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

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In moments such as these, Davie comes tantalisingly close to seeing another striking ‘religion and Europe’ connection: namely, that the ‘secularization’ that has become ‘central to the self-understanding of modern Europe’ (282), and hence central to her own self-understanding as a social scientist too, is strictly inseparable from the fact that the ‘universe’ of that self-understanding remains profoundly Christian. Glendinning, Tony. 2006. Religious Involvement, Conventional Christian, and Unconventional Nonmaterialist Beliefs. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45(4): 585–595. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2006.00329.x.

the reactions of Britain’s secular elites to the increasing saliance of religion in public as well as private life; andIn some parts of Europe, for example, baptism is becoming increasingly the preserve of the active minority, a shift which is closely related to changes in the theologies of baptism, about which, at one level, I am very sympathetic. But if you have lived in a society that for several hundred years has coerced its population into baptism with threats that if you do not have this child baptized, something terrible will happen (like burial in unconsecrated ground), and then suddenly you say that you can only have your child baptized if you come to church so many times, it seems to me that you are projecting the confusions of the church onto a population, which is a very unfair thing to do. In short, it is the church that’s moved, not the population. In the 1960s, most sociologists consciously or unconsciously bought into idea of the 'death of god' - religion became effectively invisible to academia. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, a number of events - most notably the 'Satanic Verses' controversy - dramatically increased the 'visibility' of religion: it became a political problem. Now, in the 21st century, ... Houtman, D., P. Heelas, and P. Achterberg. 2012. Counting spirituality? Survey methodology after the spiritual turn. In Annual review of the sociology of religion - volume three: New methods in the sociology of religion, ed. L. Berzano, and O. Riis, 25–44. Leiden: Brill. Religion in Britian offers an overview of these sociological realities, in a very readable and accessible form. The book is divided into five parts, covering preliminary issues; religious legacies; shifiting priorities (from obligation to consumption); public religion and secular reactions; and finally a concluding chapter. The discussion is wide ranging, but focuses primarily on Christianity. This is one weakness of the book: at least some discussion of how those of other faiths practise their beliefs would have given a fuller picture. There is much for Anglicans to engage with, including discussions of chaplaincy, faith schools, women bishops, same-sex relationships, and why cathedrals have a lot in common with large charismatic churches. From Davie’s sociological perspective, “both the cathedral and the charismatic service embody religion in the sense of the sacred or ‘set-apart.’ It seems that late modern populations respond warmly to this feature” (p.143).

BRUCE, Steve and VOAS, David (2010), "Vicarious Religion: An Examination and Critique", Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 243–259. Visiting professor, University of Uppsala (including a month at the Collegium for Advanced Studies of the University of Helsinki) My commitment to the relationship between religion and society found a rather different application in an invitation to act (with Nancy Ammerman) as a Co-ordinating Lead Author for the chapter on religion in the report of the International Panel for Social Progress (IPSP) – an international consortium that came into existence to assess and synthesize the state-of-the-art knowledge that bears on social progress across a wide range of economic, political and cultural questions, For more information about the work and publications of IPSP and the place of religion within this, see 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.Davie, Grace. 1990b. ‘An Ordinary God’: The Paradox of Religion in Contemporary Britain. The British Journal of Sociology 41(3): 395–421. It is with respect to the third phenomenon that one might see a sort of internal limit marking Davie’s own social scientific approach to ‘religion and Europe’. The ‘trend’ in Europe is, Davie suggests, ‘clear’ to all social scientists: ‘this is a part of the world that by and large has become less Christian, more secular and more religiously diverse as the decades pass’ (270). Davie herself rejects the early and still-too-teleological sociological thesis that secularisation is ‘in any way an inevitable pathway’ for any society undergoing modernisation (270). In other parts of the world, modernisation takes place without significant secularisation. Nevertheless, secularisation does significantly accompany modernisation in Europe. Why is Europe an exception in this respect? But the point I want you to grasp is that graphs that go down don’t always go on going down; they can turn. If you look at the statistics for cinema-going and first division football matches in the post-war period, for example, no one would have thought they would turn up, but they did. Why did they turn? Through a lot of effort and careful marketing, not least by making the venues more comfortable. It can be done. But whether it will or won’t be done in the churches is a completely different question, to which we will return. 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 ...

