I

In the late twentieth century the idea of secularization was, undoubtedly, a dominant paradigm. Many sociologists of ‘religion’ (by which they meant, more narrowly, Latin Christianity in Europe and North America) wrote confidently about ‘the secularization model’, ‘the secularizing process’,Footnote ¹ or ‘the secularization paradigm’.Footnote ² Indeed, ‘the paradigm of secularization has been the main theoretical and analytical framework through which the social sciences have viewed the relationship of religion and modernity’.Footnote ³ Philosophers too often took as given this sociological orthodoxy about the impact on religious belief and practice of urbanization and industrialization.Footnote ⁴ In a recent major work, Charles Taylor attempts to ‘clarify’ philosophically ‘what this process, often invoked, but still not very clear, amounts to’. His ‘transformation’ from ‘enchantment’ to ‘disenchantment’ is nevertheless a historical one: ‘How did we move from a condition where, in Christendom, people lived naively within a theistic construal’, to the present, in which ‘unbelief has become for many the major default option?’Footnote ⁵ As one historian has observed, ‘Despite the efforts of doubters, sceptics and adversaries, the most influential general account of religion in modern Europe, and in the modern world, remains the theory of secularization.’Footnote ⁶ That theory constitutes a ‘metanarrative’ which has resulted in the ‘comparative eclipse’ of research on the actual and complex history of religion.Footnote ⁷ Yet despite its intellectual hegemony, the paradigm displayed certain characteristics which should have suggested more caution to historians.

First, the paradigm is offered as an objective, value-free alternative to religion, especially Christianity, yet it often appears as programmatic; indeed, ‘Sociology began as a contradiction of theology’ and was presented as a ‘replacement’ of religion, which had been ‘erroneous’. There was, then, a ‘tension’ in the sociology of religion that ‘has never been entirely dispelled’ between a ‘scientific stance’ towards religion and the urge ‘to discredit it’.Footnote ⁸ Second, the paradigm (despite professions to the contrary) is normally singular: it takes readers to an assumed endpoint, although via different chronologies. There are not several importantly different models of the essential nature of secularization on offer but, ultimately, one model of how secularization happens; nor is it often tested against models of religious change which lead to quite different results.Footnote ⁹ Most sociologists of religion, even if making initial gestures towards alternatives, tend to revert to a confident use of the singular term. Third, the model is by now of some vintage, although this historical rootedness is never examined as an issue within sociology. The authors who framed it were such giants as Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Karl Marx (1818–83), Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), Georg Simmel (1858–1918), Max Weber (1864–1920), Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939); subsequent sociologists add refinement, qualification, and empirical data without essentially changing the structure of the model.Footnote ¹⁰

Fourth, as has belatedly been acknowledged, this sociological paradigm describes only changes ‘within industrial democracies’,Footnote ¹¹ not everywhere in the present-day world; yet the older assumption that industrial democracies stand for other societies is in difficulty. The paradigm seldom attends to differences between societies, although historians can do so: for example, by exploring widely differing rates and patterns of church involvement in contemporaneous cities in different countries.Footnote ¹² Fifth, the paradigm tends to join together, without clear distinction, different things; for example: ‘secularization as differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms, secularization as decline of religious beliefs and practices, and secularization as marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere’.Footnote ¹³ Sixth, the paradigm in its ‘hard’ form is inward-looking, offering an explanation of religious decline alone without normally seeking to relate it to parallel phenomena. So statistics for declining church attendance, baptisms, marriages, Sunday school membership, and religious education are ably marshalled, but only in exceptional studies compared against similarly declining figures, in similar time periods, for other associational activity: enrolment in, and participation in the activities of, political parties, trades unions, sports clubs, or cultural groups. Seventh, the paradigm is positivist and does not incorporate recent work by physicians, psychologists, and psychiatrists; but this may be relevant, if phenomena such as ‘near death experiences’ are evidence for the religiosity of the unchurched. Eighth, the paradigm is almost wholly supported by an evidential base of recent work by sociologists.Footnote ¹⁴ The research of few historians is cited or integrated, with the exception of those historians who profess a major indebtedness to the social sciences.Footnote ¹⁵

Yet the paradigm is inescapably a historical one,Footnote ¹⁶ purporting to describe a fundamental change from an age of faith to an age of secular indifference to religion (the reliance of the classical sociology of religion on idealized versions of twelfth- and nineteenth-century Western European religious practice is not in doubt, as was pointed out by David Martin).Footnote ¹⁷ This interpretive superstructure is still built on underlying and (by now) clichéd historical assumptions: ‘Everything concurs in indicating (whether directly or indirectly and inductively) that religion undergoes a profound crisis in industrial society … Incipient secularity began in the urban area … Within industrial society’ social changes ‘bring about a decay in religiosity from a certain moment of history onwards’.Footnote ¹⁸ ‘The rise of urban civilization and the collapse of traditional religion are the two main hallmarks of our era and are closely related movements.’Footnote ¹⁹ Again, ‘Protestantism served as a historically decisive prelude to secularization … The original “locale” of secularization … was in the economic arena, specifically, in those sectors of the economy being formed by the capitalistic and industrial processes.’ The roots of ‘the dynamics’ of these developments

Such causes are arranged chronologically: ‘The Protestant Reformation’, after producing the ‘Protestant Ethic’, led to ‘Industrial Capitalism’ and, in turn, ‘Economic Growth’; ‘Monotheism’ in historical time produced ‘Rationality’ which begat ‘Science’, which begat ‘Technology’, which begat ‘Technological consciousness’. This genealogy of secularization contends that

‘The Protestant Reformation’, equally, sired a historically datable phenomenon, ‘Individualism’. ‘The Reformation’ produced ‘mass literacy’ which in turn led to ‘the general emphasis on the importance and rights of the individual and the growth of egalitarianism and liberal democracy’.Footnote ²² All these are historical hypotheses, now themselves of some age, but systematized and combined in the secularization paradigm.

