¹ Bryan Wilson, ‘Secularization: the inherited model’, in Philip E. Hammond, ed., The sacred in a secular age: toward revision in the scientific study of religion (Berkeley, CA, 1985), pp. 9–20, at 12, 14. The editor introduced secularization: ‘Even today, scholars do not – and probably cannot – doubt the essential truth of thesis’, p. 1. A notable exception among British sociologists of religion to this homogenizing tendency has been David Martin; for his retrospect see his On secularization: towards a revised general theory (Aldershot, 2005). For another notable exception see the work of Grace Davie, especially The sociology of religion (London, 2007): ‘it is as modern to draw on the resources of religion to critique the secular as it is to draw on the resources of the secular to critique the religious’, p. 1.

² Bruce, Steve, God is dead: secularization in the West (Oxford, 2002), pp. xiiGoogle Scholar, 1, 186 and passim. It appears as ‘the secularization thesis’ in Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, ‘Secularization: the orthodox model’, in Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and modernization: sociologists and historians debate the secularization thesis (Oxford, 1992), pp. 8–30. Despite this volume's offer of a debate, the sociology of the subject which is hegemonic in Britain has not subsequently allowed itself to be revised in the light of historical research. Bryan Wilson, ‘Reflections on a many sided controversy’, in ibid., p. 210, contended that academics now ‘take secularization for granted’ and dismiss ‘serious attention’ to religion ‘with some amusement’.

³ Casanova, José, Public religions in the modern world (Chicago, IL, 1994), p. 211Google Scholar.

⁴ MacIntyre, Alasdair, Secularization and moral change (London, 1967)Google Scholar. At least one philosopher, however, was able to draw a different conclusion even from such reductionist premises, since ‘the contingency of history mocks our predictions’: Leszek Kolakowski, ‘The revenge of the sacred in secular culture’, in Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on endless trial (Chicago, IL, 1990), pp. 63–74, at 64.

⁵ Taylor, Charles, A secular age (Cambridge, MA, 2007), pp. ixGoogle Scholar, 14.

⁶ Jeffrey Cox, ‘Master narratives of long-term religious change’, in Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The decline of Christendom in Western Europe 1750–2000 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 201–17, at 201.

⁷ Nash, David, ‘Reconnecting religion with social and cultural history: secularization's failure as a master narrative’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2004), pp. 302–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 302–3.

⁸ Wilson, ‘Secularization: the inherited model’, p. 10; idem, Religion in sociological perspective (Oxford, 1982), pp. 1, 5. Wilson argued for a distinction between ‘secularization’, an objective study, and ‘secularism’, a normative campaign; the contributions of secularists had been ‘at best, marginal to the momentum of the process of secularization’ (ibid., p. 149). It is not clear that this distinction has been securely established. Even in 1965, another sociologist had argued: ‘Since there is no unitary process of secularization one cannot talk in a unitary way about the causes of secularization. The whole concept appears as a tool of counter-religious ideologies which identify the “real” element in religion for polemical purposes and then arbitrarily relate it to the notion of a unitary and irreversible process, partly for the aesthetic satisfactions found in such notions and partly as a psychological boost to the movements with which they are associated’: David Martin, ‘Towards eliminating the concept of secularization’, in Julius Gould, ed., Penguin survey of the social sciences, 1965 (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 169–82, at 176.

⁹ Exceptions are a cyclical theory of religious decline and revival based on an anthropological need for meaning (for which see Bell, Daniel, ‘The return of the sacred? The argument on the future of religion’, British Journal of Sociology, 28 (1977), pp. 419–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and what has been termed the ‘Stark–Bainbridge theory’ of the need for supernatural compensation for the non-attainment of worldly desires, a theory which is held to contend that ‘religion performs social or psychological functions sufficiently vital that it cannot disappear and hence the appearance of decline must either mask some process of substitution or be merely temporary’: Wallis and Bruce, ‘Secularization: the orthodox model’, p. 25. The second model is met with the reply that such activities do not count as supernatural religion. For the argument that high rates of church attendance are the result of denominational competition, see Stark, Rodney and Iannaccone, Laurence R., ‘A supply-side reinterpretation of the “secularization” of Europe’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 33 (1994), pp. 230–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stark, Rodney, Finke, Roger and Iannacconne, Laurence R., ‘Pluralism and piety: England and Wales, 1851’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 34 (1995), pp. 431–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Philip Hammond wrote of a conference on the subject in 1970 and its indebtedness to these founders: ‘subsequent investigators showed little in the way of systematic elaboration or development … It was as if those founders had said it all; by early in the twentieth century the social scientific study of religion had received the model bequeathed by these giants but had not gone importantly beyond it … We were still in the grip of a model conceived fifty to a hundred years earlier’: ‘Introduction’, in The sacred in a secular age, p. 2.

