Now what? Religious studies whither and why? Post- war sociology of religion 1945–2024 in Britain and America

[Extract] After the great heyday of the early sociology of religion—Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and Troeltsch—the sociological study of religion went into decline. One might argue that it was revived in the 1960s, but ironically, it had a second life to study secularization. The two major figures who did not share the same view of secular society in British sociology were Bryan Wilson (1926–2004), who published Religion in Secular Society in 1966, and David Martin (1929–2019), who spent much of his academic career attacking the secularization thesis publishing an early collection of articles on secularization in The Religious and the Secular (Martin, 1969) and The Future of Christianity (Martin, 2011) shortly before his death in 2019. For example, the legacy of Martin is found in the work of Grace Davie (1994, 1997) with the idea of “believing without belonging” and in Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas in their research on spirituality replacing institutionalized religion (Woodhead with Heelas and Martin 2001). Their view of the vitality of spirituality in a secular society depends on whether religion, in any form, can survive the process of deinstitutionalization.

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