The secularisation debate, including evidence and explanations for the decline of religion, the secularisation thesis and its critics, and debates about religion in the contemporary UK, Europe and the USA.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to evaluate the secularisation thesis: the evidence and explanations for the decline of religion, and the arguments of its critics, in the UK, Europe and the USA. The examiner rewards candidates who recognise that the answer depends heavily on how religion is defined and measured.

Evidence for secularisation

UK evidence cited for decline includes:

• Falling church attendance and membership. Weekly attendance has dropped sharply across the twentieth century and continues to fall; only a small minority now attend regularly.
• Fewer baptisms, religious weddings and clergy. The proportion of marriages conducted in church has collapsed, and the clergy is ageing and shrinking.
• Greater religious diversity and the loss of a single dominant faith, so religion no longer monopolises public life.
• A long-term decline in stated religious belief (census and survey data show rising "no religion") and in religion's influence on law, politics and everyday life (disengagement of church from state).

Explanations for secularisation

• Rationalisation (Weber): the world becomes explained by science and reason, "disenchanted", leaving less room for supernatural explanation. A technological worldview displaces a religious one.
• Structural differentiation (Parsons): as society modernises, specialised institutions take over functions once performed by religion (the state runs education and welfare), so religion is disengaged from public life and privatised into the home.
• The sacred canopy (Berger): when a society shares one religion, that faith forms a single overarching "canopy" of meaning. Religious diversity shatters the canopy, so each faith appears as just one option and its plausibility declines.
• Religious diversity and individualism (Bruce): competing beliefs and consumer choice erode religion's authority. Protestantism itself fostered individualism, which eventually undermined collective religion (a "self-limiting" process).

Critics of the secularisation thesis

• Believing without belonging (Davie): people may still hold religious beliefs even if they no longer attend church, so falling attendance does not equal falling belief. Religion has become privatised rather than absent.
• Vicarious religion (Davie): a small active minority practise religion "on behalf of" a wider population who still turn to the church for rites of passage (weddings, funerals) and at times of national crisis.
• Spiritual shopping and new movements: the growth of new religious and spiritual movements and a "spiritual revolution" (Heelas and Woodhead, the Kendal study) suggests religion is changing form, not vanishing, as a "holistic milieu" of self-spirituality grows even as congregational religion shrinks.
• The USA and globally: religion remains strong in the USA (where churches act as "spiritual shopping" providers, Bruce concedes) and is growing across much of the global South, challenging the idea that modernity automatically erodes religion.

Evaluation

The debate turns on how religion is measured: attendance statistics suggest decline, but belief, identity and new forms of spirituality suggest transformation. Statistics themselves are unreliable (Victorian attendance may have been inflated by social pressure, so the "golden age" of faith may be a myth, as Bruce and others note). Most sociologists now argue religion in Europe is changing and privatising rather than simply disappearing, while it remains strong elsewhere, so a single global "secularisation" story is too crude.