Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Making Contemporary Britain)

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Europa, the European world, is Japheth’s world spreading out, and it would not have come to be what it has become without that Christian culture. And yet for just that reason Europe’s modern condition stands as a particularly paradoxical interpretive challenge for the social sciences. Indeed, a central puzzle for this Handbook is that the European space shaped so profoundly by Christianity has become ‘one of the most secular parts of the world’ (6). How could Europe, a space so fundamentally defined by its enduring Christian religious heritage and its continuing religious diversity, become so strikingly secular? Davie further suggested that people practise their religion vicariously. Professional religious figures (like priests) practise religion on behalf of believers who remain at home. People still turn to religion for “hatching, matching and dispatching” (baptisms, weddings and funerals) and for festivals like Christmas and Easter. Hammer, Olav. 2001. Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Leiden: Brill.

Church attendance does not necessarily correlate with religiosity, so a lot depends on how one chooses to define secularisation. After all, church attendance in the 1850s was not just about religious belief but also social interaction, social status, and indeed sometimes compulsion. Guest lecturer, Fourth Symposium and Summer Institute for the Scientific Study of Religion, Shanghai UniversityThe latest research report from Theos, this time prepared in partnership with the Cardiff Centre for Chaplaincy Studies, was published on 11 March 2015: Ben Ryan, A Very Modern Ministry: Chaplaincy in the UK. It provides an interesting overview of contemporary chaplaincy, from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, perceiving it as an area of religious growth and innovation which is complementary to the notion of the ‘gathered congregation’ and has now broadened out somewhat from its Christian roots. Terminological issues, about what constitutes a chaplain, are aired but not completely resolved. For example, are street pastors – who are now thought to number 11,000 trained volunteers – to be considered as chaplains or not? The quantitative evidence is reviewed in part 1 of the report, with chaplains being found in areas as diverse as higher education (1,000), prisons (1,000 with 7,000 volunteers), police (650), armed forces (500), hospitals (350 full-time and 3,000 part-time), and sport (300). A survey in Luton in October-November 2014 identified 169 chaplains working in eight primary and eight secondary fields, equivalent to one for every 1,200 residents, albeit only 20 of these personnel were salaried. The Luton chaplains were overwhelmingly Christian, even though Christianity was professed by a minority of the town’s population (47%), with 25% Muslim. The report can be read at: Hood Jr, Ralph W. 1975. The Construction and Preliminary Validation of a Measure of Reported Mystical Experience. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion:29–41. Voas, David. 2009. The Rise and Fall of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe. European Sociological Review 25(2): 155–168. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcn044. Zinnbauer, Brian J., Kenneth I. Pargament, and Allie B. Scott. 1999. The Emerging Meanings of Religiousness and Spirituality: Problems and Prospects. Journal of Personality 67(6): 889–919.

In Christian prophetic history, this is the part of the world that would belong to Noah’s son Japheth as, according to God’s will, he expands in the dispersion after the flood. Indeed, Japheth literally means ‘spread out’ or ‘enlarge’. And the descendants of Japheth (the Christians) reside in the part of the world that the Greeks had called by the name of a young princess, Europa. Zinnbauer, Brian J, Kenneth I Pargament, Brenda Cole, Mark S Rye, Eric M Butter, Timothy G Belavich, Kathleen M Hipp, Allie B Scott, and Jill L Kadar. 1997. Religion and Spirituality: Unfuzzying the Fuzzy. Journal for the scientific study of religion:549–564. Roof, Wade Clark. 1993. A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation. San Francisco: HarperCollins.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Houtman, D., P. Heelas, and P. Achterberg. 2012. Counting spirituality? Survey methodology after the spiritual turn. In Annual review of the sociology of religion - volume three: New methods in the sociology of religion, ed. L. Berzano, and O. Riis, 25–44. Leiden: Brill.