Historians of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries used often to share this confidence in the ‘grand narrative’ of secularization not least because its end point, a secularized present, seemed assured. Medieval society was seen as obviously theistic. Nineteenth- or at least twentieth-century urban society in ‘the West’ was unquestionably secular. Its world had been thoroughly disillusioned, as Max Weber had rightly contended.Footnote ²³ It followed that the only thing for historians of the early modern period to do with secularization was to date it.Footnote ²⁴ But historians now have a problem: in the last few decades this secularized end point has been called in questionFootnote ²⁵ by such scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religion as Callum Brown, Jeffrey Cox, Robin Gill, Simon Green, Hugh McLeod, Jeremy Morris, James Obelkevitch, Mark Smith, Sarah Williams, and Stephen Yeo.Footnote ²⁶ Such work entails significant rethinking for earlier centuries. As is now appreciated, working-class participation could be substantially higher than was once thought, including in cities, and spanned a wide range of understanding, engagement, and self-identification; nor was the ‘empty church’ a recent phenomenon. Hitherto-used figures for church ‘membership’ embodied the assumptions of the voluntary, ‘gathered churches’ of Protestant nonconformity; these figures fail to capture the looser or more intermittent engagement of Catholicism and Anglicanism. Such figures also echo the assumptions about formality and regularity of middle-class activists; again, they fail to capture the less structured, less organized lives of the great majority. Assumptions about Christian behaviour and piety similarly take as an implicit yardstick the degree of knowledge of Christian doctrine and devotional practice attainable by those with intelligence, education, and leisure; the yardstick is less appropriate for those majorities with fewer of those advantages, groups that had their own conceptions of Christianity. Correcting for such inbuilt biases suggests that the high levels of church provision, attendance, and participation in Britain in c. 1850–1914 were the exception, not the norm. A new appreciation of the extent of popular religiosity means that the arrival of ‘secularization’ in Britain has been steadily postponed, and finally problematized; historians retain the term, as they retain ‘the Industrial Revolution’, but with increasing qualifiers and embarrassment. Historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are now illuminating the religious themes in episodes or developments once thought to be essentially secular.Footnote ²⁷ The contemporary world, too, has changed, as was brilliantly sensed by Gilles Kepel in his book La revanche de Dieu in 1991;Footnote ²⁸ American academic attention, even among sociologists formerly committed to the secularization paradigm, has turned to the growing salience of religion in world conflicts;Footnote ²⁹ in 2007 the Economist retracted its obituary of God, published in 2000, and printed a special issue on the wars of religion then being fought around the world.Footnote ³⁰

Historians of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have begun to reconsider their position fundamentally.Footnote ³¹ No longer is their implicit task to fill in the early sections of an overarching narrative of secularization, the full shape of which was to be more clearly seen in later centuries. Yet it is not the hardest task to argue that religion mattered in the age of the Reformation. In a later period, especially the long eighteenth century, the task is more difficult. Some scholars like Phyllis Mack and David Hempton have encouraged historians to rethink what religious experience meant for the rank and file.Footnote ³² Others like Tony Claydon and Steve Pincus have revealed the lasting importance of religious themes in the realms of politics and diplomacy, and argued about how one should diagnose and date the changes in those spheres.Footnote ³³ But such work has not yet transformed the historiography of an era still often seen as the classic territory of modernization, secularization, urbanization, and industrialization, or at least the locus of the decisive shifts that permitted such ‘processes’ to achieve swift fulfilment thereafter. There is as yet no general agreement on where historians now stand, and further exploration of the issue is suggested in this review.

II

It is argued here that the historical scenario underpinning the secularization paradigm, widely accepted half a century ago, has broken down in ways that call the paradigm in question. It is doubtful whether many historians would today endorse such broad categories or such elementary links between them as those advanced by Acquaviva and Bruce.Footnote ³⁴ It is even questionable whether sociology has authority in this field as distinct from its historical underpinning, although for reasons of space this theoretical question is not explored here. Rather, it is argued that the weak point in the secularization paradigm is not its statistical base (church attenders as a percentage of the population and church weddings as a percentage of all weddings, for example, did decline in the twentieth century) but the historical framework within which such data are set and their consequent historical interpretation. This review contends that, since the 1980s, a rapidly developing historiography, including but extending beyond the subject of religious belief and practice, has rendered the traditional sociological model untenable. With respect to the sociological genealogy of secularization just reviewed, this historiography establishes:

1. Urbanization did not produce secularization. In no simple sense was ‘modern urban society … inimical to religion’. Rather, the major declines in church attendance in Britain came in the period after the First World War, by which time migration to industrial centres had often halted and a reverse pattern of migration to suburbs and commuter belts begun. Before c. 1914, the most marked feature of many British cities was denominational rivalry, not religious disengagement. Until after 1918, urbanization was generally associated with higher, not lower, per capita church attendances. Far from industrialization and urbanization producing secularization, the late Victorian period was ‘arguably the point in British history when religion attained its greatest social significance’.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, perhaps ‘urbanization and industrialization can cause church growth’.Footnote ³⁶

2. There was no unitary ‘Protestant Reformation’ in the sixteenth century that could generate a unitary ‘Protestant ethic’.Footnote ³⁷ Rather, many diverse reforming initiatives were taken, often identified as Protestant or Catholic only by historical contingency. A weakness of the denominationally based historiography which seeks to depict a singular and uniquely Protestant Reformation is its failure to integrate into its account many major initiatives which took place within the Catholic Church, including Conciliarism and the movements of the Waldenses, Albigensians or Cathars, Lollards, Hussites, and Jansenists.Footnote ³⁸ Even historians not addressing these phenomena now talk about a ‘long Reformation’Footnote ³⁹ and point to the importance of successive waves of evangelical theology that broke before, during, and after industrialization.Footnote ⁴⁰

