ABSTRACT
Since at least the middle of the nineteenth century the religion that once dominated European societies and most of their colonial offshoots has been in decline.The liberal democracies of the west are now markedly less religious than they were in 1900 or at any point in the previous ten centuries.The description and explanation of that change is ‘the secularisation thesis’. Given its complexity, ‘paradigm’ might be more appropriate than ‘thesis’ but social scientists are agreed on this: although ‘secularisation’ initially meant the deliberate removal of property or functions from the religious to the secular sphere (and still has that sense in Francophone social science), the explanation of secularisation owes more to the unintended consequences of diffuse social changes than to the deliberate actions of people promoting a secularist agenda.
