ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that true responsibility for the continued challenges faced in closer engagements between the sociology of religion and the discipline as a whole lies less with the secularity of the social sciences as such than the sub-discipline’s failure to do full justice to its own area of study. In differentiating between empirical and theoretical readings of the postsecular turn, this chapter illustrates how the postsecular moniker is as much concerned with shifts taking place within the dynamics and social spaces of religion in contemporary society as it is with the core practice of doing sociology on the ground. Following the historic trajectory from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ iterations of secularisation, Arat thus argues that current sensibilities in sociological dealings with religion are gradually shifting further from soft-secularism towards soft-essentialism. By bracketing the category of religion not out but firmly into its research design, postsecular sociologies of religion are thus identifiable as promising new alternatives to secular sociologies based on standard modes of methodological agnosticism vis-à-vis religion.