¹¹ Bruce, God is dead, p. 219 (italics in original).

¹² Hugh McLeod, ‘Secular cities? Berlin, London and New York in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, in Bruce, ed., Religion and modernization, pp. 59–89.

¹³ Casanova, Public religions in the modern world, p. 211.

¹⁴ E.g. Bruce, God is dead, ‘References’, pp. 248–63, and, even more clearly in the index, pp. 264–9, notices the work of only a few historians, and of fewer still who dissent from the secularization paradigm.

¹⁵ For a clear example of such historians see Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, ‘Introduction. Modernity and later-seventeenth-century England’, in Houston and Pincus, eds., A nation transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 1–19. Their central contentions about the late seventeenth century are ‘the increasing differentiation of politics and religion’, and that ‘Religious life was increasingly identified with the reformation of manners. Faith, word and doctrine were supplanted by work, conduct and civility’, pp. 13, 15. Their argument appeals for its authority on the validity of a notion of ‘modernity’ only to the work of ‘social scientists’, pp. 5–7.

¹⁶ ‘Essentially, what I have tried to do here is to push to the final sociological consequence an understanding of religion as a historical product’: Berger, Peter L., The social reality of religion (London, 1969), p. viGoogle Scholar. Charles Taylor explains that ‘it is a crucial fact of our present spiritual predicament that it is historical’. Taylor also accepts, as a historical episode or process, the ‘rise of modernity’: ‘The basic insight underlying the “orthodox” modes of theory in this domain is that “modernity” (in some sense) tends to repress or reduce “religion” (in some sense)’: Taylor, A secular age, pp. 25–6, 28, 290, 429. ‘Modernity’ does not appear in the index, and is not challenged in Taylor's text.

¹⁷ Martin, David, The religious and the secular: studies in secularization (London, 1969), pp. 65–6Google Scholar. Bruce now protests that the secularization paradigm does not require an earlier ‘Golden Age of Faith’, only major change: God is dead, pp. 54–6. That major change has happened is accepted in the present article, but reinterpreted.

¹⁸ Acquaviva, S. S., The decline of the sacred in industrial society, trans. Patricia Lipscomb (Oxord, 1979), pp. 84Google Scholar, 109, 159. For the essentially historical nature of this thesis, see esp. pp. 85–136. The author adds ‘the class struggle’ and ‘science and technology’ as contributing causes, pp. 106, 136, 140.

¹⁹ Cox, Harvey, The secular city: secularization and urbanization in theological perspective (New York, NY, 1965), p. 1Google Scholar.

²⁰ Berger, Social reality of religion, pp. 113, 128, 130–1, 170.

²¹ Bruce, God is dead, p. 9.

²² Ibid., p. 4, Figure 1.1, and p. 15. For more nuanced, but still historical, accounts see Wilson, Bryan R., Religion in secular society: a sociological comment (London, 1966), pp. 1–18Google Scholar; Martin, David, A general theory of secularization (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar, offered a sophisticated account of secularization as something which ‘occurs’ by examining ‘historical circumstances’, pp. 4–5, 18–21; Sommerville, C. John, The secularization of early modern England: from religious culture to religious faith (New York, NY, 1992)Google Scholar; McLeod, Hugh, Secularisation in western Europe, 1848–1914 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 1–12Google Scholar.

²³ For an argument that Max Weber is not to be understood as a theorist of secularization, and an exploration of some historiographical consequences, see J. C. D. Clark, ‘The re-enchantment of the world? Religion and monarchy in eighteenth-century Europe’, in Michael Schaich, ed., Monarchy and religion: the transformation of royal culture in eighteenth-century Europe (Oxford, 2007), pp. 41–75.

