ABSTRACT
During the last quarter of the twentieth century the idea of secularization as an inevitable and permanent process gradually lost its position as the default explanation for religious decline among sociologists. Gill (2003) argues that worldwide religious movements, the centrality of religion to international politics and differing American patterns of attendance all served to displace secularization as the main explanation for church decline. Nevertheless, its past status appears to have given the idea of secularization a kind of embedded explanatory power within any discussion of church decline, so that there are repeated references within fresh expressions and related literature to continued arguments from secularization; for example, by sociologist Steve Bruce and historian Callum Brown (e.g. Moynagh 2012: 73, 77, 2001: 67; Gay 2011: 84; Davison and Milbank 2010: 171; Archbishops’ Council 2009: 11; Brewin, 2004: 1; Jackson, 2002: 61–2).