With Nancy Ammerman et al. (2018) Religions and social progress: Critical assessments and creative partnerships. In International Panel on Social Progress (Ed) Rethinking Society for the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambirdge Univiersty Press, 641-676. The second marker is 2000, when I published Religion in Modern Europe. The crucial point here is that Britain, in terms of its patterns and structure of religious life, is essentially a European society. It is, of course, a pivot between Europe and America, and denominationally it looks west. But in terms of pattern, structure and state-church, and the legacies of a state-church, it is firmly European. The subtitle “A Memory Mutates” was chosen because the book understood religion as a form of collective memory and then asked questions about how that memory is or is not passed on. Within the book, however, is a key idea, which, retrospectively, is I think its most important contribution, and that is the notion of vicarious religion. Vicarious religion is easy to grasp for Europeans, but sometimes problematic for Americans.

Biography

The latest research report from Theos, this time prepared in partnership with the Cardiff Centre for Chaplaincy Studies, was published on 11 March 2015: Ben Ryan, A Very Modern Ministry: Chaplaincy in the UK. It provides an interesting overview of contemporary chaplaincy, from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, perceiving it as an area of religious growth and innovation which is complementary to the notion of the ‘gathered congregation’ and has now broadened out somewhat from its Christian roots. Terminological issues, about what constitutes a chaplain, are aired but not completely resolved. For example, are street pastors – who are now thought to number 11,000 trained volunteers – to be considered as chaplains or not? The quantitative evidence is reviewed in part 1 of the report, with chaplains being found in areas as diverse as higher education (1,000), prisons (1,000 with 7,000 volunteers), police (650), armed forces (500), hospitals (350 full-time and 3,000 part-time), and sport (300). A survey in Luton in October-November 2014 identified 169 chaplains working in eight primary and eight secondary fields, equivalent to one for every 1,200 residents, albeit only 20 of these personnel were salaried. The Luton chaplains were overwhelmingly Christian, even though Christianity was professed by a minority of the town’s population (47%), with 25% Muslim. The report can be read at: Lucas, Phillip C. 1992. The New Age Movement and the Pentecostal/Charismatic Revival: Distinct Yet Parallel Phases of a Fourth Great Awakening? In Perspectives on the New Age, ed. J.R. Lewis and J.G. Melton, 189–211. Albany: State University of New York Press. Those that minister to a half-believing, rather than an unbelieving, society will find that there are advantages and disadvantages to this situation, just as there are in any other. Working out appropriate ministerial strategies for this continually shifting and ill-defined context is the central and very demanding task of the religious professional. A firm and necessary grasp of the sociological realities is the beginning. (p.80). Let me give you some examples of vicarious religion. First churches and church leaders perform rituals on behalf of others. At the time of a birth or a marriage; a divorce even, though that’s a little problematic because of the churches’ teaching about marriage; but above all, at the time of a death. And in these rituals you can see interesting changes in Europe. With this and other works, Davie entered the international ongoing debate on secularization, after Rodney Stark and other American scholars had observed that quantitative data about the United States did not confirm the theory defended in Europe by Karel Dobbelaere and Steve Bruce, implying that modernization necessarily causes a decline of religion. European defenders of secularization theories suggested that an "American exceptionalism" explained why a generally valid hypothesis did not apply to the United States, due to some unique circumstances prevailing there. Davie reversed this theory, and suggested the existence of a "European exceptionalism", explaining why classic secularization theories are valid in Europe but cannot be verified in the rest of the world. [15]