²⁴ From a large literature, see Porter, Roy, English society in the eighteenth century (Harmondsworth, 1982; 2nd edn, 1990)Google Scholar; idem, Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world (London, 2000); Israel, Jonathan, Radical enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ For an analysis of this scholarship see especially Morris, Jeremy, ‘The strange death of Christian Britain: another look at the secularization debate’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 963–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This discussion takes Morris's overview as a starting point, and does not revisit the points made there. For an argument that secularization is ‘a theological hypothesis’ within ‘arguments about the nature of religion’, whatever the quantifiable features of social change, see Morris, ‘Secularization and religious experience: arguments in the historiography of British religion’, a companion to the present article in this issue of the Historical Journal.

²⁶ Brown, Callum, The social history of religion in Scotland since 1730 (London, 1987)Google Scholar; idem, The death of Christian Britain: understanding secularisation 1800–2000 (London, 2001; 2nd edn, 2009); Cox, Jeffrey, The English churches in a secular society: Lambeth, 1870–1930 (New York, NY, 1982)Google Scholar; Gill, Robin, Competing convictions (London, 1989)Google Scholar; idem, The myth of the empty church (London, 1993); revised edn as The ‘empty church’ revisited (Aldershot, 2003); Green, S. D., Religion in the age of decline: organization and experience in industrial Yorkshire 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McLeod, Hugh, Class and religion in the late Victorian city (London, 1974), p. 281Google Scholar; idem, Secularisation in western Europe; Morris, J. N., Religion and urban change: Croydon, 1840–1914 (Woodbridge, 1992)Google Scholar; Obelkevitch, James, Religion and rural society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar; Smith, Mark, Religion in industrial society: Oldham and Saddleworth 1740–1865 (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar; Williams, S. C., Religious belief and popular culture in Southwark, c. 1880–1939 (Oxford, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yeo, Stephen, Religion and voluntary organisations in crisis (London, 1976)Google Scholar, a study of Reading, 1890–1914.

²⁷ A small sample would include, in high politics and imperialism: Parry, Jon, Democracy and religion: Gladstone and the Liberal party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strong, Rowan, Anglicanism and the British Empire (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar; Brown, Stewart J., Providence and empire: religion, politics and society in the United Kingdom (London, 2008)Google Scholar; in international conflict: Kley, Dale Van, The religious origins of the French Revolution: from Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, CT, 1996)Google Scholar; Aston, Nigel, Christianity in revolutionary Europe, 1750–1830 (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; Bell, James, The imperial origin of the king's church in early America, 1607–1783 (Basingstoke, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, A war of religion: dissenters, Anglicans and the American Revolution (Basingstoke, 2008); Burleigh, Michael, Earthly powers: religion and politics in Europe from the Enlightenment to the Great War (London, 2005)Google Scholar; idem, Sacred causes: religion and politics from the European dictators to Al Qaeda (London, 2006).

²⁸ Kepel, Gilles, La revanche de dieu (Paris, 1991)Google Scholar.

²⁹ A ‘whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled “secularization theory” is essentially mistaken … The world today is massively religious, is anything but the secularized world that had been predicted (whether joyfully or despondently) by so many analysts of modernity’: Peter L. Berger, ‘The desecularization of the world: a global overview’, in Berger, ed., The desecularization of the world: resurgent religion and world politics (Washington, DC, 1999), pp. 1–18, at 2–3, 9.

³⁰ ‘The new wars of religion’, Economist, 385 (3–9 Nov. 2007).

³¹ For a survey see Walsham, Alexandra, ‘The Reformation and the “disenchantment of the world” reassessed’, Historical Journal, 51 (2008), pp. 497–528CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The present article takes this overview of the Reformation period as a starting point, and does not revisit the points made there. Walsham is, however, primarily concerned with ‘desacralization’ rather than with ‘secularization’ (p. 504).

