic and cultural and the history begins with the late fourteenth century forcible conversion of Lithuania to Catholicism. That is why some Lithuanians embrace paganism or nature religion as their own authentic religion. This trend also appears in Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and Greece, and is analogous to North and South American interest in Native American spirituality.
When Russian pressure tried to replace Polish Catholic influence with Russian Orthodoxy it simultaneously stimulated Lithuanian self-consciousness and Catholicism. Discrimination against Lithuanian Catholics in secular employment stimulated the recruitment of talented priests from peasant families who challenged the growing influence of secular nationalism in the intelligentsia and promoted Catholic social justice and educational programs to rival the influence of socialism. These Catholic initiatives carried over into the new era of independence beginning in 1918 and Lithuanian Catholicism was further reinforced by resentment against the territorial claims of the new nation-state of Poland and ethnic hostility within Vilnius. Until 1926 political life was dominated by the Catholic Democratic Party: ethnic German Lutherans were tolerated and even the large Jewish community of 7% which made up 45% of the population of Vilnius. However, the new left wing government elected in 1926, though initially well disposed to the church, also sought to control it and in the 1930s treated the Christian Democratic Party as an arm of Catholicism. It therefore tried to reduce Catholic influence in education and offered support to minorities, including the Orthodox. Matters changed dramatically when Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940: clergy became targets of repression so that the German occupation that followed was experienced as temporary relief in spite of considerable tension. With the Soviet conquest in 1944 repression returned with a focus on atheist propaganda defining religion as an outmoded social formation, as well as on the control and suppression of the clergy and the creation of loyal priests. The church developed a fortress mentality it still retains, though gradually believers began to agitate for their human rights and a religious revival emerged under a conservative surface associated with a new Catholic intelligentsia which tried to combat increasing religious illiteracy and indifference and created an underground church with some social authority.
With independence in 1990 the church remained quite marginal. It was suspected by the reformed communists who gained power in 1992, and the prestige gained earlier fairly soon evaporated. People complained about the political ambitions of the church particularly when a right-of-center government was elected in 2008 with a socially conservative agenda and a strong Christian Democrat component. Especially among an urban middle class open to changes and responsive to the new media, particularly attitudes to the family and “deviant” minorities, the church is an ambiguous presence. The borders of the religious “field” lack definition and the church is a complacent monopoly facing quite modest religious competition; the small pagan movement, a mild interest in eastern religions and a vigorous neo-Pentecostal Word of Faith church. It remains a fact of history and the Christ’s Resurrection Church built in the inter-war period serves to memorialize nationhood and political independence (Alisauškiene and Schroeder 2012).This cameo evokes a historical period where the Catholic Church in Europe, especially in France, Belgium, Germany and Ireland, underwent a late nineteenth-century revival, mobilizing against liberalism and competing with the secular intelligentsia as the authentic voice of nations. Though it allied itself to conservative regimes before embracing Christian democracy post-1945, it also began to embrace issues of social justice. It suffered under both the Nazis and the Communists, and in recent years has become a rather ambiguous and conservative presence.
In the Evangelical world, broadly understood, there have been major changes over recent decades both in Europe and North America. Word of Faith churches such as one finds in Sweden, Lithuania and Hungary are just minor manifestations of a wider charismatic movement that affects the mainstream churches as well. In Britain, for example, there is a lively charismatic and Evangelical presence both within and outside the established bodies, and (as in the rest of Europe) these are very active among the Christian migrants from Africa and elsewhere. Pentecostalism lacks the impact it has in the two thirds world but has established a presence at the margins: a mega-church in Kiev for example, churches in southern Italy, Sicily, and Romania, and among the Gypsies of western and eastern Europe.
If we take European religion as a whole, religion is strongest in the south and east: the most religious countries are in order: Malta, Romania, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Croatia, Slovakia, Spain, and Lithuania. At the secular end there is a concentration towards the north and west: the Czech Republic, Sweden, Estonia, France, Denmark, Slovenia and Finland. Clearly the most secular area includes the whole of Scandinavia, the UK, and the countries of the northwest seaboard. The secular islands in Eastern Europe are explicable historically in terms of a negative relation between religion and nationality. Secular Slovenia and Bulgaria are not “existentially secure” or religious Poland and Romania “existentially insecure.” Nor are the differences between Spain and a more practicing Italy due to differences in security. Three in four Europeans identify themselves as Christian, one in two claims to believe in God, though that is declining and also lower in the younger age cohorts; and perhaps 15% are present in church on any given Sunday.
