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For most of the twentieth century the educated consensus was clear: religion was a relic of a pre-modern age, and modernisation would steadily, inevitably, dissolve it. The twenty-first century has refused to cooperate. Religion is resurgent across much of the globe; the most populous and fastest-growing societies are intensely religious; faith has returned to the centre of geopolitics; and even in the secularising West, belief and spirituality persist in forms the old theory never anticipated. This lesson examines the great argument over the future of religion — the classical secularisation thesis against the counter-thesis of desecularisation and religious resurgence — and the phenomena that make the debate live: the persistence of belief in Britain (Davie's "believing without belonging" and vicarious religion), the rise of fundamentalism as a distinctively modern reaction, the growth of spirituality outside institutions, the post-secular reframing of religion's public role, and the divergent global trends. The recurring evaluative judgement candidates must reach is whether secularisation is a universal law of modernity, a merely regional and reversible phenomenon, or — most plausibly — neither simple decline nor simple revival but a transformation in how religion is held and lived.
Key term: Secularisation thesis — the theory that modernisation (science, rationalisation, industrialisation, pluralism) necessarily causes the decline of religion's social significance, belief and practice; the dominant twentieth-century sociological expectation, now sharply contested.
Key term: Desecularisation — the counter-claim (Berger) that, far from disappearing, religion has revived as a powerful global force, so that the secularisation thesis was an over-generalisation from the atypical case of Western Europe.
The classical secularisation thesis held that modernity is intrinsically corrosive of religion. Max Weber spoke of the "disenchantment" (Entzauberung) of the world, as rational, scientific and bureaucratic ways of thinking drove out the magical and the sacred. Bryan Wilson (1966) defined secularisation as the process whereby "religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance," and Steve Bruce has become its leading contemporary defender, arguing that individualism, societal rationalisation, structural differentiation (specialised secular institutions — schools, hospitals, welfare, courts — taking over functions once performed by the church) and, crucially, pluralism combine to erode the plausibility of any single faith. On this account the empty pews of Western Europe are simply modernity working as predicted, and Bruce is content to predict that British Christianity will dwindle to a tiny remnant within a few generations.
It is important to disaggregate what "secularisation" can mean, because much of the dispute is really about which dimension is in view. The sociologist José Casanova (Public Religions in the Modern World, 1994) usefully distinguished three separate claims often bundled together: (1) the decline of religious belief and practice; (2) the privatisation of religion (its retreat from the public into the private sphere); and (3) differentiation (the separation of secular spheres such as the state, economy and science from religious institutions). Casanova accepted differentiation as a genuine and largely irreversible feature of modernity, but argued forcefully that the privatisation claim has been falsified by the "deprivatisation" of religion — its noisy return to public life and politics across the globe, from Solidarity in Poland to the American Religious Right to political Islam. This distinction is analytically powerful: it lets one concede that modernity differentiates society (point 3) while denying that it necessarily makes people less religious (point 1) or confines faith to private life (point 2) — and it explains how thoughtful observers can disagree so sharply, since they are often defending or attacking different theses under the one word.
The dramatic intellectual event of recent decades is that one of the thesis's own architects publicly recanted. Peter Berger, who in The Sacred Canopy (1967) had given the thesis a classic statement, declared in The Desecularization of the World (1999) that "the world today, with some exceptions … is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever." The exception, he argued, is precisely Western Europe (and a thin global elite of Western-educated intellectuals); to generalise from this atypical case to the whole of humanity was a mistake. The United States — modern, wealthy, scientifically advanced — remained stubbornly religious; the Islamic world was experiencing a powerful revival; Pentecostal Christianity was exploding across the Global South. Far from declining, religion had become more publicly significant, not least in politics. This is the desecularisation counter-thesis, and the debate between Bruce and the Berger of 1999 frames the whole topic.
Key term: Disenchantment (Weber) — the historical process by which scientific rationalisation strips the world of magical, mysterious and sacred qualities, treating it instead as in principle fully calculable and explicable; a key mechanism of secularisation.