3. Protestantism was not a necessary or sufficient condition of ‘capitalism’, even if this last reification still has historical meaning. The component parts and practices of what was later termed ‘capitalism’ long preceded the Reformation and were not even exclusive to areas later Protestant.Footnote ⁴¹ England was not the ‘cradle of capitalism’, as Max Weber has been credited with believing, but a latecomer in economic development. The first leading medieval centres of international finance were not London or Geneva, but Catholic cities like Florence, Lucca, and Siena, then Bruges and Antwerp;Footnote ⁴² the first dominant European foci of international commerce were, again, not London but Catholic ports like Pisa, Genoa, Venice, and pre-Reformation Lübeck;Footnote ⁴³ the weaving of woollen cloth became a dominant industry first in Catholic towns like Arras, Bruges, and Ghent, not Bradford.Footnote ⁴⁴ Double-entry book-keeping originated in Genoa or Florence; bills of exchange had been developed in Italy by the late thirteenth century, and commercial insurance soon after;Footnote ⁴⁵ Catholic Venice passed the first patent law in Europe in 1447, and published the first book setting out the principles of accounting in 1494;Footnote ⁴⁶ the largest manufacturing establishment in pre-Reformation Europe and first significant example of assembly-line production from standardized parts was not in Birmingham but again in Venice's naval dockyard, the Arsenale; the centre of the European cotton trade by the late eighteenth century was not Glasgow or Manchester, but Catholic Barcelona.Footnote ⁴⁷

For many centuries, concentrations of manufacturing, commerce, and finance migrated around Europe, as they now do around the world, but not blown by any ‘Protestant Wind’. Even in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, the once-celebrated strong correlation between Protestant dissent and entrepreneurship in finance and manufacture has been shown to be largely inaccurate.Footnote ⁴⁸ Nor was the influence of theology on trade uni-directional. The economy of Scotland was anything but dynamic at the time of Calvinism's greatest flourishing there from the 1560s;Footnote ⁴⁹ three centuries later, after John Knox was a distant memory, Scotland's heavy industries boomed, partly manned by Irish Catholic immigrants. It might even be argued that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination provided a disincentive to worldly striving, and that its ‘this-worldly asceticism’ acted as an economic dampener in the two centuries after the Reformation; by contrast, luxury expenditure and monastic economic organization may have been fiscal stimuli in the expansive four centuries before the Black Death. Even if ‘Protestantism’ and ‘Catholicism’ were two homogeneous economic actors, which may be doubted, their economic consequences in their undisturbed forms are hard to compare in a Europe large parts of which were devastated by the military conflicts that religious reformation unleashed.Footnote ⁵⁰

4. That monotheism (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) alone produced rationality is a hypothesis that can be made to seem plausible only by omitting the key contrary example, China.Footnote ⁵¹ Even if monotheism produced rationality in Christendom, it did so long before ‘modernization’; ‘science’ in the twentieth-century sense was later still. ‘Technology’ was often a set of craft skills that long preceded academic ‘science’, as therefore did ‘technological consciousness’. And if monotheism produced rationality, it did so, among other eras, during the age of medieval Catholicism: the ‘secularization thesis’ is an aspect of normative nineteenth-century anti-Catholic polemic more than a scholarly hypothesis without polemical applications in its own day.Footnote ⁵²

5. The argument that people's vision of the supernatural world mirrored their vision of a hierarchy of wealth and power in this world embodies a priori reductionism. Medieval Catholicism was a varied and diverse system in which the papacy's power waxed and waned, finally coming close to eclipse in the early sixteenth century; ‘feudalism’, too, is a theoretical construct stretched to cover very diverse social relations. By the eighteenth century, many great conurbations and manufacturing towns were located in Protestant Europe, but many in Catholic Europe also.

6. Individualism did not wait for Protestantism, but can be traced in human conduct for centuries in Catholic Europe.Footnote ⁵³ Equally, some Protestant denominations, however much emphasis they placed on individual conversion, could expect ‘new births’ to take very similar forms. Protestant sects could be highly coercive and communitarian – generally more so than antecedent religious arrangements.

7. If the Reformation promoted widespread literacy in vernacular languages, it remained the case that by far the larger part of publications in the vernacular expressed a similar culture, rather than a newly emancipated and therefore secular one. In England, the Term Catalogues suggest that of new titles published and registered, the percentage falling into the category ‘Divinity’ actually rose from 29·5 to 48·8 between 1668–9 and 1705–9.Footnote ⁵⁴ Most titles were not registered, but studies of all published titles yield broadly similar results. Edith Klotz's research suggested that 32·6 per cent of titles published in 1500 fell into the category ‘Religious’, compared with 43·5 per cent in 1640: there was no long-term decline in that period.Footnote ⁵⁵ Michael Suarez assigns 34 per cent of titles published or republished in 1703 to the category ‘Religion, philosophy and ethics’, the largest category; although declining to 16 per cent by 1793, this fall is explained by the general printing ‘boom’, bringing greater growth in numbers of titles in other categories: the absolute number of religious titles still rose from 573 in 1703 to 815 in 1793, after a mid-century fall.Footnote ⁵⁶ As to the Reformation producing ‘liberal democracy’, this last is a term that betrays ignorance of the historical origins of two initially unrelated phenomena, liberalism and democracy.Footnote ⁵⁷

In sum, it is now extremely difficult to argue that there was a fundamental divide between ‘pre-modern’ and ‘modern’ of a kind which might validate a claim that ‘modernity’ is essentially secular in a way that a preceding era was not.Footnote ⁵⁸

III

The ‘secularization paradigm’ was constructed at a particular time and place. Appropriately, it has been held to fit ‘the liberal industrial democracies of the Western world’ at the present day and to describe the challenges posed to religion by ‘modernization’, a phenomenon supposed to characterize ‘the West’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The category ‘modernization’ became problematic as its components came under scrutiny: the nature of liberalism, the timing and significance of industrialization, the validity of the notion of ‘the West’, the profound differences between the United States and the societies of continental Europe.Footnote ⁶⁰ Centrally, sociologists, philosophers, and others who still make use of the idea of secularization treat it as integral to the notion of modernization.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, standard dictionaries of ideas largely define secularization in terms of modernization, and modernization in terms of secularization. This produces an argument that is strong until its circularity is realized. Yet ‘modernization’, as is now appreciated, is itself an historical construct. Before that became clear, in writing on the period addressed here modernization was reified and held synonymous with ‘the industrialization of work; the shift from villages to towns and cities; the replacement of the small community by society; the rise of individualism; the rise of egalitarianism; and the rationalization both of thought and of social organization’. ‘Close-knit, integrated, communities gradually lost power and presence to large-scale industrial and commercial enterprises, to modern states coordinated through massive, impersonal bureaucracies, and to cities. This is the classic community-to-society transition delineated by Ferdinand Tönnies (1955).’ Again, ‘The fragmentation of the religious tradition that resulted from the Reformation hastened the development of the religiously neutral state.’Footnote ⁶² Modernization is traditionally located (especially within the British Isles) as beginning (alternatively) in the late seventeenth century (Laslett) or the late eighteenth (Hobsbawm) but similarly conceived, and extending into the twentieth.