In the United States the proportion of those identifying themselves as Christian is roughly the same as in Europe, though the proportion has declined in both cases, but in the United States reported regular attendance is more than twice as high and 90% believe in God. The proportion of Catholics to Protestants is roughly reversed, though the historic Protestant dominance is declining with Catholic and non-Christian migration. Religious switching is very frequent and works to the disadvantage of Catholics, including migrants. The numbers of people with “no religion” have risen to between 15% and 20% (Pew Forum 2012). “Nones” are concentrated among young adults though analysis identifies them as non-attached rather than irreligious. The stigma attached to non-affiliation has weakened, and there is probably some response to “New Atheist” militancy among the large minority of them identifying as agnostic or atheist. Yet most “nones” believe in God and many pray and describe themselves as “spiritual.” (American belief has been described by sociologist Christian Smith as “moralistic therapeutic deism.”) White Evangelicals are strongly inclined to the Republican Party, whereas Catholics now split evenly, perhaps reflecting increasing numbers of Hispanic Catholic and their identification with the Democratic Party. Black Protestants strongly identify with the Democrats, as do Liberal Protestants and secular Americans.
In Canada three in four identify themselves as Christian, though migration has increased diversity, as it has in the United States. Regular attendance is lower than in the United States at perhaps 15–20%, and the proportion of Evangelicals is lower, as is polarization over religion. The middle states mirror the conservative religiosity of the American midwest, while British Columbia mirrors the slacker religiosity of the western US seaboard, with one in three unaffiliated. Overall one may say that the contrast between North America and western Europe remains evident, that Canada hovers between the American and the European model and that Eastern Europe retains a collectivist form of embedded religion contrasted with the passive and individualized secularity of northwestern Europe.
Survey research continues apace (for example David Voas in the Religion in Numbers website, and the World Values Survey), but it needs to be embedded in historical/theoretical debates, for otherwise one misreads cultural meanings. Peter Berger was the pioneer of sensitive cultural readings in tandem with metrics, in particular the role of religion as a sacred social canopy, the emergence of the “homeless mind” and the secularizing effects of pluralism. Later he changed his mind about these effects in favor of de-secularization in the world at large, and European “exceptionalism.” David Martin initiated the critique of secularization in 1965. He also developed the first general theory of secularization, by summarizing broad empirical trends and their inflection by contrasting histories such as the difference between England and France with respect to the role of voluntary religious bodies in averting revolution and outright conflict over religion (1969; 1978). Some of the crucial background work was provided by the empirical studies of Gabriel LeBras (1955; 1956) and Fernand Boulard (1960) in France, and by Talcott Parsons on Christianity and social differentiation (1968). Martin’s work was taken forward by Grace Davie in a series of major interventions (2000, 2002), some of which related to Daniele Hervieu-Léger on religion and memory (1993). Bryan Wilson elaborated the standard model of secularization (1966). His work has been taken forward by Steve Bruce 1996) who has also attacked the critique of secularization theory by Rodney Stark and his associates (Stark et al. 1987; Bruce 1999. Problems with the secularization thesis were raised in Philip Hammond’s edited volume The Sacred in a Secular Age (1985), and again by José Casanova (1994). Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2004) have restated it in comparative research emphasizing the role of existential security in dampening religious fervor.
Key debates regarding religion in the public arena and its “privatization” have centered on José Casanova’s reassertion of the public role of religion (1994) and on Jürgen Habermas’s interest in a “postsecular” negotiation of the public role of religion (Calhoun et al. 2013). These debates can be set in the context of the work of Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (2007), reviewing the changes of the last half millennium towards “an immanent frame,” of Robert Bellah tracing religious evolution over millennia (Bellah 2011) as well as the contemporary moral mentality of the United States (Bellah et al.1986), of Robert Wuthnow on the resilience of American religion and its political role (Wuthnow, 1988) and of Robert Putnam on Bowling Alone (2000) – the erosion of religion as social capital. In Europe major analyses of the political role of religion are to be found in the work of José Casanova (1994), Arend Liphart (1999), Steve Bruce (2003), John Madeley (2003), and Stein Rokkan (1982, 1983, 1999). There have been summaries of the field by Dobbelaere (1981), Lechner (1991), Warner (1993), Keenan (2002), and Goldstein (2009), and overviews by Roberto Cipriani (2000), Christian Smith (2003), and Martin Riesebrod (2010).
Major disagreements continue over the role of the Protestant Ethic and the Reformation(s) (Fernandez-Armesto and Wilson 1996), the Enlightenment (Gay 1966; 1969; Clark 1994; Sorkin 2008), early modern religion (Laslett 1965; Thomas 1971; Duffy 1992; Collinson 2003; MacCulloch 2003), the Industrial Revolution and thereafter (MacLeod 2000; Blaschke 2002), religion in Britain as the first industrial nation (Gilbert 1976; Brown 2001; Green, 2012; Woodhead and Catto 2012), and religion in America as the first new nation (Lipset 1963; Marty 1970; Butler 1990; Bloom 1992; Noll 1992; Hempton 2005). Jonathan Clark has elaborated an historical critique of secularization (Clark 2012). Key concepts are civil religion (Hammond 1985), culture wars, spirituality, “new religious movements” and cults (Barker 1984), along with the issue of “European exceptionalism” and “believing without belonging,” the destabilization of the binary concept of religious-secular (Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and Van Antwerpen 2011), the watershed of the 1960s (MacLeod 2007), fundamentalism (Marty and Appleby 1991; Bruce 2008), and charismatic/pentecostal Christianity (Martin 2002; Hefner 2013).