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

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The next stage of mywriting developed this thinking in new ways.In the first instance, this found expression in a book commissioned by Sage for their Millennium Series, which reflects on w hy the subject matter of the sociology of religion has developed in the way that it has. Why, in other words, have certain aspects of the research agenda received disproportionate attention and what are the consequences for sociological understanding? The text becomes in fact a critical appraisal of both content and method within the sociology of religion, underlining the importance of contextual factors for its development in different parts of the world (the comparative element is central).It was first published in May 2007; a new edition appeared in 2013.

Versteeg, Peter G.A. 2006. Marginal Christian Spirituality: An Example From A Dutch Meditation Group. Journal of Contemporary Religion 21(1): 83–97.

Should Scholars of Religion be Critics or Caretakers?

I began my sociological career with an undergraduate degree in Sociology at Exeter (1967); this was followed by a doctorate at the London School of Economics (1975). It was at this stage that I developed the two aspects of my work which were to endure throughout: an interest in the sociology of religion and an acquaintance with both France and French sociology. My doctoral thesis on the political aspects of the French Protestant community in the interwar period brought these together. 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. Troeltsch, Ernst. 1956[1931]. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. London: Allen and Unwin.

The inspiration for this episode came from one of Russell McCutcheon's works which we had encountered through the undergraduate Religious Studies programme at the University of Edinburgh, entitled 'Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion'. The result is this compilation of differing opinions and interpretations ... Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: Brill. What the concept of “believing without belonging” effectively says is that there’s a disjunction between the hard indicators of religious life in Europe and the softer ones. In some ways I think that the phrase “believing without belonging” is a little misleading, because it isn’t that belonging is hard and belief is soft. Both of them can be hard and soft. For example, if you ask European populations — and here I’m generalizing — do you believe in God, and you’re not terribly specific about the God in question, you’ll get about 70 percent saying yes, depending where you are. If you say, do you believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, you’ll get a much lower number. In other words, if you turn your question into a creedal statement, the percentages go down. The looser your definition of belief, the higher the percentage of believers. At a more practical level, I have explored the interactions between religion and welfare, religion and healthcare and (to a lesser extent) religion and law, recognizing the implications of these diverse fields for sociological thinking about religion. That’s a nice nuance. However, what is not even considered here is that Europe remains stubbornly religious precisely in its preference for secularity. For reasons I will try to explain, this possible alternative to the standard secularisation thesis – conceiving secularity as a socio-political preference internal to a specifically Christian religious position – is not represented in the Handbook at all. The only connection between the religious and the secular that is considered is external: ‘the waning of Christianity’ in Europe is simply the unavoidable flipside of its ‘growing secularization’ (10).BRUCE, Steve and VOAS, David (2010), "Vicarious Religion: An Examination and Critique", Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 243–259. Parsons, William Barclay. 1999. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Visiting professor, University of Uppsala (including a month at the Collegium for Advanced Studies of the University of Helsinki) Hill, Peter C., Kenneth I.I. Pargament, Ralph W. Hood, Jr McCullough, E. Michael, James P. Swyers, David B. Larson, and Brian J. Zinnbauer. 2000. Conceptualizing Religion and Spirituality: Points of Commonality, Points of Departure. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 30(1): 51–77. De Groot, Kees, and Jos Pieper. 2015. Seekers and Christian Spiritual Centers in the Netherlands. In A Catholic Minority Church in a World of Seekers, edited by S. Hellemans and P. Jonkers, 97-127. Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy.

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] Bellah, Robert N, Richard Madsen, William M Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M Tipton. 2008[1985]. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press.

Aldridge, A (2013). Religion in the contemporary world: a sociological introduction. Oxford: Polity Press. p.147. Grace Davie's The Sociology of Religion is a highly valuable textbook for students on under graduate as well as graduate levels. It combines a critical reflection on the issues and debates that have shaped the field and a challenging agenda outlining some of the most crucial theoretical and empirical issues for the future. This way it equips students to both explore new tendencies and trends of religion in contemporary society and to be attentive to the significance of history and context for analysing. Just two or three remarks on believing without belonging, before I move on, because I really don’t want to center on this too much. It is vital to remember that the disjunction of active and inactive, of dropping in or regular commitment, is as common in secular life as it is in religious life. If you look at political parties, trade unions, attendance at football matches, cinema-going, all the graphs go in the same direction. Interestingly, if you look at football and cinema, you find J-curves; they drop very sharply in the postwar period and they turn up from the late ’80s, and ’90s into the 21st century. I don’t see why that is not possible for religion, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Ed. (with Lucian Leustean) The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 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? This book offers both an expert survey of contemporary sociology of religion and the personal reflections of one of the leading scholars in the field. Grace Davie is a good model for students and their teachers: she is clear, engaging and fair minded but unafraid to express a point of view' -David Voas, University of Manchester Davie, Grace (2014). "Grace R.C. Davie: Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Waco, Texas: Baylor University . Retrieved 2 November 2020.

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What the editors refer to as ‘the entity known as Europe’ (1) would simply not be what it is had Christianity not spread out or enlarged spatially, territorially, in a cultural place-producing way – and hence also had it not both opposed and absorbed other religions and traditions in the process. As the editors put it, ‘religion and religious ideas have shaped and continue to shape the idea of Europe, the lives of Europeans, the geographical boundaries of the European continent, and the art and culture contained within them’ (1).