The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview

Abstract

On the international religious scene, it is conservative or orthodox or traditionalist movements that are on the rise almost everywhere. These movements are precisely the ones that rejected an aggiornamento with modernity as defined by progressive intellectuals. Conversely, religious movements and institutions that have made great efforts to conform to a perceived modernity are almost everywhere on the decline. One of the most interesting puzzles in the sociology of religion is why Americans are so much more religious as well as more churchly than Europeans. The other exception to the desecularization thesis is less ambiguous. There exists an international subculture composed of people with Western-type higher education, especially in the humanities and social sciences that is indeed secularized. Both in the media and in scholarly publications, these movements are often subsumed under the category of fundamentalism. The chapter also concerns the relation of the religious resurgence to a number of issues not linked to religion.