ABSTRACT
It is often said that religion is declining, in Britain and elsewhere, that it will eventually disappear, that there is ‘secularisation’ in which religion ceases to be important. It is well known that in Britain church attendance at any rate has declined; this may have given a misleading idea that the same thing is happening in the rest of the world. In this chapter we will first look carefully to see exactly what has happened to religion in Britain. Then the very different state of affairs in the USA will be examined. And in the next chapter we will look at some parts of the world where there has been expansion of religion rather than decline-such as Africa, Brazil and Korea. Sociologists, thinking about Europe, used to think that industrialisation was the cause of secularisation, but in some countries we shall see that over the last century industrialisation has been accompanied by more religion, not less. And while some churches have declined, other new churches have been born.
