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For leaders of the Church of England, secularisation was such an obvious fact that it virtually became a self-fulfilling prophecy as it informed political and theological debates within the Church. This article shows how by adjusting to secularisation the Church demonstrated a remarkable degree of resilience and managed to remain an important national voice – at least until the end of the Thatcher era. Three factors were of particular relevance in this development: First, the use of old networks which gave the Church of England privileged access to the political establishment. Second, the professionalisation of its political structure that equipped the Church with expertise. Third, complex changes within the Anglican theological strands that were opened up for political and social issues. These elements enabled the Church to develop new political agendas that were able to substitute political and moral positions that had become obsolete in the era of secularisation.

This chapter assesses the political implications of Taylor’s landmark work A Secular Age and provides an analysis of the book’s content and its implications for debates about religion in modern times. The chapter shows how Taylor understands secularisation today as being about the options that social agents can have to believe or not believe, and how they express what they do or do not believe. The chapter explores how historical developments such as the Enlightenment and Deism have led to this situation, and how people today reveal advanced notions of romantic individuality which he calls expressive individualism. The chapter unpacks key concepts developed in Taylor’s book, such as the buffered self, exclusive humanism, authenticity, and the immanent frame. Finally, the chapter shows how upheavals such as the social changes of the 1960s have influenced modern views about religion and secularity.

This chapter continues to explore the interdependence and co-imbrication of the religious and secular, focusing now on mature Egyptian novels from the mid twentieth century. It explores Mahfuz’s famous trilogy (1956-7) and al-Sharqawi’s Al-Ard (1954) and Muhammad Rasul al-Hurriyya (1962) as different culminations of the secularisation process implied by nation formation, and the conflict and tension inherent therein, examining methods of religious displacement and othering, strategies of demystification, lines of religious critique, symbolic trajectories, as well as spiritual yearning, apologetics and theological conundrums as they appear in these works. The evidence is that, into maturity, as the secular aesthetic in the Egyptian novel stabilises, religious themes endure and religion remains a contested site.

Chapter 2 gives an insight into the main social transformations in the Republic of Ireland since the 1960s and the consequences of these developments for the place of religion in contemporary society and in the dominant representations of Irish national identity, within the political sphere in particular. These transformations include the on-going process of relative secularisation, along with a wider sociocultural and religious diversification that was accelerated by significant levels of immigration in the 1990s and 2000s. These changes have sparked a public debate on the place of the Christian tradition and identity in the Irish public sphere and on the Irish State as a Christian nation (with communitarian undertones) or as a republican nation.

This essay contests the general view, based on the processes of secularisation rooted in the nineteenth century, that religion and its moral teachings were incompatible with the modern city. Angela Connelly presents a detailed study of the Manchester and Salford Methodist Mission, with a focus on their Albert Hall and Aston Institute (1910), part of a wider movement in the denomination to reach out to the poorer working classes. She situates this in the context of Manchester’s other religious activities – church-going, Whit walks, philanthropy. She examines accounts of the various uses made of the Albert Hall, and shows that these included non-religious events, including musical performances and clubs for children, and concludes that the appearance of Christianity in other mundane settings (the street and the workplace) was not deemed incongruous.

Building on the notion that the Gothic is shaped by (and responds to) Enlightenment historiography and shifting conceptions of the past in the eighteenth century, this chapter proposes that The Old English Baron can be read as a reaction to a popular (and frequently neglected) work of proto-Enlightenment English history that Reeve was very familiar with: Nicholas Tindal’s translation of Rapin’s History of England (1721–1731). Focusing on this previously ignored relationship, this chapter considers the religious and political implications of Rapin’s history for the Gothic past presented in The Old English Baron. Furthermore, it reveals the ways in which Reeve’s novel can be read as a rewriting of Otranto and draws attention to the historical specificity that she introduces to the Gothic genre at this time. Focusing on Reeve’s Old Whig political beliefs and the English setting of her novel, it assesses the extent to which The Old English Baron conveys Whig historico-political nightmares and focuses on how her Gothic past betrays contemporary anxieties. This chapter shows how The Old English Baron subverts the Walpolean Gothic and responds to the Enlightenment drive to secularise the historical cause.

While recent commemorative histories mythologise fervent devotion to the faith as a distinctive attribute of the post-war migrant experience, catholic observers at the time feared migrants were ‘falling away from the church’. This chapter explores the changing place of religion in migrants’ lives in England and the complex agency of catholic ideals in shaping religious selfhoods over the migration journey. Where contemporary observers feared the secularising effects of urban culture upon migrants, the chapter shows how continuity and change articulated simultaneously within the evolution of migrants’ religious identities. Regulatory religious ideals offered some migrants a model of virtuous and socially respectable settlement in which they could recognize aspects of their own fears, ambitions and aspirations, while other, often later migrants, drew on a public critique of clerical power to narrate a story of renunciation and personal transformation. Irrespective, however, of whether or not individuals embraced or derogated their religious heritage, narratives of religious change always registered disavowal as an ambivalent process, involving the management of conflicting desires for autonomy from and conformity to deeply internalised religious prohibitions.

The fifth chapter goes back to Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology to frame the author’s late return to this theme. The chapter argues that this return underscores the centrality of political theology for Schmitt’s late work in general. It means to show that Schmitt in his debate with the theologian Erik Peterson and the philosopher Hans Blumenberg in Political Theology II emphasizes the need for theological foundations. They can be found in the New Testament. As a consequence, he stresses the continued relevance of political theology.

This chapter develops the concept of an evangelical subculture in order to explore how both the politics of the post-Agreement period, as well as more mundane, everyday concerns about God, faith and life, have helped shape changes in evangelicals' personal religious practices and identities. Drawing on a body of ninety-five semi-structured interviews with evangelicals, conducted between 2002 and 2007, it explores links between macro-level political changes, micro-level subcultural changes and individual religious change. It explains how evangelicals have experienced changes that have pushed their religious journeys in six different directions: deepening in a conservative direction, moderating, transforming, converting, maintaining a steady faith and exiting evangelicalism.