Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis

by Steve Bruce (editor), Roy Wallis (Contribution by), Callum G. Brown (Contribution by)

The claim that modern societies are less religious than their predecessors because modernity itself undermines the plausibility of religion has been almost an orthodoxy. But increasingly this "secularization thesis" is being challenged on a number of fronts. Leading sociologists and historians who share a common interest in advancing our understanding of religious change here clarify the key elements of this thesis, testing them against appropriate data bases. The book discusses the thesis and explores such issues as church adherence in the nineteenth century in the United States Europe, the British 1851 census of church attendance, changes in English Roman Catholicism, and comparisons of American and European religiosity. Even where historians and sociologists cannot agree, Religion and Modernization has the great value of clarifying the arguments and pointing the way toward their resolution.

236 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1992

About the author

Steve Bruce (born 1951), Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen since 1991, elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2005, he has written extensively on the nature of religion in the modern world and on the links between religion and politics.