ABSTRACT
Since its inception, presumably to be dated in the classical period of Durkheim and Weber, the sociology of religion has been fascinated by the phenomenon of secularization. This term, of course, has been endlessly debated, modified and occasionally repudiated. But for most purposes it can be defined quite simply as a process in which religion diminishes in importance both in society and in the consciousness of individuals. And most sociologists looking at this phenomenon have shared the view that secularization is the direct result of modernization. Put simply, the idea has been that the relation between modernity and religion is inverse-the more of the former, the less of the latter. Different reasons have been put forward for this relation. Most often it was ascribed to the ascendancy of modern scientific thinking, making the world more rationally comprehensible and manageable, and thus, supposedly, leaving less and less space for the supernatural. This interpretation was eloquently expressed in Weber’s phrase of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. Other reasons have been cited-the progressive differentiation of modern institutions (this was Parsons’s favourite paradigm), the severance of the linkage of state and church in modern democratic regimes making religious affiliation a voluntary matter, and last but not least the massive modern processes of migration, urbanization and mass communication that undermined traditional ways of life. By the time I started my own work in this area, there was a body of theory and empirical work that could reasonably be called (and was so called) secularization theory.