³² Mack, Phyllis, Visionary women: ecstatic prophecy in seventeenth-century England (Berkeley, CA, 1994)Google Scholar; idem, Heart religion in the British Enlightenment: gender and emotion in early Methodism (Cambridge, 2008); Hempton, David, The religion of the people: Methodism and popular religion c. 1750–1900 (London, 1996)Google Scholar; idem, Methodism: empire of the spirit (New Haven, CT, 2005).

³³ Claydon, Tony, Europe and the making of England 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar; Pincus, Steve, 1688: the first modern revolution (New Haven, CT, 2009)Google Scholar. This work provides extensive evidence for the importance of religious commitment; evidence at odds with the book's central argument.

³⁴ See above, p. 000.

³⁵ Callum G. Brown, ‘Did urbanization secularize Britain?’, Urban History Yearbook, 1988 (London, 1988), pp. 1–14, at 1, 11. Brown offers a critique of Gilbert, Alan, Religion and society in industrial England: church, chapel and social change, 1740–1914 (London, 1976)Google Scholar: ‘Gilbert's interpretation hinges on the sociological concept of “modernization”’, p. 5.

³⁶ Callum G. Brown, ‘A revisionist approach to religious change’, in Bruce, ed., Religion and modernization, pp. 31–58, at 48.

³⁷ ‘The history of the Reformation as a European phenomenon has … oscillated between seeing it as a matter of local variants on a central theme, and emphasizing the peculiarities and distinctiveness of local traditions’; from a survey of 1994 ‘no comprehensive synthesis seems to emerge’: Bob Scribner, in Scribner, Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., The Reformation in national context (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 2–3; Heinz Schilling, ‘The second Reformation: problems and issues’, in Schilling, Religion, political culture and the emergence of early modern society (Leiden, 1992), pp. 247–301.

³⁸ For the latter, in the period of this review, see Kolakowski, Leszek, God owes us nothing: a brief remark on Pascal's religion and on the spirit of Jansenism (Chicago, IL, 1995)Google Scholar; Doyle, William, Jansenism: Catholic resistance to authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Dale Van Kley, ‘Jansenism and the international suppression of the Jesuits’, in Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett, eds., The Cambridge history of Christianity, vii:Enlightenment, reawakening and revolution, 1660–1815 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 302–28.

³⁹ Chatellier, Louis, The Europe of the devout: the Catholic Reformation and the foundation of a new society trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar; Tyacke, Nicholas, ed., England's long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London, 1998)Google Scholar; Wallace, Peter G., The long European Reformation: religion, political conflict, and the search for conformity, 1350–1750 (Basingstoke, 2004)Google Scholar; Watt, Jeffrey R., ed., The long Reformation (Boston, MA, 2006)Google Scholar. Despite its qualifications, even Dickens, A. G. and Tonkin, John M., The Reformation in historical thought (Cambridge, MA, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar treated ‘the Reformation’ almost wholly as a sixteenth-century and as a Protestant episode.

⁴⁰ Ward, W. R., The Protestant evangelical awakening (Cambridge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Early evangelicalism: a global intellectual history, 1670–1789 (Cambridge, 2006).

