Loading...
Now what? Religious studies whither and why? Post- war sociology of religion 1945–2024 in Britain and America
Turner, Bryan S.
Turner, Bryan S.
Author
Abstract
[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.
Keywords
sociology of religion, secularization, comparative religion, Axial Age, Max Weber
Date
2024
Type
Journal article
Journal
Book
Volume
50
Issue
1
Page Range
69-75
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
Collections
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© 2024 The Authors. Religious Studies Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Rice University.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Open access publishing facilitated by Australian Catholic University, as part of the Wiley - Australian Catholic University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Open access publishing facilitated by Australian Catholic University, as part of the Wiley - Australian Catholic University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.