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SACRED AND SECULAR
Seminal thinkers of the nineteenth century – Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer,
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Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud – all predicted
that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant
with the emergence of industrial society. The belief that religion was dying
became the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the
twentieth century. During the last decade, however, the secularization thesis
has experienced the most sustained challenge in its long history.
The traditional secularization thesis needs updating. Religion has not dis-
appeared and is unlikely to do so. Nevertheless, the concept of secularization
captures an important part of what is going on. This book develops a theory of
secularization and existential security and compares it against survey evidence
from almost 80 societies 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.
Pippa Norris is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F.
Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Her work compares elec-
tions and public opinion, gender politics, and political communications. Com-
panion volumes by this author, also published by Cambridge University Press,
include A Virtuous Circle (2000), Digital Divide (2001), Democratic Phoenix (2002),
Rising Tide (2003, with Ronald Inglehart), and Electoral Engineering (2004).
Ronald Inglehart is professor of political science and program director at the
Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. His research deals
with changing belief systems and their impact on social and political change.
He helped found the Euro-Barometer Surveys and directs the World Values
Surveys. Related books include Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural,
Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies (1997), Rising Tide (2003, with Pippa
Norris), and Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (forthcoming, with
Christian Welzel).
Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion, and Politics
Editors
David C. Leege University of Notre Dame
Kenneth D. Wald University of Florida, Gainesville
The most enduring and illuminating bodies of late-nineteenth-century social
theory – by Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and others – emphasized the integration
of religion, polity, and economy through time and place. Once a staple of classic
social theory, however, religion gradually lost the interest of many social scientists
during the twentieth century. The recent emergence of phenomena such as Sol-
idarity in Poland; the dissolution of the Soviet empire; various South American,
Southern African, and South Asian liberation movements; the Christian Right in
the United States; and Al-Qaeda have reawakened scholarly interest in religiously
based political conflict. At the same time, fundamental questions are once again
being asked about the role of religion in stable political regimes, public policies,
and constitutional orders. The series Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Reli-
gion, and Politics will produce volumes that study religion and politics by drawing
on classic social theory and more recent social scientific research traditions. Books
in the series offer theoretically grounded, comparative, empirical studies that raise
“big” questions about a timely subject that has long engaged the best minds in social
science.