Religion, Renewal and Choice

If secularisation theory claims that religion is declining, the renewal-and-choice perspective replies that religion is not dying but mutating. Its leading thinkers argue that the institutional, congregational, "belonging" side of religion is contracting, while belief, spirituality, and religious consumption are being reorganised around individual choice. Religion is becoming privatised, de-traditionalised, and pluralised — a matter of personal selection rather than inherited obligation. This lesson examines four positions: Grace Davie (believing without belonging; vicarious religion), Danièle Hervieu-Léger (cultural amnesia; spiritual shopping; pilgrims and converts), Stark and Bainbridge's religious market theory, and Heelas and Woodhead's spiritual-revolution thesis (the Kendal Project). David Lyon's postmodern Jesus in Disneyland completes the picture. The central evaluative axis is whether "choice" represents the vitality of religion or merely a softer, terminal phase of secularisation.

Key Definition: Religious renewal is the revitalisation or transformation of belief and practice into new forms rather than its simple disappearance. Religious choice is the late-modern condition in which individuals select their beliefs and practices from a plural market of options rather than inheriting them from tradition and community.

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Spec Mapping

This lesson addresses the AQA A-Level Sociology (7192) specification, examined in Paper 2 (7192/2): Topics in Sociology, Section B — Beliefs in Society. Within that topic it covers:

• The debate on the nature and extent of secularisation in a global context — specifically the counter-arguments that religion is being transformed rather than eroded.
• Religion in a global context, including the growth of religious choice, privatisation, and the spiritual marketplace.
• The relationship between religion and social change, since renewal theorists ask whether late-modern social change destroys religion or simply reshapes it.
• A bridge to religious organisations, movements, and members (the pilgrim/convert distinction maps onto NRMs and sects) and to the wider question of religiosity among different social groups (the holistic milieu is strongly gendered and classed).

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Synoptic Links

• Sociological theory. Renewal theory is shot through with debates between modernity and postmodernity: Lyon and (in part) Hervieu-Léger draw on postmodern ideas of de-traditionalisation and the collapse of metanarratives (Lyotard), while Bruce defends a modernist secularisation thesis. Stark and Bainbridge import rational-choice theory from economics.
• Research methods. The whole debate is a methodological argument about operationalising religiosity: does church attendance measure religion (Bruce) or only its institutional form (Davie)? The Kendal Project's mixed-method "snapshot" of one town raises questions of representativeness and validity; the British Social Attitudes survey illustrates longitudinal quantitative data.
• Stratification. The holistic milieu is disproportionately middle-class and female, so renewal links directly to the sociology of gender and class — Woodhead argues spirituality has migrated rather than died.
• Globalisation. Davie's "exceptional Europe" argument and the religious-market account both rest on global comparison (secular Europe vs religiously vibrant USA and Global South), connecting to debates on whether modernity universally secularises.

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Grace Davie: Believing Without Belonging and Vicarious Religion

Grace Davie (1994, 2007) mounted the most influential British challenge to secularisation. Her starting point is that the steep fall in church attendance does not prove a fall in belief. Survey evidence repeatedly shows that the proportion of Britons who describe themselves as believers, who pray, or who hold to some notion of God or "a higher power" is markedly higher than the proportion who attend services. Davie captured this gap in the phrase "believing without belonging": people retain private faith while detaching from institutional membership.

Vicarious Religion

In her later work Davie refined the idea into the concept of vicarious religion — religion performed by an active minority on behalf of a much larger majority who implicitly approve. The few who attend, maintain the buildings, and conduct the rituals act as a kind of public religious resource. The majority do not participate week-to-week, but they:

• expect churches to be available for the rites of passage — weddings, funerals, christenings;
• turn to religion at moments of national trauma or personal crisis (Davie cites the public mourning that gathers in cathedrals after disasters);
• want the church to speak on moral questions and to hold values "in trust" for society.

Religion, on this view, functions rather like a public utility: most people do not use it daily, but they want it maintained and resent its disappearance. Davie contrasts this European pattern with the market model of the USA, where religion is consumed actively and competitively. This Europe/USA contrast leads her to argue that Europe is the exceptional case, not the global template — secularisation is not the inevitable accompaniment of modernity but a peculiarly European trajectory.

Exam Tip: Distinguish Davie's two ideas precisely. "Believing without belonging" is a claim about individuals (private belief persists). "Vicarious religion" is a claim about a social relationship (the active few perform religion for the passive many). Conflating them loses the marks for conceptual discrimination.