In a range of specialist fields, however, historians have produced results that are inconsistent with this model:

1. Labour had long pursued specialization of economic function: this did not wait for the Reformation, but preceded it and continued irrespective of religious innovation. Heads of households had long sought to specialize, for economic reasons: urbanization from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries produced increasing occupational definition. Thornbury, Gloucestershire, saw by-names for thirty-five non-agricultural activities, even before craft names became hereditary surnames (in Britain, before 1400; elsewhere earlier): bakers, brewers, butchers, carpenters, carters, coopers, fishers, fletchers, gardeners, joiners, masons, millers, porters, potters, shearers, shepherds, smiths, tailors, tanners, thatchers, tilers, turners, weavers, wrights, and others, including even clerks. The proliferation of such occupations did not wait for emancipation from any religious constraints.Footnote ⁶³

2. Population growth initially occurred both in the countryside and in the towns, so that urban life, although in some ways different, was not seen before the nineteenth century as signalling an ontological divide (and even then only by certain theorists). John Wesley (1703–91), whose journals record in detail a career of unwearying itinerancy in countryside, town, and growing manufacturing areas from the 1740s to his death, perceived no essential discontinuity bearing on the religious experience and development of individuals.Footnote ⁶⁴

3. Even the great urban conurbations were collections of small communities, so that it is not clear that even the nineteenth century saw a replacement of small-scale communities by ‘society’. Additionally, a widely shared idea of the polity was very ancient in the British Isles, and promoted a sense of collective identity at least back to the Anglo-Saxons: this, too, did not wait for ‘modernization’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The ascription of the date 1955 to Tönnies's notion records an English translation, and conceals the fact that his work positing a transition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft was first published as long ago as 1887; it now calls for revision.

4. Individualism (as has been seen) has been dated to a much earlier period and may even be pushed back to the origin of individual burials (in present-day England, from the bronze age, c. 2500 bc): it can no longer be chronologically linked to ‘modernization’. Nor, if individualism is a present-day reality, can it be adduced as a cause of secularization, since individual emancipation may only encourage people to explore a variety of ‘New Age’ religions rather than more familiar denominations.

5. Egalitarianism was a religious principle for many centuries before it became a secular political one: the idea that ‘all men are created equal’ has real leverage only when the emphasis is placed on the word ‘created’, and that term is construed literally. Nor did industrialization necessarily promote egalitarianism: the twentieth-century money economy permitted extraordinary disparities of wealth, and even more of life-styles, where people in medieval societies were often tied to a rough equality by the primitive nature of available goods. Even if occupational mobility promoted individualism, the pre-industrial countryside in the British Isles was a place of churning economic and demographic change, rarely of immemorial stasis.Footnote ⁶⁶

6. The ‘rationalization of thought’ is hard to explain, unless it means emancipation from religious belief; in which case the argument becomes circular. It might mean the rejection of Catholicism as superstition, in which case it identifies the polemical origin of the secularization paradigm. Or it might mean the extension of intellectuals’ doubts about Christian revelation into a broad social movement essentially built on the rejection of Christianity, now know as the Enlightenment; but here the historiography of recent decades has overset Peter Gay's secular model of the Enlightenment, propagated by him in the 1960s, and re-inscribed religion at the centre of that phenomenon.Footnote ⁶⁷

7. The meaning of ‘the rationalization … of social organization’ is similarly unclear; the smaller role of the state in earlier economies may only have meant a greater freedom for individuals rationally to maximize their utility. The idea that present-day bureaucracies act in rational ways is drawn from a priori assumption (or from the idealization of state bureaucracies in the German-speaking world, where much modernization theory originated) rather than from observation of their self-interest, corruption, or incompetence. The reassignment of administrative and charitable activities (in education, health, crime) from churches to civil agencies was ‘very much a product of the victory of Dissent’, seeking to break perceived monopolies of the established church, not of the decline of religious commitment as such. Indeed, the same period that saw the growth of a local government bureaucracy also saw the growth of many denominational initiatives against prostitution, drink, and gambling.Footnote ⁶⁸ A differentiation of function has undoubtedly occurred in the last two centuries, with the state taking over many religious functions hitherto discharged by churches and religious orders, but it is not clear why this would promote the decline of religious belief or practice as such.

8. The posited transition between religious uniformity produced by top-down imposition in late medieval Catholicism, and diversity as the result of individual choice in Reformation Protestantism, greatly overstates, and perhaps reverses, these characteristics on each side of the alleged binary divide. Late medieval Catholicism was itself diverse in respect of faith and practice, and generally lacked the centralized authority that Protestantism itself was to provoke.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the same time, historians have become increasingly aware of the principled reasons for seeking to impose religious uniformity in past societies,Footnote ⁷⁰ reasons closely related to the reasons given for the imposition of secular values in present-day societies. England witnessed a new phenomenon from the 1660s, in the development of congregations of nonconformists separated from the established church, a reality given a degree of recognition in the Toleration Act of 1689; but this growth of denominations can be interpreted as evidence of religious zeal rather than of a novel pluralism or relativism from which sprang religious indifference.

9. The religiously neutral state, formerly dated to the late seventeenth century, can no longer be located in that age: in Britain, hegemonic official ideology pictured the state as built on religious premises throughout the long eighteenth century and residually into the twentieth. Such an ideology (as in Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the laws of England) was presented as derived from a revealed religion which was conceived as doctrinal truth, not opinion. In England, legal disabilities on non-Anglicans were powerful until 1829 and are residual even today.Footnote ⁷¹ In North America, the ‘civic religion’ of the United States made the ‘separation of church and state’ a mantra in the twentieth century; this obscured the historical origins of that polity as a land created by Protestant dissent in a war of religion, a fact whose present-day consequences are correctly appreciated by militant Islam.Footnote ⁷²

Historians, then, can deal with the concept of modernization by dating its formulation and tracing how it was used. Certainly, the concept was wholly absent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. True, their inhabitants debated ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’, but this was a way of debating the relative achievements of Rome and their then-present-day Europe; the idea was not reified as ‘modernity’ or extrapolated as a process, ‘modernization’. Only those historians who are dependent on ahistorical social sciences for their categories can now suppose that there simply is such a thing as modernity, the task of historians being merely to date its arrival or explain the different shapes that it takes.

