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

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Roszak, Theodore. 1969. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society And Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday. But exactly the same is true in terms of membership or belonging. Those who attend church regularly each week are a falling percentage, probably around 10 percent in Britain. It would be higher or lower in different parts of Europe. But if you move to a much looser notion of membership — for example, and I’ve never seen this in a poll, but it would be a very interesting question — where do you expect your funeral to be held or who do you expect to conduct your funeral, not many would “contract out.” And that’s one of your keys. The historic churches are public utilities, and you expect public utilities to be there when you need them. Campbell, Colin. 2007. Easternization of the West: A Thematic Account of Cultural Change in the Modern Era. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. But where the church is no longer able to discipline belief or behavior, which is the case across most of the continent, young people do not, it seems, turn to secular rationalism; they begin to experiment. Now, whether this will be of significance in a decade or whether it will be something that grows, is too soon to say. All I will say now is that nobody predicted the shift in the mid-1990s. Something is happening; something that I need to think about as I prepare a new edition of this book for the 21st century. But so much for believing without belonging.

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. The way that I want to do this — if you’ll forgive me for being a little egocentric — is to look at the books I’ve published on religion in Britain and modern Europe and show you not only how the situation itself has evolved, but also how my thinking about it has changed. Neither the situation nor the sociological interpretation of it is static. In short, we’re hitting a moving target. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. 2011. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. New York: Cambridge University Press. 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.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:

Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life A co-authored book (with Peter Berger and Effie Fokas) followed in September 2008.It emerged from three meetings in Berlin concerned with European Secularity.Its eventual publication, coinciding with the American Presidential election in 2008 under the title Religious America, Secular Europe: A Theme and Variations(Ashgate 2008) was nothing if not timely. Why is religion still important? Can we be fully modern and fully religious? The Sociology of Religion works at two levels. First it sets out the agenda - covering the key questions in the sociology of religion today. At the same time, it interrogates this agenda - asking if the sociology of religion, as we currently know it, is 'fit for purpose'. If not, what is to be done? 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.

Biography

I was the co-director of both WREPand WaVEboth of which fed into the establishment in Uppsala of a Linnaeus Centre of Excellencein Uppsala concerned with the Impact of Religion:Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy .My involvement in this Centre resulted further visits to Uppsala, which continued into retirement. Storm, Ingrid. 2009. Halfway to Heaven: Four Types of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48(4): 702–718. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01474.x. Hood Jr, Ralph W. 1975. The Construction and Preliminary Validation of a Measure of Reported Mystical Experience. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion:29–41.

The trailer is essentially a comparison between Britain and France and argues that France is without a doubt a more democratic society than Britain. But Britain, in my view, is a more tolerant society than France. So the underlying question becomes: Is democracy a vector of tolerance? I would be very interested to know how you consider America in those terms. My remarks are also premised on the fact that you only really know your own society when you leave it. How America looks to a European is what I’ve been learning about this morning. I learn more about Europe the more I come away from it. One of the reasons I’m here, in fact, is to work with Peter Berger on a book that looks at the secularity of Europe through the prism of a comparison with America.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