The twenty-first-century context that shapes all of this is globalisation — the intensifying interconnection of the world through trade, migration, media and technology — and its effect on religion is profoundly ambiguous, cutting both ways at once. On one side, globalisation has been a powerful vehicle for religion. Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, which barely existed in 1900 and now numbers in the hundreds of millions, has spread with astonishing speed from its American origins across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, carried by missionaries, migrants and electronic media; its experiential, healing-centred, demonstrative worship travels easily across cultures and flourishes precisely among the poor and insecure of the rapidly urbanising Global South. This shift is so large that scholars such as Philip Jenkins (The Next Christendom, 2002) speak of the centre of gravity of world Christianity moving decisively southward, so that the typical Christian of the twenty-first century is no longer a European but an African, Latin American or Asian — a development that simply inverts the secularisation narrative for most of the world's Christians. Islam sustains a global ummah through the hajj, transnational organisations and a worldwide diaspora; Hindu and Buddhist practices (yoga, mindfulness, meditation) have travelled into Western culture, often in secularised, commodified forms; and the internet lets co-religionists build transnational networks unimaginable a generation ago. Migration in particular has re-religionised secular Western cities, as believing diasporas plant vigorous new congregations — the "reverse mission" of African and Caribbean Pentecostals revitalising British Christianity being a striking example of the Global South now evangelising the North.
On the other side, globalisation is also a solvent of religious authority. It exposes once-insulated traditional communities to a relentless flow of competing worldviews, consumer culture and the liberal-secular values (individual autonomy, gender equality, LGBT+ rights) that often clash with conservative teaching. The mechanism is the one Berger had originally identified: pluralism. When every faith is visibly one option among many, jostling in the global marketplace of belief, the taken-for-granted certainty that sustains religious commitment is undermined, and all traditions are relativised. Globalisation thus simultaneously spreads religion and corrodes its plausibility — which is precisely why it can underwrite both the desecularisation of the Global South and the secularisation of the West, and why fundamentalism (a defensive reaction to exactly this relativising exposure) and SBNR spirituality (a consumerist sampling of the global religious supermarket) are both its characteristic products.
| Effect of globalisation | Tends to strengthen religion | Tends to weaken religion |
|---|---|---|
| Spread of ideas and movements | New converts; global Pentecostalism, the ummah | Exposure to rival worldviews relativises all faiths |
| Migration | Diasporas plant and revitalise congregations ("reverse mission") | Assimilation into a secular host culture erodes faith |
| Media and the internet | Transnational networks; digital outreach | Secularising content; the "spiritual supermarket" |
| Consumer culture | Religious markets, products and festivals | Materialism and choice corrode commitment and authority |
Between simple decline and simple revival lies the subtler British reality captured by Grace Davie. In Religion in Britain since 1945 (1994) she coined the phrase "believing without belonging" to describe a population that had largely stopped attending church while still, in large numbers, professing belief in God, an afterlife, or "something there." Institutional belonging was collapsing far faster than belief itself; the two had come apart. Davie later developed the complementary idea of vicarious religion — the way an active religious minority maintains the churches, rituals and festivals "on behalf of" a much larger population that does not attend but tacitly approves of their continued existence and turns to them at moments of crisis, national mourning or rite of passage (a baptism, a wedding, a funeral, a Remembrance Sunday, a state funeral, a cathedral vigil after a terrorist attack). The death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, with its profoundly Christian state liturgy watched by millions who never attend church, was a textbook instance: religion functioning vicariously, performed by the few and endorsed, at a distance, by the many. The implication is that secularisation in Britain is real but uneven and complex: it is institutional belonging, more than belief or cultural presence, that has eroded, and a population can be sociologically "secular" in its weekly habits while remaining culturally and residually Christian in its instincts and its rites of passage.
Key term: Vicarious religion (Davie) — the situation in which an active religious minority believes, practises and maintains the rituals "on behalf of" a much larger population that endorses their doing so and draws on them at moments of crisis and national ceremony, without itself attending; offered as a corrective to a simple reading of secularisation.
