2012/02/10 by J. C. D. CLARK, J. C. D. Clark · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Aesthetics #Ancient history #Archaeology #Art #Early modern period #Historiography #History #Law #Literature #Modernization theory #Narrative #Orthodoxy #Period (music) #Philosophy #Political science #Religion and Society Interactions #Religion, Society, and Development #Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology #Religiosity #Secularization #Social science #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1017/s0018246x11000586
openalex publication_date 2012/02/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
ABSTRACT This historiographical review offers a critical reconsideration of a central component of modernization theory: the model of secularization devised within the sociology of religion, and especially the version sustained by sociologists in the UK. It compares that model with the results of historical research in a range of themes and periods, and suggests that those results are now often radically inconsistent with this sociological orthodoxy. It concludes that an older historical scenario which located in the early modern period the beginnings of a ‘process’ of secularization that achieved its natural completion in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries is finally untenable, and it proposes a broader, more historical conception of ‘religion’ able to accommodate both persistent religiosity and undoubted changes in religious behaviour.