ABSTRACT
The religious world-view typical of traditional societies falls into decline and secularised religious and moral values emerge. This implies the growing autonomy of individuals in developing their own values and norms. Thus economic and technological modernisation is held to give rise to a process of cultural modernisation. Secularisation involves a process of disruption of traditional social structures and the ‘taken-for-granted view of the world which they impose as a self-evident truth’. The model of ‘secularisation’ states that social change weakens the hold of religious values; it may be defined as ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the dominance of religious institutions and symbols’. The 1990 European Values Study made it possible to study the relationship between church attendance and religious values. The foregoing discussion demonstrates that there is no straightforward trend encompassing factors such as church attendance and religious, moral, and family values.