For polemical reasons, ‘modernization’ and ‘secularization’ became largely synonymous. Like the first, the second has been held by sociologists to be ‘naturally occurring’.Footnote ⁷³ It has, however, been described more by its putative effects than by its alleged nature:

Such a characterization combines historical hypotheses with philosophic categories; it depends on the sustainability of such philosophical terms as ‘empirical’, ‘rational’, and ‘positivistic’, and, here again, developments in the natural sciences like quantum physics call in question these survivals from the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁵ As to the historic base:

1. The diminution in the social significance of religion may be traced in some periods, only for new forms of social significance to emerge in subsequent periods. William Pitt (1759–1806) and Charles James Fox (1749–1806) may have been indifferent to religion, but a re-Christianized politics emerged with the anti-slavery campaigns of William Wilberforce (1759–1833), the social reforms of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th earl of Shaftesbury (1801–85), and the overtly denominational priorities of William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98).

2. In England, the sequestration of religious property can be dated to the dissolution of the monasteries in the early sixteenth century, a world away from the ‘modernization’ of the nineteenth or declines in church attendance in the twentieth.Footnote ⁷⁶

3. Similarly, the shifting balance of power between church and state has been played out in every century since the first Christian missions to Britain from Iona and Rome; it is not unique to any recent century.

4. The decline in time and resources devoted to supra-empirical concerns might be matched by the decline in the percentage of time and resources devoted to any one secular concern, with increasing wealth and increasing diversity of consumption and occupation: cooking, housekeeping, and child-rearing similarly occupy smaller fractions of the time of present-day Britons.

5. The decay of religious institutions has been a perennial complaint, although the disposal of (for example) many churches and monasteries in recent decades is undeniable.

6. The supplanting of religious precepts by technical criteria attends to, but does not accurately capture, real changes. It is not clear, for example, how present-day practices involving drugs, drink, and violence exemplify the internalization of ‘technical criteria’. For some intellectuals, the eighteenth century may have witnessed a series of ‘Enlightenment-era reactions to the inaccessibility of a radically transcendent, hidden God’.Footnote ⁷⁷ But for far larger numbers, their experience was that of being ‘born again’ by direct contact with the divine. And this experience tended to take a similar form for both the educated elite, influenced most by Anglican evangelicalism, and for those larger numbers influenced most by Methodism.Footnote ⁷⁸

7. The rise of a rational consciousness may be called into question if the rise of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century is evidence of a persisting willingness to invoke metaphysical concepts to analyse the mind. Far from the Reformation promoting rationality, it might be argued that it long promoted (bigoted? irrational?) conflict between different denominations, including among different groups of Protestants and freethinkers.

IV

An effect of such packagings of meanings into the single category of ‘secularization’ is to obscure a distinction which is central to the historical analysis of the subject, namely the distinction between religiosity and religious practice. ‘Religiosity’ is here used to denote the disposition of people to respond to intuitions that they have, over time, termed religious. Religious behaviour embraces the forms of action undertaken in response to those intuitions. So distinguished, religiosity may be analysed like other human attributes such as height and strength: such characteristics tend to be distributed on a bell curve. A bell curve records, for statisticians, a ‘normal distribution’ of a phenomenon; and the argument here advanced suggests that this model may be extended from quantifiable to non-quantifiable characteristics. The latter would include musicality, people's responsiveness to music. So one might say that J. S. Bach was at one end of the curve, the tone deaf at the other, and the majority of mankind in the middle. Expressions of musicality change over time: in recent decades, listening to recorded music has grown and the playing of musical instruments has declined; but undoubted changes in musical behaviour are highly problematic if advanced as evidence that underlying musicality has changed – that is, that the position of the bell curve has moved with respect to the x and y axes.Footnote ⁷⁹

If so, a bell curve can also be used to represent the distribution of human religiosity, that is, of human responsiveness or receptiveness to what people in various and changing ways have characterized as God, or the gods, or the supernatural (sociologists have laboured unsuccessfully to define ‘religion’; historians merely respond to the meanings employed by the people they study). At one end of the curve are people who claim that they have direct experience of God. At the other end are people who claim that they have no religious experience whatsoever. In between are the great majority. Over time, the expressions of their religiosity clearly change. A smaller proportion of people in Britain now attend the services of the long-established religious denominations. Those denominations supply a smaller proportion of provision in health care and education than they once did. But this is not proof that religiosity has shared in these ‘declines’. Indeed, the distribution of religiosity from theism to atheism may be relatively constant over time.Footnote ⁸⁰ Religious practice also changes in contradictory directions: a host of ‘new age’ religions has sprung up to rival the declining Presbyterians or Methodists. Television evangelists reach millions. And religion is one of the two largest subjects represented on the internet.

Scholars’ views on this matter may partly reflect their personal positions on the bell curve. Some assure us that secularization in their period was in full flood; others claim that their people in the past were sensible, moderate, and pragmatic in their beliefs; others again claim that the age they write about was an age of faith. But incorporating all their research makes problematic the assumption that the shape of the curve, or its position with respect to the x and y axes, changes over time. It also undermines the idea that a single sociological model ties together over time the diversity of individual experience.

It appears to be an important assumption of the sociological debate, shared on each side, that church attendance is evidence for the truth of Christianity, while non-attendance is evidence for its untruth. Historians need accept neither premise. They may, however, observe that repeated predictions of imminent or eventual secularization in western societies have never been fulfilled.Footnote ⁸¹ Instead, what historians record is that at different periods, individuals at different points on the bell curve seize public attention and announce that the world is as they see it. At one moment, a Martin Luther or a John Knox steps forward to demand that other people conform their religious experience to that of a Luther or a Knox. At another time, a Richard Dawkins or a Christopher Hitchens, at an opposite point on the curve, steps forward to insist that the world is everywhere as it appears to him.

