This paper argues that the alleged demise of liberation theology is the product of an oversimplification of the movement’s development,—one that depends on a church-focused understanding of the process of secularization. Yet, a different interpretation of this process may allow us to see secularization as a process capable of eliciting new forms of sacralization. My contention is that liberation theology has remained active in civil society, especially through faith-based organizations not supported by the Catholic Church. I argue that these civil-society organizations have become new sacred spaces that address the needs of the most vulnerable. To warrant these claims, I present a comparative study of the parallel development of liberation theology and Pentecostalism in Latin America, particularly in the case of Peru. Since both movements focus on the most disenfranchised and thus may compete for the same public, attention to the success or failure of their strategies will help to elucidate the current status of liberation theology.

Critics of secularization theory have recently focused upon religion’s public role to put forward theses about de-differentiation, post-secularity and desecularization. A strong defence of secularization theory has not been forthcoming because its proponents have tended to assume, rather than demonstrate, that religion has lost social significance. Drawing upon a neosecularization theoretical approach that highlights the scope of religious authority, this article examines evidence from qualitative studies of the attempts of English mainstream Christian organizations to bring religious messages into the public space and to engage in welfare provision. This re-assessment shows that religious organizations are increasingly co-opted by secular authorities, in ways neither anticipated by, nor explored in, orthodox accounts of secularization. But rather than blurring “the religious” and “the secular,” their distinction is heightened. This situation involves an interlinked and mutually-reinforced declining scope of religious authority at the macro-, meso- and micro-levels, which, it is proposed, constitutes a state of advanced secularization.

Why do similar modern nations accord religion different roles in their public institutions? This paper engages this question by examining trends in religious instruction in the public schools of the United States and Australia from 1850 to 1950. I find that American education secularized farther and faster than Australian education because of its decentralized system of educational administration. In the United States, decentralized educational administration facilitated challenges to religious exercises by religious minorities, fostered professional development among educators, and allowed novel educational practices oriented in new educational theories rather than religion to spread. In Australia, by contrast, centralized state control over education insulated majoritarian religious exercises from minority criticism, suppressed professional development, and helped maintain traditional educational practices that sustained religious instruction. The state thus has both mediating and constitutive effects on secularization, a finding which opens new directions for research into the dynamics of secularization.

This paper examines the development of religious education policy in the government schools of New South Wales (Australia) since 1960. The New South Wales religious education curriculum features three components: (1) teacher-led “general religious education” (gre); (2) right-of-entry denominational instruction provided by visiting clergy (“special religious education”, or sre); and (3) occasional additional devotional exercises such as hymns and prayers. Between 1960 and 1980, this system underwent a partial secularization. gre was transformed from a straightforward course in Christianity built around government-produced Scripture readers to a flexible curricular component built around the academic study of multiple religions. At the same time, sre was strengthened and had its position in the curriculum secured; and devotional exercises were allowed to continue only in those settings where they formed an “appropriate” match with the community. I find that “secularizing” reforms were most consistently driven by teachers and administrators with practical motives: avoiding controversy, improving working conditions, and facilitating class management. This finding both challenges and complements recent works that interpret secularization as a political process driven by politicians and professionals primarily interested in enhancing their power or prestige at the expense of religious actors.

Surveying three generations of comparative sociologists, separated by abrupt discontinuities, the study reaches the conclusion that the original promise of comparative sociology set in motion a century ago remains largely unfulfilled. It will then be argued that the work of the third generation of comparative sociologists on civilizational analysis and multiple modernities can redeem the promise of comparative sociology by rectifying the neglect of developmental patterns in other civilizations and recovering the fundamental relevance of the periphery. The third generation is thus seeking to undo the erasure of the historical experience of a very sizeable portion of humankind from the foundation of social theory. This argument is illustrated by selective reference to the concept of the nation-state, and comparisons of civilizational processes and developmental patterns that stem from different religions and traditions and generate varieties of nationalism, alternative modernities and patterns of secularization.

In this article, I review my recent book Protestant Modernity. Weber, Secularisation and Protestantism, which reconstructs Weber's theory of secularisation and argues that this is formulated within a liberal Protestant framework. I argue that this theory is a part of his Protestant account of modernity. I also sketch some of the major issues involved in developing a Catholic account of modernity and provide some worked through examples of the sociological implications of this change of confessional presuppositions.