ABSTRACT
World developments Secularisation has not been restricted to the West. If the term is used in the way that Becker defined it, it has been a common feature of the processes of social change everywhere. Existing religious and ideological monopolies have been challenged and at least temporarily replaced by periods of toleration, though in some cases the old ideology has been rapidly replaced by a new monopolistic system. For example, the Russian Revolution broke the monopoly of the Orthodox church which had been supported by the Tsarist regime, but rapidly replaced it with a monopolistic communist ideology enforced by the Party and the state. The brief interval of toleration in Germany that followed the First World War ended with the imposition of Nazi ideology in 1933, though this was replaced, at least in West Germany, by a secular regime after the Second World War. In Japan defeat in the Second World War led to the end of a state-supported ideology and to an outburst of religious creativity that may even have exceeded the outburst in North America.
