ABSTRACT
For several decades, sociologists of religion have written about ‘secularization’ and the decline in organized religion. Membership and church attendance have certainly dwindled in Britain during the past century, particularly since the 1960s. Steve Bruce writes about ‘Christianity falling below the critical mass required to reproduce itself ’, predicting the demise of the Methodist Church by 2031, by which time ‘the Church of England will...be reduced to a trivial voluntary association with a large portfolio of heritage property,’ and regular ‘churchgoers will be too few to show up in representative national survey samples’ (Bruce 2002: 74). As we have argued, this is not a global pattern: although this may be true of Britain and some other European countries, this is certainly not what is happening in Africa and in Latin America. However, even in Britain Christianity is by no means dead or even dying outside its institutional boundaries.
