ABSTRACT
The first fifty years of ‘international development’, however, coincided with a distinct secularisation of public policy in Western Europe and North America.Policymakers and academics alike concerned with international development were heavily influenced by ‘secularisation theory’, the belief (in Wilson’s classic formulation) that
‘religious institutions, actions and consciousness lose their social significance’ over time as societies modernise (Wilson 1992: 49). This influence was evident in two key respects: in ‘secular reductionism’ – the neglect of religious variables in favour of other sociological attributes such as class, ethnicity and gender – and in ‘materialistic determinism’ – the neglect of non-material, especially religious, motivations in explaining individual or institutional behaviour (see Luttwak 1994).
