It is increasingly clear that histories of secularization are not simply dispassionate descriptions of the decline of religious belief and practice in the West. Rather, such narratives often seek to celebrate secularization, promote some version of it, lament it, or otherwise oppose it in favour of a programme of desecularization or resacralization. The aim of this book is to identify some of the major genres of the history of secularization and to explore their historical contexts, normative commitments, and tendential purposes. The contributors to the volume offer different perspectives on these questions, not least because a number of them are themselves participants in the cultural-political programs described above. The primary purpose of this book, however, is the identification of such programs rather than their promotion. Overall, the collection seeks to bring analytical clarity to ongoing debates about secularization and help explain the co-existence of apparently conflicting stories about the origins of Western modernity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Intellectual History Review journal.

"What does it really mean to be modern? The contributors to this collection offer critical attempts both to re-read Max Weber's historical idea of disenchantment and to develop further his understanding of what the contested relationship between modernity and religion represents. The approach is distinctive because it focuses on disenchantment as key to understanding those aspects of modern society and culture that Weber diagnosed. This is in opposition to approaches that focus on secularization , narrowly construed as the rise of secularism or the divide between religion and politics, and that then conflate this with modernization as a whole. Other novel contributions are discussions of temporality - meaning the sense of time or of historical change that posits a separation between an ostensibly secular modernity and its religious past - and of the manner in which such a sense of time is constructed and disseminated through narratives that themselves may resemble religious myths. It reflects the idea that disenchantment is a narrative with either Enlightenment, Romantic, or Christian roots, thereby developing a conversation between critical studies in the field of secularism (such as those of Talal Asad and Gil Anidjar) and conceptual history approaches to secularization and modernity (such as those of Karl Løwith and Reinhart Koselleck), and in the process creates something that is more than merely the sum of its parts."--

Peter Harrison takes what we think we know about science and religion, dismantles it, and puts it back together again in a provocative new way. It is a mistake to assume, as most do, that the activities and achievements that are usually labeled religious and scientific have been more or less enduring features of the cultural landscape of the West. Harrison, by setting out the history of science and religion to see when and where they come into being and to trace their mutations over timereveals how distinctively Western and modern they are. Only in the past few hundred years have religious beliefs and practices been bounded by a common notion and set apart from the secular. And the idea of the natural sciences as discrete activities conducted in isolation from religious and moral concerns is even more recent, dating from the nineteenth century. Putting the so-called opposition between religion and science into historical perspective, as Harrison does here for the first time, has profound implications for our understanding of the present and future relations between them. "

The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

What does it really mean to be modern? The contributors to this collection offer critical attempts both to re-read Max Weber's historical idea of disenchantment and to develop further his understanding of what the contested relationship between modernity and religion represents. The approach is distinctive because it focuses on disenchantment as key to understanding those aspects of modern society and culture that Weber diagnosed. This is in opposition to approaches that focus on secularization, narrowly construed as the rise of secularism or the divide between religion and politics, and that then conflate this with modernization as a whole. Other novel contributions are discussions of temporality - meaning the sense of time or of historical change that posits a separation between an ostensibly secular modernity and its religious past - and of the manner in which such a sense of time is constructed and disseminated through narratives that themselves may resemble religious myths. It reflects the idea that disenchantment is a narrative with either Enlightenment, Romantic, or Christian roots, thereby developing a conversation between critical studies in the field of secularism (such as those of Talal Asad and Gil Anidjar) and conceptual history approaches to secularization and modernity (such as those of Karl Löwith and Reinhart Koselleck), and in the process creates something that is more than merely the sum of its parts.

What does it really mean to be modern? The contributors to this collection offer critical attempts both to re-read Max Weber's historical idea of disenchantment and to develop further his understanding of what the contested relationship between modernity and religion represents. The approach is distinctive because it focuses on disenchantment as key to understanding those aspects of modern society and culture that Weber diagnosed. This is in opposition to approaches that focus on secularization, narrowly construed as the rise of secularism or the divide between religion and politics, and that then conflate this with modernization as a whole. Other novel contributions are discussions of temporality - meaning the sense of time or of historical change that posits a separation between an ostensibly secular modernity and its religious past - and of the manner in which such a sense of time is constructed and disseminated through narratives that themselves may resemble religious myths. It reflects the idea that disenchantment is a narrative with either Enlightenment, Romantic, or Christian roots, thereby developing a conversation between critical studies in the field of secularism (such as those of Talal Asad and Gil Anidjar) and conceptual history approaches to secularization and modernity (such as those of Karl Löwith and Reinhart Koselleck), and in the process creates something that is more than merely the sum of its parts.

'Secularization' has been hotly debated since it was first subjected to critical attention in the mid-sixties by David Martin, before he sketched a 'General Theory' in 1969. 'On Secularization' presents David Martin's reassessment of the key issues: with particular regard to the special situation of religion in Western Europe, and questions in the global context including Pentecostalism in Latin America and Africa. Concluding with examinations of Pluralism, Christian Language, and Christianity and Politics, this book offers students and other readers of social theory and sociology of religion an invaluable reappraisal of Christianity and Secularization. It represents the most comprehensive sociology of contemporary Christianity, set in historical depth.