Religious practice changed greatly in the twentieth century, as it has changed in every century, and these changes are historically important; it is highly problematic to argue from that evidence to an underlying change in religiosity. But some sociologists do just that. They can write of secularization as ‘a gradual, uneven, at times an oscillating, trend, the general direction of which is none the less unmistakable, in the nature of human consciousness, towards what might be called a “matter-of-fact” orientation to the world’.Footnote ⁸² They sometimes notice the possibility of a disjuncture between ‘religious sentiment’ and ‘the form in which it has been expressed’ (a way of putting it that implicitly downgrades ‘sentiment’), but only to dismiss such a notion;Footnote ⁸³ ‘Whilst some form of religious commitment appears to be widespread, it seems doubtful that there is a dimension of religiosity which varies independently of the degree of attachment to traditional beliefs.’Footnote ⁸⁴ Steve Bruce justifies that dismissal with the argument that other forms of religion are on offer, if old forms fail to meet ‘demand’. Perhaps this indicates rather that analysing religious belief and practice in terms of ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ is less than appropriate: such analysis does not discuss the nature of the ‘religion’ that is supposedly demanded or supplied.

Bruce adds that opinion polls also show a decline in Christian belief; but such professions of disbelief to pollsters might be strongly related to people's disengagement from denominational Christian practice rather than evidence for a decline in religiosity itself, especially since surveys have showed that ‘non-traditional’ religious beliefs remained stable. One poll in 2000 suggested that Britons acknowledging a spiritual realm of some sort outnumbered its deniers by 70 per cent to 15 per cent of total respondents.Footnote ⁸⁵ Bruce offers appropriate scepticism on the reliability of survey results in which respondents identify the degree of their religiosity, but no congruent scepticism towards such surveys’ reliability on affirmations of agnosticism or atheism. Indeed, he describes the figures in one poll in 2000 for people declaring themselves agnostics or atheists, together 18 per cent of all respondents, as ‘far higher than anything we would have got a century ago, had such polls been conducted then’, a claim that, by its own admission, cannot rest on historical evidence. Bruce concludes: ‘Whether there is some essential human need to raise spiritual questions is too broad a question to be answered here’; but he does in fact dismiss arguments that religiosity is constant and that change has been ‘limited to organizational structures and shared rituals’ as ‘unsociological’, that is, not explicable by ‘our biological condition’; ‘some scholars invent considerable latent religiosity’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Such arguments may be, if unsociological, at least historical.

An opposite interpretation has been proposed, stressing the persistence of religious belief coinciding with decreasing formal religious practice.Footnote ⁸⁷ If, moreover, religiosity is to some degree independent of religious practice, it becomes much more difficult to posit secularization as a process, whether inevitable or merely irreversible. Indeed, many denominations have recently experienced both declines in churchgoing and growth in involvement in other forms of religiously inspired activity.Footnote ⁸⁸

Within the secularization paradigm, however, religious behaviour and religiosity have generally been equated: ‘within the religious experience where there is such a close co-ordination between experience of the sacred and religious behaviour, there is generally no behaviour without experience or experience without behaviour’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Sociologists who have sensed the distinction have typically reacted by denying its importance: in their work

However, it is suggested here that this reductionist step in the argument is both a non-sequitur and unsupported by historical evidence.

V

Secularization, then, is widely pictured as a ‘process’, normally within the framework of stadial theory: ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols’.Footnote ⁹¹ But the historian is entitled to ask whether there are such things as processes. Perhaps the cast of historical characters consists only of individuals and their actions. If so, a ‘process’ is an invention of the social sciences, at best a metaphor imported from the natural sciences that then becomes reified and treated as if it were a thing, so that all historians need do with it is to date it more accurately. And historians who still take their cues from the social sciences generally think they have gained a great point if they date secularization to an earlier period than their colleagues had appreciated.

The long eighteenth century, c. 1660–1832, is the central territory on which the steady or sudden unfolding of secularization is held to be demonstrated. According to Marcel Gauchet, ‘Somewhere around 1700, the deepest ever fracture in history occurred’; ‘roughly around 1700 … specifically Christian history comes to a halt’.Footnote ⁹² But here, above all, recent historiography has pointed in the opposite direction. Some sociologists have resisted this research; they have allowed that there may have been ‘occasions, or even epochs, of “resacralization”’, but countered that ‘It would be difficult to demonstrate that any such reversals have ever occurred.’Footnote ⁹³ If secularization is an irreversible and naturally occurring process, then such reversals could only be temporary aberrations. It is, however, legitimate for historians to weigh the evidence.

One historical response to this sociological scenario is to argue that recent decades are more religious than the notion of a great divide requires. A second is to record that many people in past centuries often showed a disregard of religious obligations or little evidence of faith until a ‘devotional revolution’ often datable to the nineteenth century. As Keith Thomas urged in 1971, ‘We do not know enough about the religious beliefs and practices of our remote ancestors to be certain of the extent to which religious faith and practice have actually declined.’ In the same year, Jean Delumeau wrote: ‘As I see it, the “Christian Middle Ages”, as far as the (essentially rural) masses are concerned, is a legend which is being increasingly challenged. And if it is legend, the two Reformations – Luther's and Rome's – constituted, despite mutual excommunication, two complementary aspects of one and the same process of Christianization.’Footnote ⁹⁴ This argument would offer support to the idea of a constant religiosity, but it is not essential to it. It is possible that religious behaviour changes in much the ways that the secularization paradigm describes, yet that religiosity may remain constant. The first argument, that the general incidence of religious practice has been understated for later periods, carries more weight: for example, much flows from the recent demonstration that popular religion in the long eighteenth century was more powerful than it had been posited in earlier work that had given a special significance to industrialization and urbanization.Footnote ⁹⁵ One still finds asides about ‘eighteenth-century inertia’ in historical writing on other periods, but they are now rare.Footnote ⁹⁶

What historians can securely report is evidence for a strengthening ideology demanding the separation of church and state, religion and political life. But such a separation, in the British Isles, occurred much later than was once thought: not in 1660, or 1688, and not indeed importantly until long into the nineteenth century, after the conventionally identified processes of ‘modernization’ were thought to have become powerful. Nor was the separation of church and state ‘one consequence of diversity’Footnote ⁹⁷ but, rather, one outcome of political conflict not predetermined by the existence of rival religious groups.Footnote ⁹⁸

Historians must deal with the alleged instantiations of their categories. Some wish to claim that secularization is demonstrated in the lives and writings of individuals, from libertines like Charles II through James Boswell to Charles James Fox. Others treat as exemplary philosophers like John Locke, David Hume, and Jeremy Bentham. Others wish to point to certain key transformative events or episodes, like the Restoration, the Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution. Others again point to concepts, especially the concept of modernization, as validating secularization.