⁴¹ See, in general, Lopez, Robert S., The commercial revolution of the middle ages, 950–1350 (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Favier, Jean, Gold & spices: the rise of commerce in the middle ages (1987; trans. Caroline Higgitt, New York, NY, 1998)Google Scholar; Spufford, Peter, Power and profit: the merchant in medieval Europe (London, 2002)Google Scholar (for the ‘commercial revolution’ of the thirteenth century, pp. 12–59); Epstein, Steven A., An economic and social history of later medieval Europe, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar. The significance of these changes for the secularization paradigm remains, even if they are not to be interpreted as a ‘transition to capitalism’; for the latter thesis see Howell, Martha C., Commerce before capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁴² van der Wee, Herman, The growth of the Antwerp market and the European economy (fourteenth–sixteenth centuries) (3 vols., The Hague, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cardini, Franco et al. , Banchieri e mercanti di Siena (Rome, 1987)Google Scholar; Hunt, Edwin S., The medieval super-companies: a study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Brien, Patrick et al. , eds., Urban achievement in early modern Europe: golden ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London (Cambridge, 2001)Google Scholar; Spufford, Peter, From Antwerp to London: the decline of financial centres in Europe (Ortelius lecture, Wassenaar: Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Dollinger, Philippe, The German Hanse (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Lane, Frederic C., Venice: a maritime republic (Baltimore, MD, 1973)Google Scholar; Kedar, Benjamin Z., Merchants in crisis: Genoese and Venetian men of affairs and the fourteenth-century depression (New Haven, CT, 1976)Google Scholar; Heinz Stoob, Die Hanse (Graz, 1995); Epstein, Steven, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996)Google Scholar; Hocquet, Jean Claude, Denaro, navi e mercati a Venezia, 1200–1600 (Rome, 1999)Google Scholar; Marco Tangheroni, Politica, commercio, agricoltura a Pisa nel trecento (Pisa, 2002); Kirk, Thomas Allison, Genoa and the sea: policy and power in an early modern maritime republic, 1559–1684 (Baltimore, MD, 2005)Google Scholar; Koppe, Wilhelm, Die Lübecker Frankfurt händler des 14 jahrhunderts (Lübeck, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Lestocquoy, Jean, La vie sociale et economique à Arras du XIIe au XVe siècle (Arras, 1941)Google Scholar; Nicholas, David, The metamorphosis of a medieval city: Ghent in the age of the Arteveldes, 1302–1390 (Lincoln, NE, 1987)Google Scholar; Murray, James M., Bruges, cradle of capitalism, 1280–1390 (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Spufford, Power and profit, pp. 29, 32, 34.

⁴⁶ Epstein, An economic and social history of later medieval Europe, pp. 213, 271–4.

⁴⁷ Thomson, J. K. J., A distinctive industrialization: cotton in Barcelona, 1728–1832 (Cambridge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁴⁹ For an attempt to vindicate Max Weber see especially Marshall, Gordon, Presbyteries and profits: Calvinism and the development of capitalism in Scotland, 1560–1707 (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar, a work which is, however, over-optimistic about Scotland's industrial activity in the seventeenth century and frames no comparison with economic activity in non-Calvinist societies. On Weber, see also Collinson, Patrick, ‘Religion, society and the historian’, Journal of Religious History, 23 (1999), pp. 149–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 163–4.

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⁵² ‘The Christian Church of the Middle Ages was firmly authoritarian and exclusive in its attitude to knowledge. There was a single truth and it knew what it was’: Bruce, God is dead, p. 29. No evidence is adduced to support this parody.

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⁵⁵ Klotz, Edith L., ‘A subject analysis of English imprints for every tenth year from 1480 to 1640’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 1 (1938), pp. 417–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sommerville, The secularization of early modern England, pp. 92–3.

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⁵⁷ For the origin of liberalism see Clark, J. C. D., English society, 1660–1832: religion, ideology and politics during the ancien regime (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 6–8Google Scholar; for the theological origins of universal suffrage, ibid., pp. 382–4, 396–7.

⁵⁸ Bruce, God is dead, pp. 229–32, abandons a transition from the modern to the post-modern without appreciating the consequence: the corresponding weakness of a transition from the pre-modern to the modern. For the absence of this earlier transition, at least in England, see also Macfarlane, Alan, The culture of capitalism (Oxford, 1987), pp. 144–69Google Scholar. Macfarlane (p. 169) identified the recent desire to see fundamental transitions everywhere as ‘Revolutionism’, and called for its study; perhaps the secularization paradigm is a prime instance of this convention.

⁵⁹ Bruce, God is dead, pp. xii, 2.

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⁶² Bruce, God is dead, pp. 2, 13–14.

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⁶⁴ J. C. D. Clark, ‘The eighteenth-century context’, in William J. Abraham and James E. Kirby, eds., The Oxford handbook of Methodist studies (Oxford, 2009), pp. 3–29, at 5.

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⁶⁸ Brown, ‘A revisionist approach to religious change’, pp. 52–3.

⁶⁹ For the decline of medieval Conciliarism, the rival ecclesiology to Tridentine papalism, see Tierney, Brian, Foundations of the conciliar theory: the contribution of the medieval canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1955)Google Scholar; Black, Antony, Monarchy and community: political ideas in the later Conciliar Controversy 1430–1450 (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar; Oakley, Francis, The Conciliarist tradition: constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar.