Evaluation of Davie

Strengths:

• Davie explains a genuine, repeatedly observed empirical pattern: belief figures outrun attendance figures in British survey data.
• Vicarious religion captures the "just in case" attitude — the resilience of demand for rites of passage and the surge of religious behaviour in collective crises.
• The "exceptional Europe" thesis is a powerful corrective to the assumption that the secular West is the world's future.

Weaknesses:

• Bruce (2002, 2011) argues that belief detached from practice becomes vague and unstable: "believing without belonging" is not a durable form of religion but a way-station on the road to unbelief. Without institutional reinforcement, each generation inherits a thinner faith.
• Voas and Crockett (2005), analysing British Social Attitudes data, found that belief and belonging are declining together, not diverging — undermining Davie's claim that belief holds steady while belonging falls. They label the residue "fuzzy fidelity."
• Critics note that "belief in something" is so loosely operationalised that it may measure little more than cultural habit or politeness, not religion in any demanding sense.

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Danièle Hervieu-Léger: Cultural Amnesia, Spiritual Shopping, Pilgrims and Converts

Danièle Hervieu-Léger (2000) offers a memory-based account. Religion, she argues, is fundamentally a chain of memory — a tradition transmitted across generations that binds the living to the dead and to a shared past. What modern societies have lost is not the human capacity for religion but the mechanisms of transmission.

Cultural Amnesia

In the past, religion was passed on automatically: children were socialised into the faith of their parents within stable, geographically rooted communities, reinforced by school, neighbourhood, and extended family. Modernity has shattered this. Geographical and social mobility, the decline of the extended family, and the marginalisation of religious education have produced what Hervieu-Léger calls cultural amnesia — a break in the chain of memory. Young people are no longer reliably inducted into a religious tradition; religion becomes one option among many in a plural culture.

Spiritual Shopping, Pilgrims and Converts

Crucially, Hervieu-Léger does not conclude that religion vanishes. Instead, individualism transforms it. People become spiritual shoppers, assembling personal belief-packages from a wide menu of resources. She identifies two characteristic late-modern religious types:

1. Pilgrims follow an individual spiritual path, moving between sources — meditation, retreats, therapy, New Age practices, world faiths — in a personal quest for self-discovery and meaning. Theirs is a privatised, journey-shaped religiosity with no fixed institutional home.
2. Converts take the opposite route: they join strict, demanding communities — evangelical and Pentecostal churches, NRMs, fundamentalist groups — precisely because these offer the certainty, moral clarity, and belonging that the wider culture no longer supplies.

Both types are products of the same condition: where tradition no longer hands religion down, individuals must choose it, either by wandering (pilgrims) or by committing (converts).

Key Definition: A chain of memory is the inter-generational transmission of a religious tradition that links individuals to a community of believers extending into the past; cultural amnesia is the breaking of that chain in modern, mobile, individualised societies.

Evaluation of Hervieu-Léger

• Her framework elegantly explains both sides of contemporary data: the decline of inherited, congregational religion and the simultaneous growth of new spirituality and strict religious communities.
• The pilgrim/convert typology connects renewal theory directly to the study of NRMs and sects.
• However, like Lyon she risks treating very thin engagement (occasional dabbling in spirituality) as equivalent to religion.
• The cultural-amnesia thesis fits Western Europe but travels poorly to societies — much of the Global South, the USA, immigrant communities — where the chain of religious memory remains robust, a point reinforced by the religiosity of minority ethnic groups.

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Stark and Bainbridge: Religious Market Theory

Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge (1985) reject the secularisation thesis outright and replace it with religious market theory (also called rational-choice or supply-side theory). Drawing on the language of economics, they argue that religion does not decline; rather, the demand for religion is constant because human beings universally seek compensators — credible promises of rewards (eternal life, ultimate meaning, divine justice) that cannot be obtained in the here-and-now. What varies is supply.

Supply, Not Demand

The key claim is that secularisation theorists have mistaken a change in the religious market for a decline in religion. Where a single church enjoys a state-backed monopoly (much of historic Europe), it grows complacent, lazy, and unresponsive — like any monopoly producer — so participation falls. Where there is a free, competitive religious market with no established church (the USA), religious "firms" must compete vigorously for members, producing energetic, attractive, responsive religion and therefore high participation. Religious vitality, on this account, is a function of competition and pluralism, not of how modern or scientific a society is.

This generates the central paradox of the theory: religious diversity — which secularisation theorists like Berger once saw as corrosive to faith (the "plausibility problem") — is reinterpreted as the very engine of religious strength.

Cycles of the Sacred

Stark and Bainbridge add that religion regenerates itself through ongoing cycles. As established churches accommodate to the secular world and lose their supernatural distinctiveness, they leave a gap that is filled by sect formation (revival of demanding, otherworldly religion) and cult innovation (entirely new spiritualities). Secularisation, revival, and innovation are therefore permanent, self-correcting features of any religious economy, not a one-way historical road to irreligion.