As in other matters, British history reveals a vast array of contrary instances. Against Restoration licence can be set the works of Milton and Bunyan, and the writings of the Caroline divines. John Locke has been misinterpreted if presented as a philosopher seeking to demote faith to opinion,Footnote ⁹⁹ for he argued both that God's existence was ‘the most obvious Truth that Reason discovers’, and that the evidence for God's existence was ‘(if I mistake not) equal to mathematical Certainty’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ To balance the deists, historians set the writings of Bishop Berkeley, and the piety of the high churchmen and nonjurors.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Even the English Catholic community and the universities have been rehabilitated.Footnote ¹⁰² David Hume's contemporaries included John Wesley and George Whitefield; they reached far more people. Indeed, Hume's contemporaries and immediate successors widely believed that he had lost the argument over miracles,Footnote ¹⁰³ and if debate shifted away from miracles in the late eighteenth century it may only have turned instead to a renewed emphasis on providence.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ One balances Jeremy Bentham, a convert to atheism,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and the utilitarians against the evangelical movement that was so dominant in the early nineteenth century. The great conurbations of the late nineteenth century, seemingly proofs of the power of being to determine consciousness, coincided with the greatest pastoral reach of the Oxford Movement.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Within Christianity, one might debate whether men heterodox with respect to the Trinity, from John Toland and Matthew Tindal to Thomas Paine, should be understood as atheists or as reformers working towards a purified faith.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Indeed, the once-widespread idea that a powerful and secularizing deist movement was a prime agent of modernity has been declared a ‘myth’,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and religious change is increasingly traced to sources within the church.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The American Revolution, far from producing a secular society, was followed by successive waves of Protestant evangelicalism.

Historians do not conflate secularization with laicization, the growing involvement of the laity in religion, whether as organizers of denominations and of worship, or as authors, musicians, and artists. Nor do they think of religion only as an element of continuity and stability. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century heterodoxy fed into Liberalism, the vehicle for the political prominence of Protestant nonconformity that reached its high tide with the Liberal electoral victory in 1906; the distinct waves of Christian Socialism in the nineteenth century, more than a secular Marxism, fuelled the rise of the Labour party, which reached its high tide in and after 1945.

It has been argued that the existence of a state church in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alienated many of the population from it because of its association with ‘the ruling class’: ‘the close association between the clergy and the ruling class caused large sections of the laity to attach their dislike of their rulers to the clergy they controlled and then generalize it into a dislike of religion as such’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It was the same point made by Alexis de Tocqueville about the new United States: a multiplicity of competing but not established denominations raised the level of piety. Yet such an argument may fit at some times and in some places, but not generally. In the case of England, the existence of an established church was long associated with high levels of identification with it and attendance at its services. Protestant and Catholic dissenters might form only a small fraction of the population; and in the case of Protestant dissent, its numbers evidently fell markedly in the century c. 1660–1760. If they rose in the century that followed, the Church of England was no more established than it had been before. The Church of England's association with the state might be at some times (as during the French Revolution) a source of strength,Footnote ¹¹¹ at other times (as after 1918 and 1945) of weakness.Footnote ¹¹²

Sociologists have often emphasized a class basis to religious commitment and political mobilization. ‘It would be unwise to suppose that most chose sides in the English civil war on religious preferences (or even that many chose as distinct from simply being enlisted by their masters), but there was an obvious social basis to allegiances.’ Eighteenth-century Methodism, too, is held to have been determined by the class location of its adherents. ‘Within any one region, the more radical Protestant ideas appealed most to the most advanced sections of the subordinate social classes in large part because they reinforced and legitimated the claims to autonomy and independence that such social and economic changes had awakened in those groups.’Footnote ¹¹³ Yet most historians have in recent decades taken an opposite view: in their work, religious affiliation has emerged as the key correlate of allegiance in the 1640s, while early Methodism is less and less explicable in terms of class.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Class itself emerges as an anti-religious ideology from the 1830s, not as a proof of widening secularity in response to industrialization from the 1780s.Footnote ¹¹⁵

This argument suggests that secularization is always happening, but never completed. Perhaps historians might say that religion is always declining in much the same sense as the middle class is always rising; and this locution would capture the clichéd character of both scenarios. In all ages, some people's religious vision grows dim, or their religious practice is discontinued. But at the same time, other people's becomes more intense, and their practice more engaged. ‘Revivalists’ often lamented that their age was an age of growing indifference, but at the same time they were rekindling enthusiasm. The religious sectarianism of the 1640s faded, but a century and a half later the religiously based politics of Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and Thomas Paine suggest that no ontological divide had been crossed. If talk of hell and sin declined in the late seventeenth century,Footnote ¹¹⁶ such talk rose again in the late eighteenth and was prominent in the early nineteenth.Footnote ¹¹⁷ If resistance theory was distanced from practice after 1660 and 1688, it was squarely back on the agenda in 1776 and back on the agenda in our own day in the case of Islam. If the generation after 1660 wished wars of religion to be a thing of the past,Footnote ¹¹⁸ Hew Strachan judges the First World War to have been ultimately a war of religion.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Historians who fix on some one episode in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries as a turning point that proves a subsequent long-term trend too often show little comparative sense of what came before or after. Expressions of religiosity are always changing, but in their familiar and their novel forms are all around us in later and later decades. It might be concluded that historians have no competence to pronounce that religiosity itself changes over time. They can record that at certain times a particular discourse becomes hegemonic in some societies in which religious belief and religiously based action are asserted to be illusory. But these hegemonies are often succeeded by their opposites.