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⁷¹ For the way in which these phenomena contradict modernization theory, see especially Clark, English society, 1660–1832, passim.

⁷² For which, see Clark, J. C. D., The language of liberty, 1660–1832: political discourse and social dynamics in the Anglo-American world (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁷³ Bruce, God is dead, p. xii.

⁷⁴ Wilson, Religion in sociological perspective, p. 149.

⁷⁵ It is clear that the term ‘rational’ in such discussions signifies some substantive end approved of by the author, not the effectiveness of a means to any end, e.g. Bruce, God is dead, pp. 32 (‘impose rationality’), 43 (‘non-rational sentiments’).

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⁷⁹ ‘In any era … when religion, at least as commonly understood, is receding, vitality of the sacred may thus come as a surprise. The present era would seem to fit such a description’: Philip Hammond, in The sacred in a secular age, p. 5.

⁸⁰ Evidence for the constant distribution of belief and disbelief in God among American scientists between 1914 and 1996 is reviewed by Rodney Stark, ‘Secularization, R.I.P.’, in William H. Swatos, Jr. and Daniel V. A. Olson, eds., The secularization debate (Lanham, MD, 2000), pp. 41–66, at 57–8.

⁸¹ Stark, ‘Secularization, R.I.P.’, pp. 41–5.

⁸² Wilson, Bryan, Contemporary transformations of religion (London, 1976), p. 11Google Scholar (italics added).

⁸³ Bruce, God is dead, pp. 71–3, 104, 186.

⁸⁴ Kenneth Thompson, ‘How religious are the British?’, in Terence Thomas, ed., The British: their religious beliefs and practices, 1800–1986 (London, 1988), pp. 211–39, at 229.

⁸⁵ Bruce, God is dead, pp. 138, citing Gill, Robin, Hadaway, C. Kirk, and Marler, Penny Long, ‘Is religious belief declining in Britain?’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37 (1998), pp. 507–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Soul of Britain’ survey, Opinion Research Survey 2000.

⁸⁶ Bruce, God is dead, pp. 72, 186–203, 104–5, 186. Bruce contends that much work on ‘receptivity to religion’ (here called religiosity) is ‘methodologically inadequate’ (ibid., p. 186); perhaps that is because it is insufficiently historical.

⁸⁷ Davie, Grace, Religion in Britain since 1945: believing without belonging (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Michael P. Hornsby-Smith, ‘Recent transformations in English Catholicism: evidence of secularization?’, in Bruce, ed., Religion and modernization, pp. 118–44, at 121–3, 133, 135, 137, 139–40.

⁸⁹ Acquaviva, Decline of the sacred in industrial society, p. 153.

⁹⁰ Bruce, God is dead, pp. 3–4.

⁹¹ Berger, Social reality of religion, p. 107. Bruce disavows any claim of inevitability: ‘We are claiming irreversibility, rather than inevitability’: God is dead, p. 38. But a process need not be an inevitable process; and the question is whether it is a process at all.

⁹² Gauchet, Marcel, The disenchantment of the world: a political history of religion (1st edn, Paris, 1985Google Scholar; trans. Oscar Burge, Princeton, NJ, 1997), p. 162.

⁹³ Wilson, ‘Secularization: the inherited model’, p. 17.

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⁹⁷ Bruce, God is dead, p. 17.

⁹⁸ Clark, English society, 1660–1832, pp. 501–64.

⁹⁹ Worden, ‘The question of secularization’, p. 31. Worden repeatedly cites as his authority Cragg, Gordon, From puritanism to the age of reason (Cambridge, 1966)Google Scholar. But this work is actually of rather greater vintage, being a reprint of the 1950 edition; much has changed in the historiography of eighteenth-century religion since that date.

¹⁰⁰ [John Locke], An enquiry concerning humane understanding (London: Tho. Basset for Edward Mory, 1690), bk iv, ch. x, s. 1, p. 312.