Key term: Believing without belonging (Davie) — the pattern, especially in Britain, in which people retain religious belief and identity while largely ceasing to attend or formally belong to religious institutions; cited against a simple reading of secularisation as the disappearance of belief.
Davie's thesis is contested. David Voas and Alasdair Crockett (2005), analysing British survey data, argued that both believing and belonging have declined together across the generations, so that "believing without belonging" overstates the persistence of belief; what looks like residual faith is, they suggest, a fading inheritance rather than a stable alternative to institutional religion. The exchange matters because it bears directly on the future: if Voas and Crockett are right, Britain is on a slow but genuine path to a thoroughly secular condition; if Davie is right, religion is mutating rather than vanishing. Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age (2007), reframes the whole question by arguing that the deepest secularisation is neither the decline of belief nor of practice but a change in the conditions of belief: faith has shifted from an unquestioned, taken-for-granted default to merely one option among many, contestable and contested — which is compatible with widespread continuing belief, but belief of a different, more fragile and reflexive kind.
Nothing embarrasses the simple secularisation thesis more than the global rise of fundamentalism. The word originated in early-twentieth-century American Protestantism, in a series of pamphlets, The Fundamentals (1910–15), that asserted the literal truth of the Bible against liberal theology and Darwinism; it is now applied, controversially, to assertive, anti-modernist movements across the religions. The crucial and counter-intuitive scholarly insight is that fundamentalism is not a survival of the pre-modern past but a distinctively modern reaction to modernity itself. Karen Armstrong, in The Battle for God (2000), argues that fundamentalisms arise when people experience modern secular culture as a mortal threat to their identity and values, and respond by retreating into a defensive, militant and idealised version of their tradition — a response that is itself shaped by the very modernity it opposes, using modern media, technology and political organisation. The massive Fundamentalism Project (1987–95) led by Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby at the University of Chicago compared fundamentalisms across the world's religions and identified recurring family traits: reaction against the marginalisation of religion; selective retrieval of doctrines and practices from the past; moral dualism (a sharp us-versus-them); absolutism and inerrancy; and a millennial or restorationist hope.
The examples span the traditions: Christian fundamentalism in the American Religious Right (Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, founded 1979, mobilising on abortion, school prayer and opposition to LGBT+ rights); Islamic revivalism from the Muslim Brotherhood (founded 1928) through the Iranian Revolution (1979) to the violent extremism of groups such as ISIS; Hindu nationalism (Hindutva, the RSS and the BJP) promoting India as an essentially Hindu nation; and ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Judaism resisting secular modernity. A recurring feature is the politicisation of religion — the use of democratic and even revolutionary politics to resist secularisation and reassert religious authority in the public sphere — which is itself one of the most striking refutations of the prediction that modernity would privatise and tame faith.
Evaluatively, fundamentalism powerfully demonstrates religion's continuing vitality and political force — exactly what the secularisation thesis denied — but the category must be handled with care. Critics argue the term is a Protestant-derived, often pejorative Western label that flattens very different movements and obscures their distinct contexts; Steve Bruce, while broadly defending secularisation, helpfully argues that fundamentalism arises specifically where rapid modernisation threatens a community's cultural and religious identity, so it is a product of social forces, not merely of theology. It is also essential not to conflate fundamentalism with violence, since most fundamentalists are concerned with personal piety, scriptural fidelity and communal boundary-keeping, not terror. The deepest point for this topic is that fundamentalism is evidence of secularisation as much as against it: it is a defensive reaction to the felt advance of the secular, and so presupposes the very process it resists — which is why a sophisticated answer treats it not as a knockdown refutation of secularisation but as proof that religion and modernity are locked in a continuing, dynamic struggle rather than a one-way decline.
Key term: Fundamentalism — assertive, anti-modernist religious movements marked by scriptural literalism/inerrancy, moral dualism and the wish to restore religion's public authority; understood by scholars (Armstrong; the Fundamentalism Project) not as a pre-modern survival but as a distinctively modern reaction against secular modernity.
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