Part I. Understanding Secularization: 1. The secularization debate 2. Measuring secularization 3. Comparing secularization worldwide Part II. Case Studies of Religion and Politics: 4. The puzzle of secularization in the United States and Western Europe 5. A religious revival in post-communist Europe? 6. Religion and politics in the Muslim world Part III. The Consequences of Secularization: 7. Religion, the Protestant ethic, and moral values 8. Religious organizations and social capital 9. Religious parties and electoral behavior Part IV. Conclusions: 10. Secularization and its consequences 11. Re-examining the theory of existential security 12. Re-examining evidence for the security thesis.

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Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide

Sacred and Secular is essential reading for anyone interested in comparative
religion, sociology, public opinion, political behavior, political development,
social psychology, international relations, and cultural change.

Sacred and Secular

For modern social theory, as well as for many ordinary people, religious identities have been a problem. Just what does it really mean to claim a Jewish or Christian identity? To think of oneself as Presbyterian or Baptist? What do we know of that new church down the road that simply calls itself “Fellowship Church”? And do any of those things have anything to do with how we might expect someone to perform their duties as a citizen or a worker? As modern people have loosened their ties to the families and places that (perhaps) formerly enveloped them in a cocoon of faith (or at least surrounded them with a predictable round of religious activity), they can choose how and whether to be religious, including choosing how central religion will be in their lives. Religious practices and affiliations change over a complicated lifetime, and the array of religious groups in a voluntary society shifts in equally complex ways. If religious identity ever was a given, it certainly is no longer. In his influential work on religion and personal autonomy, Philip Hammond posits that, given the mobility and complexity of the modern situation, individual religious identities are of various sorts – either ascribed (collectivity-based) or achieved (individual) and either primary (a core or “master” role) or secondary (Hammond 1988). In the premodern situation, religion was presumably collective and core. In the modern situation, taking up a collective, core religious identity is a matter of (exceptional) choice, not determinism.

Handbook of the Sociology of Religion: Religious Identities and Religious Institutions

Changes in U.S. immigration laws in the past four decades have had far-reaching consequences for American religion. Even though the majority of the new immigrants are Christian (Warner and Wittner 1998; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000b), the practices, symbols, languages, sounds, and smells that accompany the ethnically and racially diverse forms of practicing Christianity, brought by immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, India, Africa, and elsewhere challenge the various European practices of Christianity that have predominated in the United States since its founding. As Maffy-Kipp (1997) argues, rather than immigrants “de-Christianizing” religion in America, they have, in fact, “de-Europeanized” American Christianity. In addition, the new immigrants have brought religious traditions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Vodou, and Rastafarianism, that were unfamiliar to Americans prior to the mid-1960s. Today many American neighborhoods are dotted with temples, mosques, shrines, storefront churches, Christian churches with foreign names, guadwaras, and botannicas. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT The “new immigrants” refer to those who entered the United States after the passage of the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965. The abolition of the country-of-origin quotas established in 1924, and the dramatic increase in immigration visas provided to people from Asia and Latin America, in particular, significantly altered the racial and ethnic backgrounds of immigrants. For example, the number of Asian immigrants living in the United States rose from about 150,000 in the 1950s to more than 2.7 million in the 1980s, while the number of European immigrants fell by more than one-third.

Religion and the new immigrants

Religion is a critical construct for understanding contemporary social life. It illuminates the everyday experiences and practices of many individuals; is a significant component of diverse institutional processes including politics, gender relations, and socioeconomic inequality; and plays a vital role in public culture and social change. This handbook showcases current research and thinking in the sociology of religion. The contributors, all active writers and researchers in the area, provide original chapters focusing on select aspects of their own engagement with the field. Aimed at students and scholars who want to know more about the sociology of religion, this handbook also provides a resource for sociologists in general by integrating broader questions of sociology (e.g., demography, ethnicity, life course, inequality, political sociology) into the analysis of religion. Broadly inclusive of traditional research topics (modernity, secularization, politics) as well as newer interests (feminism, spirituality, faith-based community action), this handbook illustrates the validity of diverse theoretical perspectives and research designs to understanding the multilayered nature of religion as a sociological phenomenon.

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Handbook of the sociology of religion

This article does not seek to argue for or against any aspect of the secularisation thesis. It argues that careful attention to the definition of terms, together with a division of existing arguments relating to the thesis into a “Broad Approach”; and a “Narrow Approach”; would greatly assist in the clarification and evaluation of arguments concerning the secularisation thesis. It argues further that it is vital for historical data to be correctly researched, handled and applied. The article concludes that there is a significant amount of confusion caused by the failure to define terms and apply historical data with care. This makes it difficult to make headway with the secularisation debate or to evaluate properly the alternative model of “Desacralisation”; (Stark & Iannaccone, 1994), so that theorists are often talking at cross purposes.

Sharon Hanson

Papers

The secularisation thesis: talking at cross purposes