Feature	Religious monopoly (e.g. historic Europe)	Religious free market (e.g. USA)
Number of "firms"	One established church	Many competing denominations/sects
Incentive to recruit	Weak — guaranteed members	Strong — must win members
Quality/energy of provision	Low, complacent	High, dynamic
Predicted participation	Low	High
Interpretation of decline	"Lazy monopoly," not lost demand	n/a — vitality is the norm

Evaluation of Religious Market Theory

• It offers a genuine explanation of American exceptionalism — why the most modern society on earth is also intensely religious — which classic secularisation theory struggles to explain.
• It reframes pluralism as a source of vitality, supported by the energy of competitive US denominationalism.
• However, Bruce (1999, 2011) counters with damaging evidence: highly pluralistic societies are not always more religious, and some highly monopolistic ones (historically Catholic Ireland and Poland) sustained very high participation — the reverse of the theory's prediction. The correlation between diversity and vitality does not hold reliably.
• Critics argue the theory imports an economistic model of the rational consumer that misrepresents religious commitment, which is often inherited, communal, and emotional rather than chosen like a purchase.
• It applies far better to the deregulated American market than to Europe, so it may explain a special case rather than refute secularisation in general.

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Heelas and Woodhead: The Spiritual Revolution and the Kendal Project

Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead (2005) investigated the spiritual revolution thesis — the claim that traditional, congregational religion is being displaced by a new, individualised spirituality of the self. Their Kendal Project studied all the religious and spiritual activity in one Cumbrian town and distinguished two zones.

Congregational Domain vs Holistic Milieu

1. The congregational domain — churches and chapels organised around external authority: scripture, doctrine, clergy, and tradition, demanding that the self conform to a higher religious order. This domain was contracting.
2. The holistic milieu — a network of mind-body-spirit practices (yoga, meditation, tai chi, reiki, aromatherapy, healing) organised around the inner self, its subjective experience and authentic feelings. This domain was growing.

The Subjective Turn

The migration from one domain to the other reflects what Heelas and Woodhead, following Charles Taylor, call the subjective turn in modern culture: the shift from living by external roles and duties ("life-as") to cultivating one's own inner experience and authenticity ("subjective-life"). Traditional religion, which subordinates the self to external authority, is increasingly out of step with this culture; the holistic milieu, which sacralises the self, is in tune with it. This is why the milieu attracts those most invested in subjective fulfilment.

graph TD
    A["Secularisation thesis: religion is declining"] --> B["Renewal / choice reply: religion is transforming"]
    B --> C["Davie: believing without belonging + vicarious religion"]
    B --> D["Hervieu-Léger: cultural amnesia -> pilgrims and converts"]
    B --> E["Stark & Bainbridge: religious market theory (supply-side)"]
    B --> F["Heelas & Woodhead: subjective turn"]
    F --> G["Congregational domain: external authority (declining)"]
    F --> H["Holistic milieu: inner self / subjective-life (growing)"]
    C --> I{"Choice = vitality or terminal secularisation?"}
    D --> I
    E --> I
    H --> I
    I --> J["Bruce: holistic milieu too small; belief without belonging fades"]

Findings of the Kendal Project

	Congregational domain	Holistic milieu
Share of the town's population	Small minority (a few per cent)	Much smaller still (around one in sixty)
Trend	Declining	Growing
Dominant ethos	External authority, tradition, conformity	Inner authority, self-exploration, experience
Typical participants	Older, more traditional	Disproportionately middle-aged, middle-class women

Was There a Spiritual Revolution?

Their verdict was carefully hedged: there was a partial and prospective revolution. The holistic milieu was growing while the congregational domain shrank, so on present trends the milieu might one day overtake congregational religion — but at the time of study it remained far too small to have replaced it. Spirituality was rising, but it had not yet won.

Evaluation of Heelas and Woodhead

• The Kendal Project is among the most rigorous empirical studies of contemporary religion, combining counts, interviews, and observation.
• The subjective-turn thesis links religious change to a wider, well-evidenced cultural shift toward individualism and authenticity.
• However, the study covers a single small English town, raising real doubts about representativeness.
• Bruce argues the holistic milieu is simply too small and too shallow to constitute a "revolution": most participants treat it as an occasional supplement, not a replacement for religion, and it shows little capacity for intergenerational transmission (few children are socialised into reiki).
• The milieu's concentration among middle-class women makes it a socially specific phenomenon, not a general religious future — a point that connects directly to the sociology of gender and class.

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David Lyon: Jesus in Disneyland (Postmodern Religion)