Introduction

The dawning of the twenty-first century was marked by three major cultural shifts. First, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the ending of the Cold War stimulated a shift away from ideological politics and a political turn towards civil society, particularly in European liberal democracies. Second, in spite of the continued numerical decline of many religious institutions, faith groups in the United Kingdom and the United States assumed a renewed significance within social movement politics and were increasingly embraced as critical partners by government as a result of their ongoing grass-roots social capital. Third, the veracity of the secularization thesis that had its roots in the work of Max Weber assuming an almost unquestioned status, particularly in Western Europe, began to fray at the edges. Whereas the levels of regular attendance at worship and the membership of many formal religious institutions continued to decline, former advocates of the secularization thesis such as Peter Berger acknowledged the ongoing sociological significance of faith as a primary factor in civic engagement. ¹ As the new millennium began, therefore, we witnessed the tentative emergence of a complex new social landscape characterized by a postsecular civil society politics on which the grass-roots social capital of faith groups (particularly in urban contexts) provided increasingly significant resources for activism in a plural public sphere.