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Religion, Secularization and Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Gordon Graham
Gordon Graham
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews
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Extract

The ideas of modernity and post-modernity have recently come to figure prominently in social thought. Their importance for social thought about religion, however, has not generally been explored. Yet recent concern with modernity and its aftermath is closely related to the widespread interest that used to be taken in secularization. Indeed, I hope to show that some of the basic questions at issue are much the same.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 67 , Issue 260 , April 1992 , pp. 183 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992

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References

1 A clear statement of this view is to be found in Don Cupitt's popularizing book The Sea of Faith (London: BBC Publications, 1984).Google Scholar ‘The process of secularisation has been going on very slowly for a very long time. Its beginning, at the height of Christian civilization in the twelfth century, seems to be connected with the fact that Christianity makes a sharper distinction than other faiths between the clergy and the laity, and between the sacred and the secular. The faith itself tended to push political and economic man away, out into a non-religious realm. In time, that secular realm of politics, economics, science and technology outgrew and overwhelmed the sacred. Religion lost its influence in public life, and in the past century or so has even lost much of its influence in private life as well’ (p. 31).

2 State of the Working-class in England in 1844, ix.Google Scholar

3 Communist Manifesto, Trans. Moore, Samuel (Penguin edition, 1967), 106.Google Scholar

4 MacIntyre, Alasdair, Secularization and Moral Change (Oxford: Claren don Press, 1967).Google Scholar

5 For example Dretske, Fred I., Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).Google Scholar

6 For example Fodor, Jerry, The Language of Thought (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976).Google Scholar

7 For example Gibbard, Alan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).Google Scholar

8 On this see classic, Keith Thomas'sReligion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971).Google Scholar

9 Of the sort Gibbard outlines, loc. cit.