Campbell, Colin. 2007. Easternization of the West: A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe , Grace Davie and Lucian N. Leustean bring together contributors to examine the role of religious ideas, structures and institutions in the making of Europe, attending to the centrality of Christian heritage and the significance of other world religions to Europe’s cultural identity. Reflecting on this intelligently designed collection, reviewer Simon Glendinning explores the book’s particular engagement with Europe’s secular modernity. Troeltsch, Ernst. 1956[1931]. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. London: Allen and Unwin.This structural shaping of social science approaches is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Chapter 15 of the Handbook, the very chapter that relates the brief history of European culture becoming secular that I have just run through. That chapter is also a hinge for the volume as a whole, segueing the two halves mentioned above: it brings the part largely dedicated to religion in pre-modern Europe ‘to a close’ and ‘at the same time, it establishes the context for the material that follows’ on modern Europe, including the EU, and its predominantly secular formation (9). Davie, Grace. 1990b. ‘An Ordinary God’: The Paradox of Religion in Contemporary Britain. The British Journal of Sociology 41(3): 395–421.

Those that minister to a half-believing, rather than an unbelieving, society will find that there are advantages and disadvantages to this situation, just as there are in any other. Working out appropriate ministerial strategies for this continually shifting and ill-defined context is the central and very demanding task of the religious professional. A firm and necessary grasp of the sociological realities is the beginning. (p.80). Berger, after having initially predicted complete secularisation, has argued that there has been a significant desecularisation of the world and that western academics did not predict this because they were blinded by their own atheism. Western academics existed in a particular secular “bubble” and imagined other people shared their experiences. Actually, as we shall see in the next section, most of the world is highly religious. According to Berger, it has become more religious in recent years (hence desecularisation and resacrilisation). To explain European exceptionalism, Davie introduced yet another new concept, "vicarious religion", meaning that modern Europeans are happy to "delegate" to a minority of active believers participation in regular church activities, something they approve of but are no longer ready to engage in. This theory was also criticized by those who adhere to classic theories of secularization, who claimed that a generalized sympathy for the religious minority among the non-religious majority cannot be unequivocally demonstrated. [16] Publications [ edit ] the reactions of Britain’s secular elites to the increasing saliance of religion in public as well as private life; and The essays in this Handbook attend helpfully to both the centrality of the Christian heritage and the significance of other world religions to Europe’s cultural identity. And it is equally strong in its coverage of Europe’s secular modernity and its characteristically national shaping. It will be an excellent resource for students and scholars of both religion and Europe as well as ‘religion and Europe’. The point of view that Davie has championed seems thoroughly vindicated too: Europe’s modern culture is not secular because it is modern, but because it is European. But here I do want to enter an objection to the general pattern of the Handbook’s social science argumentation: it is European because of the continuing and enduring role of a distinctive Christian heritage – still Christian, even today, because and not despite the fact that it is so secular.Davie's research interests lie in the sociology of religion. [4] In her book Religion in Britain Since 1945, she coined the phrase "believing without belonging" [11] to describe religiosity and secularization in Britain. [12] This is the argument that although church attendance has decreased, [13] people may still think of themselves as religious on an individual level. [14] scholar, Faculty of Theology, University of Uppsala; return visits in September 1994, December 1995 Aarts, Olav, Ariana Need, Manfred Te Grotenhuis, and Nan Dirk De Graaf. 2008. Does Belonging Accompany Believing? Correlations and Trends in Western Europe and North America between 1981 and 2000. Review of Religious Research 50(1): 16–34. It is with respect to the third phenomenon that one might see a sort of internal limit marking Davie’s own social scientific approach to ‘religion and Europe’. The ‘trend’ in Europe is, Davie suggests, ‘clear’ to all social scientists: ‘this is a part of the world that by and large has become less Christian, more secular and more religiously diverse as the decades pass’ (270). Davie herself rejects the early and still-too-teleological sociological thesis that secularisation is ‘in any way an inevitable pathway’ for any society undergoing modernisation (270). In other parts of the world, modernisation takes place without significant secularisation. Nevertheless, secularisation does significantly accompany modernisation in Europe. Why is Europe an exception in this respect?