¹⁰¹ Mather, F. C., High church prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733–1806) and the Caroline tradition in the later Georgian church (Oxford, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Varley, E. A., The last of the prince bishops: William Van Mildert and the high church movement of the early nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For high churchmanship as the matrix of the Oxford Movement see especially Nockles, Peter Benedict, The Oxford Movement in context: Anglican high churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁰⁶ A survey of the movement's pastoral role is lacking, but for its theoretical stance see Skinner, S. A., Tractarians and the ‘condition of England’: the social and political thought of the Oxford Movement (Oxford, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 6, ‘The church and the poor’.

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¹¹⁰ ‘We have plenty of evidence that the eighteenth-century Church of England was stuffed with placemen and that toadying to the gentry who controlled the lucrative livings and to the senior church officials who controlled cathedral posts was common’; nineteenth-century denunciations of eighteenth-century ‘Unbelieving bishops and a slothful clergy’ were ‘widely applicable’: Bruce, God is dead, pp. 153–4. Historians have now recovered much evidence for the pastoral effectiveness of the eighteenth-century church and for local spiritual vitality: e.g. Jago, Judith, Aspects of the Georgian church: visitation studies of the diocese of York, 1761–1776 (Cranbury, NJ, 1997)Google Scholar; Gregory, Jeremy and Chamberlain, Jeffrey S., eds., The national church in local perspective: the Church of England and the regions, 1660–1800 (Woodbridge, 2003)Google Scholar.

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¹¹⁵ Clark, English society, 1660–1832, pp. 164–200.

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¹¹⁷ One feature of the new American republic was the extraordinary attention of its preachers to the doctrine of the Atonement; but this has yet to find its historian.

¹¹⁸ J. C. D. Clark, ‘The strange persistence of wars of religion, 1638–2009’, in idem, The writing on the wall (forthcoming).

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¹²¹ Green, Religion in the age of decline, pp. 387–8, 390. Norman, Secularisation, p. ix, attributes the decline of the Church of England to ‘lost habit’ rather than to the impact of ‘hostile ideology’.

¹²² ‘What makes the European situation unique and exceptional when compared with the rest of the world is precisely the triumph of secularism as a teleological theory of religious development’: José Casanova, ‘Beyond European and American exceptionalisms: towards a global perspective’, in Grace Davie, Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, eds., Predicting religion: Christian, secular and alternative futures (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 17–29, at 24. For one aspect of this see David Bebbington, ‘The secularization of British universities since the mid-nineteenth century’, in George M. Marsden and Bradley J. Longfield, eds., The secularization of the academy (New York, NY, 1992), pp. 259–77.

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¹²⁴ From a large literature, see especially Ward, Keith, God, chance and necessity (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar; McGrath, Alister E., The twilight of atheism: the rise and fall of disbelief in the modern world (London, 2004)Google Scholar; Dawkins, Richard M., The God delusion (London, 2006)Google Scholar; Hitchens, Christopher, God is not great: the case against religion (London, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹²⁵ For the tensions within classic secularization theory subsequently caused by the inclusion in the analysis of historical evidence for other societies from around the world, see Katznelson, Ira and Jones, Gareth Stedman, eds., Religion and the political imagination (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁶ Marwick, Arthur, The sixties: cultural revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–1974 (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar; McLeod, Hugh, The religious crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, The death of Christian Britain (2009); and Brown, Callum G., ‘What was the religious crisis of the 1960s?’, Journal of Religious History, 34 (2010), pp. 468–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The emerging divide in scholarship is between explanations internal to the churches, notably reforming theology (McLeod) and explanations external to them, notably circumambient social change (Brown).

¹²⁷ Some students acknowledge ‘a basic incompatibility between religiously-based reasoning and “experiencing”, for instance, in the scientific world. Is the incompatibility intrinsic and irremediable, or is it historical and, for that reason, contingent?’: Acquaviva, Decline of the sacred in industrial society, p. 163. Green, Religion in the age of decline, p. 381, concludes that ‘no theory, for or against secularization, is consistent with all, or even most, of the evidence’. Bruce offers a definition of religion: ‘Religion for us consists of actions, beliefs and institutions predicated upon the assumption of the existence of either supernatural entities with powers of agency, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose, which have the capacity to set the conditions of, or to intervene in, human affairs’: ‘Secularization: the orthodox model’, pp. 10–11. The word ‘assumption’ seems to rule out the possibility of the validity of human experience. By contrast, historians have no authority to exclude evidence for either theism or atheism a priori.

