ABSTRACT
During most of the 20th century, Western policy makers and social theorists confidently predicted that non-Western societies would witness the gradual privatisation and decline of their once vibrant religious traditions. The bases for this forecast were too widespread if, we now realise, erroneous assumptions: that privatisation and decline had been the fate of religion in all Western countries, and that religious modernity elsewhere was destined to replicate the secularised Western experience (cf. Davie 2001). African, Asian, and Muslim societies might be latecomers to the privatisation and decline of religion, it seemed, but they too would inevitably succumb to the secularist juggernaut (Lerner 1958).
