Re-Thinking Religious Change in Europe

Debate in the sociology of religion has been dominated by the ‘secularization thesis’ and those who have argued, from data about falling church populations, that European societies are experiencing an irreversible decline in religious affiliation and participation (Bruce 2002). Critics have argued on the one hand that this linear model of religious decline should be replaced by an oscillation model of religious change (Stark and Bainbridge 1987) or on the other, that the data used to support the secularization thesis fails to account for the emergence of new, spiritual populations and improvised religiosities (Sutcliffe and Gilhaus 2013). In this Paper I will argue that the secularization thesis lacks a theory of the secular, defining it simply as an absence of religion (Lee 2015). Moreover, the secularization debate tends to frame the religious and the secular as a zero-some game between two competing and absolute identities of the social, and is blind both to what might be called the religious dimensions of the secular and the secular dimensions of the religious. When the hybrid spaces where the religious and the secular combine are investigated, it becomes possible to discern the irrational and emotional ritual practices that constitute (political, secular) society (Durkheim 1915) as well as Muslim hip-hop (Aidi 2004) or the various improvisations of religion and sci-fi from Scientology to Jediism to Heaven’s Gate (Zeller 2012). Such a focus offers the opportunity to re-think the social (e.g. Laclau 1990) and to develop a different discourse for discussing religion and the secular for scholars and policy-makers that begins not from their essential antagonism (which acts largely as buttress for intolerance and violence) but rather their mutual implication (which could become a foundation for political recognition).