One school of historians traces the decline of religious practice in England primarily to endogenous causes. Some among them stress the clergy's (primarily the Anglican clergy's) defeats in a series of debates and conflicts that they might have won.Footnote ¹²⁰ Others look to functional failings, especially problems of associational practice. In this view, there was no ‘sea change in popular urban religion’ (in the sense of this essay, religiosity) in the early twentieth century; the decline of the churches after the First World War was ‘the product as much of an internal deficiency within modern religious organizations as of the external pressures which had been brought to bear on them during the past fifty years and more’, so that by the mid-twentieth century, people ‘stopped believing because they stopped going’ to church, not vice versa.Footnote ¹²¹

If that is correct, it follows, further, that secularization is not a process, but a project;Footnote ¹²² not something happening autonomously within the phenomena, like ocean currents or hurricanes, but a project urged by some individuals who seek historical validation for a cause.Footnote ¹²³ In this sense, the secularist and the evangelist are mirror images of each other, and atheism, articulated in a sociological scenario as secularization, is an act of faith as much as is theism. To this debate, historians have a wider perspective to contribute as the social sciences (following R. G. Collingwood's prediction) collapse into history. Yet in the substantial absence of that contribution to date, arguments between theists and atheists have reached a stage of renewed intensity.Footnote ¹²⁴

VI

However the phenomena of churchgoing or non-churchgoing might plausibly be explained in particular times and places by reference to political or economic circumstance, the persistence of religiosity across many cultures over many centuries gives weight to the idea of the importance of human religiosity as against its changing expressions.Footnote ¹²⁵ The persistence of religious behaviour in Britain over much shorter time frames, but periods crucial to the component parts of the scenario of secularization, also suggests that that scenario in its sociological form has significant problems. In Britain, a sharp downturn in church attendance and in the perceived authority of Christianity seems now to have taken place mainly from ‘the long 1960s’. It is open to question how far one very recent phase of the history of the ‘secularization paradigm’ within the sociology of religion implicitly generalizes these post-1960s phenomena, only now being researched,Footnote ¹²⁶ to stand for human experience across many centuries in importantly differing societies.

If that is so, then to historicize the secularization paradigm has important consequences. This exercise reveals secularization not as a process but as a project, and a project still pursued, sometimes with an evangelical zeal, by its apostles. But if secularization is not a process, historians can deal with the idea that ‘it’ is not a thing, instantiated over time, but a variety of phenomena grouped under one label. That is, the idea of ‘secularization’ can be turned from the key which will open all locks into an important component of the history of ideas that can itself be explained historically.

It is not the purpose of this article to refute ‘the secularization paradigm’ but to begin to locate it historically, and to appreciate what it achieves and what it fails to achieve in the light of recent historical research. All such enquiry has its limitations. If the very terms ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ embody a value judgement, and if there is no agreed definition of what constitutes ‘religion’, it follows that sociological discussion of the subject can only be inconclusive. Certainly, it cannot validate the analysis, or the predictions, of ‘the secularization paradigm’ independently of historical evidence.Footnote ¹²⁷

The challenge for historians is to explain the lasting affirmations of theists and atheists alike. The methodological problems in that enterprise suggest that the decisive division among students of this subject is not so much between ‘pessimists’ (emphasizing the scale of the decline of religious practice) and ‘optimists’ (stressing its long survival) but between reductionists and non-reductionists. The reductionists (it has been argued) are still embarked in a project that precludes understanding of the phenomenon it appears to address and only replaces confessional history with its opposite, ‘secular confessional history’.Footnote ¹²⁸ In 1994, one believer in the secularization paradigm concluded a survey of the history of religion in Britain with a forecast that any alternative to progressive secularization was unimaginable except via a ‘cataclysm’; the ‘kind of demodernization which would radically reverse the process of secularization might prove catastrophic for civilization as a whole’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Today, it is difficult to see such comments as other than normative; but the persisting strength of the paradigm is manifest.Footnote ¹³⁰ One historian has confessed: ‘As someone who has spent over twenty-five years researching aspects of eighteenth-century religion, what strikes me is what little impact those of us working on religious themes have actually had on the ways in which the eighteenth century is conceptualized and studied.’Footnote ¹³¹ It may indeed be that the still-ghettoized subject of ‘ecclesiastical history’ has failed to address the growing problems of secularization theory and failed to deliver on its potential to integrate both theism and atheism in a larger vision, perhaps in an alternative master narrative.Footnote ¹³²

Nevertheless, the landscape changes. The ‘secularization paradigm’ was challenged in the 1960s by Martin and countered with key empirical evidence in the 1980s by Cox and Brown; from that decade, historical research has accumulated which raises increasing difficulties. The largest problem with the secularization scenario is an omission. Indeed, one of the largest social changes in the last half century in Europe – mass immigration – may have been pictured by sociologists primarily as ethnic diversification (welcome) rather than as religious challenge (unwelcome). The sociology of religion was therefore unprepared to deal with this new issue, and held to old certainties. The secularization paradigm would be less persuasive if argued on the territory of international Islam; but this difficulty has implications for the realms of Christianity and Judaism also.

Rather than being the key to the history of religion, it is the history of the secularization paradigm that now needs to be written;Footnote ¹³³ that history will reveal a composite notion, built up over time from diverse and partly inconsistent components, a notion put to a changing series of uses. The Islamic terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States and 7 July 2005 in the United Kingdom are no simple refutations of the secularization paradigm, but do encourage doubts about whether that paradigm leads people to the point at which they believe they now stand.Footnote ¹³⁴ Increasingly, Western Europe, with clearly lower levels of religious practice than other areas of the world, may be the odd man out.Footnote ¹³⁵ Yet even historical research on European religion suggests that a stage has been reached at which a radical reconstruction of a hitherto-hegemonic explanatory framework is necessary. Such a reconstruction would have to be open to the possibility not of decline but of transformation: ‘a shift from theism to pantheism, from outer to inner authority, from God to self-as-god, and above all from religion to spirituality’.Footnote ¹³⁶ It might be asked whether David Martin's challenge in 1965 to dispense with the category ‘secularization’ should now be re-examined; not because nothing changesFootnote ¹³⁷ but, rather, because the unified category obscures the many and complex changes that manifestly occurred, many only recently. And given the symbiotic relation between the concepts of ‘secularization’ and ‘modernization’, a reconsideration of the first cannot leave the second wholly untouched.Footnote ¹³⁸