¹²⁸ Gregory, Brad S., ‘The other confessional history: on secular bias in the study of religion’, History and Theory, 45 (2006), pp. 132–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, illustrates the premises of metaphysical naturalism present in Durkheim's work.

¹²⁹ Alan D. Gilbert, ‘Secularization and the future’, in Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils, eds., A history of religion in Britain: practice and belief from pre-Roman times to the present (Oxford, 1994), pp. 503–21, at 520 (italics added).

¹³⁰ For recent reassertions of the long-term validity of the secularization paradigm and of the related concept of modernization see, for example, Norris, Pippa and Inglehart, Robert, Sacred and secular: religion and politics worldwide (Cambridge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bruce, Steve and Glendinning, Tony, ‘When was secularization? Dating the decline of the British churches and locating its cause’, British Journal of Sociology, 61 (2010), pp. 107–26CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

¹³¹ Gregory, Jeremy, ‘Introduction: transforming “the age of reason” into “an age of faiths”: or, putting religions and beliefs (back) into the eighteenth century’, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 32 (2009), pp. 287–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 293.

¹³² Whether postmodernist critiques have been more effective is a matter for debate; see Ruff, Mark Edward, ‘The postmodern challenge to the secularization thesis: a critical assessment’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte, 99 (2005), pp. 385–401Google Scholar. Ruff suggests that the abandonment of the master narrative of secularization will only lead to the creation of a new master narrative, ‘one likely based on the so-called “feminization” narrative, the fruits of gender history’ (p. 398).

¹³³ For a preliminary attempt, from the standpoint of the sociology of religion in and relating to the United States, see William H. Swatos, Jr, and Kevin J. Christiano, ‘Secularization theory: the course of a concept’, in Swatos and Olson, eds., The secularization debate, pp. 1–20. The authors do not engage with the historical scholarship reviewed here.

¹³⁴ Micklethwait, John and Wooldridge, Adrian, God is back: how the global revival of faith is changing the world (New York, NY, 2009)Google Scholar. The analysis of this work is, however, made problematic by its normative endorsement of the category ‘modernization’. For similar appreciations of changing understandings see Marshall, Paul, Gilbert, Lela, and Ahmanson, Roberta Green, eds., Blind spot: when journalists don't get religion (New York, NY, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft, ‘God is winning: religion in global politics’, pp. 11–28; Smith, Steven D., The disenchantment of secular discourse (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar.

¹³⁵ Even then, ‘Might it not be the case that Europeans are not so much less religious than citizens in other parts of the world as differently religious?’: Grace Davie, ‘Europe: the exception that proves the rule?’, in Berger, ed., The desecularization of the world, pp. 65–83, at 65. Davie argues that ‘Western Europeans are unchurched populations, rather than simply secular’, p. 68. Cf. Davie, Grace, Religion in modern Europe: a memory mutates (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

¹³⁶ Davie, Heelas, and Woodhead, eds., Predicting religion, p. i and passim. Sommerville, The secularization of early modern England, p. 3, warns that ‘we are certainly not discussing the decline of Christianity’ (although treating the changes he explores as a ‘process’, pp. 11, 179–80, or ‘various processes’, p. 178, effecting a transition from just one binary alternative to its opposite). McLeod, Secularisation in western Europe, argues that ‘rather than one simple story-line, we need a narrative in which a variety of plots and sub-plots are intertwined’, p. 286. Martin, On secularization, p. 3, proposes, in place of secularization as ‘a once-for-all unilateral process’, a model of ‘successive Christianizations followed by or accompanied by recoils’.

¹³⁷ ‘Secularization is happening, yet secularization theory is wrong’: Brown, The death of Christian Britain, p. x. For an argument that this paradox entails ‘a re-examination of the nature of “religion” itself’, see Morris, ‘Secularization and religious experience’.

¹³⁸ See, for example, Davie, The sociology of religion, ch. 5, ‘Modernity: a single or plural construct?’, and pp. 247–9. Her reconsideration, as yet, still accepts ‘modernity’ and seeks only to diversify its meanings.