ABSTRACT
Post 1989, the structures and ideologies of communism imploded, releasing spaces for religion that had not existed for several generations. In most places the mainstream churches have re-emerged to fill the gaps, some more successfully than others, but new forms of religion have also flooded in through open borders. The ‘insulation’ and ‘isolation’ of the sociology of religion from the principal currents of sociological thinking has formed a dominant theme in Jim Beckford’s writing. Mainstream sociologists – indeed social scientists in general – have ignored the significance of religion. Britain has a more developed tradition of accommodating group identities within the framework of British society, a feature that owes a good deal to the relatively greater degree of religious pluralism that has existed in Britain for centuries rather than decades. Britain contains a much more diverse religious population, many of whom have come from the sub-continent alongside a significant influx of Christians from English-speaking Africa and the Caribbean.
