Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Making Contemporary Britain)

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I think, in fact, that you have two economies of religion in Europe: the first one I would call an economy of birth, which is turning more toward a market; and the second an economy of death, which is the public utility. So if you were to compare Britain, Europe and America, it isn’t the case that all Americans are religious and no Europeans are. Europeans are differently religious from Americans. And because European forms of religion don’t look like their American equivalents, Americans very often don’t see them. Let’s try to do better this afternoon.

The second marker is 2000, when I published Religion in Modern Europe. The crucial point here is that Britain, in terms of its patterns and structure of religious life, is essentially a European society. It is, of course, a pivot between Europe and America, and denominationally it looks west. But in terms of pattern, structure and state-church, and the legacies of a state-church, it is firmly European. The subtitle “A Memory Mutates” was chosen because the book understood religion as a form of collective memory and then asked questions about how that memory is or is not passed on. Within the book, however, is a key idea, which, retrospectively, is I think its most important contribution, and that is the notion of vicarious religion. Vicarious religion is easy to grasp for Europeans, but sometimes problematic for Americans. With Nancy Ammerman et al. (2018) Religions and social progress: Critical assessments and creative partnerships. In International Panel on Social Progress (Ed) Rethinking Society for the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambirdge Univiersty Press, 641-676. This is why the market language of American religion goes so badly wrong in Europe. Europeans don’t work in market mode. Many of my American colleagues, for example, do work on “switching,” which is a market thing to do. You change your brand if you don’t like it, including your brand of religion, but Europeans tend not to do this. Some of them, the active ones, do, but the default position in Europe is to be a passive member of the historic churches, to activate that membership only when you need it, most often at the time of a death, your own or someone else’s. And there is deep offense, of course, if that service is either denied or thought to be inadequate. Turner, Robert P., David Lukoff, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, and Francis G. Lu. 1995. A Culturally Sensitive Diagnostic Category in the DSM-IV. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 183(7): 435–444. In Christian prophetic history, this is the part of the world that would belong to Noah’s son Japheth as, according to God’s will, he expands in the dispersion after the flood. Indeed, Japheth literally means ‘spread out’ or ‘enlarge’. And the descendants of Japheth (the Christians) reside in the part of the world that the Greeks had called by the name of a young princess, Europa.Zinnbauer, Brian J., and Kenneth I. Pargament. 2005. Religiousness and Spirituality. In Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, ed. R.F. Paloutzian and C.L. Park, 21–42. New York: The Guilford Press. Roszak, Theodore. 1969. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society And Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday. Houtman, D., S. Aupers, and P. Heelas. 2009. Christian religiosity and new age spirituality: A cross-cultural comparison. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48 (1): 169–179. Troeltsch, Ernst. 1956[1931]. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. London: Allen and Unwin. Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: Brill.

Reitsma, Jan, Ben Pelzer, Peer Scheepers, and Hans Schilderman. 2012. Believing and Belonging in Europe. Cross-national Comparisons of Longitudinal Trends (1981-2007) and Determinants. European Societies 14(4): 611–632. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2012.726367. Let me give you some examples of vicarious religion. First churches and church leaders perform rituals on behalf of others. At the time of a birth or a marriage; a divorce even, though that’s a little problematic because of the churches’ teaching about marriage; but above all, at the time of a death. And in these rituals you can see interesting changes in Europe. During my time at Exeter, I enjoyed close collaboration with and visits to a number of European Universities, notably the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 2000-01, I held the Kerstin Hesselgren Professorship at Uppsala University, where I returned in 2006-07 and again in 2010, 2012 and into retirement. The 2006-07 visit included a month at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki. In 2005, I spent the fall semester at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. The details are listed below. I began my sociological career with an undergraduate degree in Sociology at Exeter (1967); this was followed by a doctorate at the London School of Economics (1975). It was at this stage that I developed the two aspects of my work which were to endure throughout: an interest in the sociology of religion and an acquaintance with both France and French sociology. My doctoral thesis on the political aspects of the French Protestant community in the interwar period brought these together.Roof, Wade Clark. 1998. Modernity, the Religious, and the Spiritual. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558(1): 211–224. Glendinning, Tony. 2006. Religious Involvement, Conventional Christian, and Unconventional Nonmaterialist Beliefs. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45(4): 585–595. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2006.00329.x. The Sociology of Religion. A Critical Agenda" is perfect for classroom use. Next to offering a well organized, competent and cutting edge overview on the challenges faced by the sociology of religion in our time, it teaches students how to think sociologically. Davie's insightful and imaginative account triggers new perspectives and research questions with regard to the global presence of religion. A wonderful, multi-layered resource for teaching! De Groot, Kees, and Jos Pieper. 2015. Seekers and Christian Spiritual Centers in the Netherlands. In A Catholic Minority Church in a World of Seekers, edited by S. Hellemans and P. Jonkers, 97-127. Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy.

In partnership with the NSRN (Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network), it is our pleasure to bring you the audio recordings of five very important lectures from Grace Davie, Humeira Iqtidar, Callum Brown, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, and Jonathan Lanman. Berger, after having initially predicted complete secularisation, has argued that there has been a significant desecularisation of the world and that western academics did not predict this because they were blinded by their own atheism. Western academics existed in a particular secular “bubble” and imagined other people shared their experiences. Actually, as we shall see in the next section, most of the world is highly religious. According to Berger, it has become more religious in recent years (hence desecularisation and resacrilisation).

Grace Davie is one of the best analysts of religion in contemporary sociology. The second edition of this title caps a distinguished record of studies of religion - first of Britain, then of Europe, then globally. This is a magisterial work, which should be read by anyone interested in the place of religion in the modern world Davie, Grace. 1990a. Believing Without Belonging: Is This the Future of Religion in Britain? Social Compass 37(4): 455–469. Presidents of the Association 1938-2016" (PDF). Association for the Sociology of Religion . Retrieved 16 March 2018. Hood Jr, Ralph W. 1975. The Construction and Preliminary Validation of a Measure of Reported Mystical Experience. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion:29–41.

Davie has written several works during her career, including Religion in Britain since 1945 (1994), Religion in Modern Europe (2000), Europe: the Exceptional Case (2002), The Sociology of Religion (2013) and Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox (2015). [10] I was the co-director of both WREPand WaVEboth of which fed into the establishment in Uppsala of a Linnaeus Centre of Excellencein Uppsala concerned with the Impact of Religion:Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy .My involvement in this Centre resulted further visits to Uppsala, which continued into retirement. Schlehofer, Michele M., Allen M. Omoto, and Janice R. Adelman. 2008. How Do “Religion” And “Spirituality” Differ? Lay Definitions Among Older Adults. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47(3): 411–425.Daiber, Karl-Fritz. 2002. Mysticism: Troeltsch’s Third Type of Religious Collectivities. Social Compass 49(3): 329–341. Hill, Peter C., Kenneth I.I. Pargament, Ralph W. Hood, Jr McCullough, E. Michael, James P. Swyers, David B. Larson, and Brian J. Zinnbauer. 2000. Conceptualizing Religion and Spirituality: Points of Commonality, Points of Departure. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 30(1): 51–77. The inspiration for this episode came from one of Russell McCutcheon's works which we had encountered through the undergraduate Religious Studies programme at the University of Edinburgh, entitled 'Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion'. The result is this compilation of differing opinions and interpretations ...