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This chapter shows that during the 1960s there was an increasing affinity between the notion that de‐institutionalized religion is something good and the intellectual and social sensibilities of the period. Two views on secularization and de‐institutionalization of religion, those of Christian theologian Harvey Cox and sociologist Peter L. Berger, mirrored the intellectual and social climate of the time and were broadly discussed and debated. In this chapter Slavica Jakelić argues that Berger and Cox's claims about the inevitable link between deinstitutionalization of religions and modernity were persuasive because they happened in a context in which “religionless religion” was increasingly becoming the ideal of religious life. Berger and Cox talked of the de‐institutionalization of religion as progress that brought about freedom for individuals to choose. Their prophecies of godlessness were the prophecies of freedom.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first examines the wider lessons to be drawn from the study of millenarianism at Kensington Temple. The second section argues that although the Problem of the End has manifested itself throughout the history of millenarianism, it is becoming more acute. It concludes that secularization weakens millenarianism in a more direct way than it weakens other forms of religious consensus.

The general hypothesis of the book is that the power of long-term factors to explain party choice has gradually become weaker. Since value orientations can be considered as long-term factors, one should expect the explanatory power of value orientations to decline over time. However, the empirical evidence in this chapter suggests that the impact of values is regulated by the political context. This contextual factor includes the extent to which citizens learn to make use of ideological labels and concepts, the extent to which they receive ideological cues in order to choose on the basis of values, as well as the affective strength with which values are endorsed. The apparent decrease in perceived party polarisation in the 1990s led to a decline of the extent to which extremely economic left-right values matter for party choice.

Having explored the dispatches from the field in the chapters of this book, it is apparent that there is no one summary measure of secularization or of religious strength. Existing traditions are by no means the only elements in people’s religious repertoire, but they are still a powerful presence, with an impact beyond what can be counted by asking individuals about their beliefs. An adequate social theory of religion will require that we look for the everyday intersections among the social domains of modern life — including religious domains — and for the ways plural cultural patterns affect each other. Paying attention to how modern people identify the religious and spiritual dimensions of their lives will continue to stretch our definitions, but it will also continue to suggest new ways to think about where religion is found and why, how spiritual practices affect lives, and how the particular histories of the world’s diverse societies shape the story of religion’s presence and role. There are indeed many modernities — not just the Western Enlightenment story of religious decline. And there are many kinds of choices — not just the rational maximizing of rewards. Everyday religion takes place in the fascinating flow of choosing and creating that constitutes modern social life.

This chapter examines leading figures and institutions of the Religious Right in the United States and the distinctive narrative form its public and political activism has taken from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present: namely, the jeremiad. The resurgence of publicly assertive religion has become the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny and the source of much political concern. Social scientists and policymakers have long presumed that as the world modernized it would inevitably secularize. The political ascendancy of the Religious Right in the United States and, more recently, the consequential militancy of radical Islamism confounds conventional wisdom of inevitable secularization. The chapter closes with a cursory comparison of the jeremiad with the jihad, the distinctive narrative form of radical Islamism, which reveals that despite strong rhetorical similarities between them, crucial differences persist in their political effects. Moreover, such a comparison reveals an important irony: just as the specter of resurgent religion has been undermining the longstanding academic confidence in the self‐evident inevitability of secularization, the perceived threat of secularization has been busy mobilizing the faithful both at home and abroad.

While the number of people involved in new religious movements (NRMs) is small, the attention they have received in the popular media and academic discourse suggest a greater significance. In the popular media, NRMs are most often seen as a social problem. In academic studies, they are more often associated with processes of social change and the critique of modernity. In the literature, there are four interpretive frameworks for understanding the significance of NRMs when viewed as a response to the social conditions of modernity. The first sees them as part of the protest against modernity. The second sees them as forums for modern social experimentation. The third identifies them with the re-enchantment of the modern world. The fourth suggests they are born of attempts to adapt to the social and psychological tensions created by a dialectic of trust and risk in late modern societies.

This chapter illustrates the rich variety of the secularization process, looking at four cities representing four distinctive regions. These cities include New Delhi, Rome, Prague, and Boston. They represent the march of secularization and urbanization in, respectively, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States. Each of the four has felt the pressure of secularization differently, in part because of their diverse histories. The careers of these cities prove that the emergence of a world-wide urban civilization need not obliterate the distinctive coloration of particular cities or erase the uniqueness of their character. The chapter also demonstrates an important distinction made in an earlier chapter—the difference between secularization as a historical movement and secularism as ideology.

This introductory chapter discusses first, the relationship between religious liberty and human rights; and second, the global resurgence of religion and its significance for contemporary international law and politics. Religious liberty rights merit special attention in part because they are closely correlated with the observance of other human rights. This connection assumes even greater significance in view of the second point, namely, that the world is experiencing a religious resurgence with profound implications for contemporary international relations. To be more precise, it is not so much that greater numbers of people are religious but rather that their religiosity has acquired new theoretical and empirical salience for international law and politics.

The prevailing secularist paradigm and quantitative analyses of the relationship between religion, conflict, and peace are inadequate. Powers calls for moving beyond a functionalist approach to the roles of religion in promoting conflict or peace to a fuller appreciation of the complexity of religion and the unique spiritual and religious resources available for peacebuilding. Citing illustrative examples from around the world, he highlights the pressing need for a multi-layered analysis of complex religious strategies for peacebuilding. The chapter explores three critical dimensions of a strategic approach to religious peacebuilding: the public role of religion, religion’s relationship to nonviolence and the just war tradition, and the potential and limits of ecumenical and interreligious peacebuilding.

In the United States, in contrast to continental Europe, science and social reform maintained generally positive relations with organized Christianity into the twentieth century. After World War Two, however, American social scientists frowned on religion's public role and embraced secularization theory despite its conceptual and empirical shortcomings. More important than the influx of European émigrés in effecting this shift was the reinterpretation of American democracy by native‐born social scientists. Under assault from Catholic intellectuals for their “moral relativism,” social scientists turned the tables, arguing that totalitarianism was the child of Catholic‐style moral absolutism, while democracy flowed from moral openness and skepticism. They buried the covenantal conception of America as a moral project and reinterpreted it as a regime of neutral process. Modernization‐secularization theory, as developed in the United States, projected this procedural, “secular Enlightenment” image of America onto the world stage, casting it as the telos of history.

What is the current cultural context for American higher education? This essay defines the concepts of secularization, secularism, and the secular, and provides a brief history of their role in American higher education as well as more recent postsecular developments. The notion of postsecularity is described empirically (not ideologically) in terms of religion's new visibility in American culture and, by extension, on the nation's college and university campuses. Implications for contemporary higher education are briefly explored, especially as they relate to programs of general education.