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Europe is a relatively secular part of the world in global terms. Why is this so? And why is the situation in Europe so different from that in the United States? The first chapter of this book - the theme - articulates this contrast. The remaining chapters - the variations - look in turn at the historical, philosophical, institutional and sociological dimensions of these differences. Key ideas are examined in detail, among them: constitutional issues; the Enlightenment; systems of law, education and welfare; questions of class, ethnicity, gender and generation. In each chapter both the similarities and differences between the European and the American cases are carefully scrutinized. The final chapter explores the ways in which these features translate into policy on both sides of the Atlantic. This book is highly topical and relates very directly to current misunderstandings between Europe and America.
This book offers a unique transdisciplinary collection of essays written by highly renowned international scholars.
Secularisation can mean many quite different things - rising unbelief, the privatisation of belief, weakening denominational identity, the development of a religiously neutral state. This book reveals both the many-sidedness of secularisation and the great unevenness with which it affected different areas of life. France is the classic example of the secularisation of society in the later nineteenth century. Church and school, then church and state, were separated. Town councils tore down crosses and banned processions. Teachers and doctors were seen as a new priesthood. Yet even in France things were not so simple. In the west, most people remained practising Catholics, and Lourdes demonstrated the continuing vitality of 'popular religion'. When we look at Germany and England, or compare Catholics with Protestants and Jews, the picture becomes even more complex. This book examines the nature and causes of religious change in the three countries, and the class, gender and regional differences within each.
Owen Chadwick's acclaimed lectures on the secularisation of the European mind trace the declining hold of the Church and its doctrines on European society in the nineteenth century.
While French laïcité is often considered something fixed, its daily deployment is rather messy. What might we learn if we study the governance of religion from a dynamic bottom-up perspective? Using an ethnographic approach, this book examines everyday secularism in the making. How do city actors understand, frame and govern religious diversity? Which local factors play a role in those processes? In Urban Secularism: Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe, Julia Martínez-Ariño brings the reader closer to the entrails of laïcité. She provides detailed accounts of the ways religious groups, city officials, municipal employees, secularist actors and other civil-society organisations negotiate concrete public expressions of religion. Drawing on rich empirical material, the book demonstrates that urban actors draw and (re-)produce dichotomies of inclusion and exclusion, and challenge static conceptions of laïcité and the nation. Illustrating how urban, national and international contexts interact with one another, the book provides researchers with a deeper understanding of the multilevel governance of religious diversity.
Latest from Olivier Roy offering a brilliant analysis of Europe's ongoing culture wars over identity, immigration and Islam, and what these mean for Christianity. As populism rises and historic identities are hotly contested, the idea of the 'Christian West' is under the spotlight.
In 2015 vond aan het Sint-Janscentrum een wetenschappelijk colloquium plaats met internationale sprekers, naar aanleiding van de verjaardag van de val van de Berlijnse Muur. De teksten van de lezingen, die gehouden werden tijdens dit colloquium, zijn nu verzameld in de bundel Secularisation & Europe , een uitgave van uitgeverij Betsaida in samenwerking met de wetenschappelijke uitgeverij van de Pauselijke Universiteit Johannes Paulus II in Krakau.
Christendom lasted for over a thousand years in Western Europe, and we are still living in its shadow. For over two centuries this social and religious order has been in decline. Enforced religious unity has given way to increasing pluralism, and since 1960 this process has spectacularly accelerated. In this 2003 book, historians, sociologists and theologians from six countries answer two central questions: what is the religious condition of Western Europe at the start of the twenty-first century, and how and why did Christendom decline? Beginning by overviewing the more recent situation, the authors then go back into the past, tracing the course of events in England, Ireland, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and showing how the fate of Christendom is reflected in changing attitudes to death and to technology, and in the evolution of religious language. They reveal a pattern more complex and ambiguous than many of the conventional narratives will admit.
The power of modernity to secularise has been a foundational idea of the western world. Both social science and church history understood that the Christian religion from 1750 was deeply vulnerable to industrial urbanisation and the Enlightenment. But as evidence mounts that countries of the European world experienced secularising forces in different ways at different periods, the timing and causes of de-Christianisation are now widely seen as far from straightforward. Secularisation in the Christian World brings together leading scholars in the social history of religion and the sociology of religion to explore what we know about the decline of organised Christianity in Britain, Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia. The chapters tackle different strands, themes, comparisons and territories to demonstrate the diversity of approach, thinking and evidence that has emerged in the last 30 years of scholarship into the religious past and present. The volume includes both new research and essays of theoretical reflection by the most eminent academics. It highlights historians and sociologists in both agreement and dispute. With contributors from eight countries, the volume also brings together many nations for the first consolidated international consideration of recent themes in de-Christianisation. With church historians and cultural historians, and religious sociologists and sociologists of the godless society, this book provides a state-of-the-art guide to secularisation studies.
In Western Europe, populist radical right parties are calling for a return to Christian or Judeo-Christian values and identity. The growing electoral success of many of these parties may suggest that, after decades of secularisation, Western Europeans are returning to religion. Yet these parties do not tell their supporters to go to church, believe in God, or practise traditional Christian values. Instead, they claim that their respective national identities and cultures are the product of a Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition which either encompasses—or has produced—secular modernity. This book poses the question: if Western European politics is secular, why has religious identity become a core element of populist radical right discourse? To answer this question, Morieson examines the discursive use of religion by two of the most powerful and influential populist radical right parties: The French National Front and the Dutch Party for Freedom. Based on this examination, he argues that the populist radical right has capitalised on a cultural shift engendered by the increasing visibility of Islam in Europe. Western Europeans’ encounter with Islam has revealed the non-universal nature of Western European secularism to Europeans, and demonstrated the secularisation of Christianity into Western European ‘culture.’ This, in turn, has allowed secular French and Dutch citizens to identify themselves—as well as their nation and, ultimately, Western civilisation—as Christian or Judeo-Christian. Seizing on this cultural shift, the author contends that the National Front and Party for Freedom have built successful and similar brands of reactionary politics based on the notion that contemporary secularism is a product of Europe’s Christian heritage and values, and that therefore Muslim immigration is an existential threat to the core values of European politics, including the differentiation of politics and religion, and of church and state. ‘Religion and the Populist Radical Right: Secular Christianism and Populism in Western Europe’ will be of interest to scholars and researchers working on the intersections of Political Science, Sociology, and Religion. It will also appeal to the general audience interested in the relationship between populism in Western Europe and religious identity as it is written in an accessible style.