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This chapter examines the growing attraction of many renewalists towards secularization, that is, in non-religious forms of ministry. As they grew more frustrated with the church’s inability to reorient itself towards renewal, more of these reformers came to believe that their objectives lay not in reforming the church but escaping it. The advent of the War on Poverty provided one obvious route, as its massive infusion of government funds offered opportunities well beyond what the church could provide. Renewalists invested their energies in programs like Model Cities, and encouraged community control over poverty funds. These types of activities were abetted by the popularity of secular theologies, which identified the ultimate form of Christian expression in secular realms. Some renewalists began to speak of post-renewal, the idea that the church was an obsolete institution. A number of underground churches, religious communities divorced from traditional denominations and geared towards secular ends, emerged during this period.

This chapter looks at the reasons for the growth of Christianity and its future. It argues that the need to rebuild the broken village community pressured people to demonstrate their commitment to the church and created religious enthusiasm. This produced a strong backing for evangelism, but also for the rapid reconstruction of the institutional church. Parish priests became powerful as pivots between the village and the state, and this brought them into conflict with the older lay leaders and encouraged the growth of the underground church.

The Vatican II era was experienced by many American Catholics as a spatial crisis. Church renovations, innovative new buildings, and unconventional Eucharistic spaces like rented cafeterias simultaneously exhilarated and unsettled postconciliar Catholics feeling their way toward a new understanding of the Church. This chapter engages with a broad range of late 1960s and early 1970s suggestions for both the liturgy of the future and the worship space of the future. It argues that the key characteristic of the immediate post-Vatican II era was uncertainty about both liturgy and architecture. A key event was the necessity of renovating hundreds of older churches for a very different liturgical future. As a result, architects came to value spatial flexibility and openness at the same time as liturgists suggested an ever-changing evolutionary future. Meanwhile, Catholics continued to develop new places to meet for liturgy: shopping malls, "house churches," storefronts, and multipurpose spaces, among others. They experimented with space along with the text of the liturgy. Underground and "floating" parishes resisted ownership of buildings and hierarchical control at the same time.

This chapter introduces four types of state-religion relations in human history – religious monopoly, pluralism, oligopoly, and a total ban. It argues that religious oligopoly is the most common practice in the world today and applies that understanding to the situation in China. The chapter illuminates the operation of triple markets in China: a red market of legal (officially permitted and regulated) religions; a black market of illegal religious groups and activities; and a grey market of spiritual organizations and practices of ambiguous legal status. This triple market is dynamic, as some groups, such as the Falun Gong, moved from ambiguous to illegal status, while some illegal underground Christian churches have moved into the gray category. The chapter draws upon these findings to challenge and refine dominant theories about the operation of religious markets.