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

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Davie, Grace. 1990a. Believing Without Belonging: Is This the Future of Religion in Britain? Social Compass 37(4): 455–469.

Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: Brill. Aarts, Olav, Ariana Need, Manfred Te Grotenhuis, and Nan Dirk De Graaf. 2008. Does Belonging Accompany Believing? Correlations and Trends in Western Europe and North America between 1981 and 2000. Review of Religious Research 50(1): 16–34. In partnership with the NSRN (Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network), it is our pleasure to bring you the audio recordings of five very important lectures from Grace Davie, Humeira Iqtidar, Callum Brown, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, and Jonathan Lanman.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Roof, Wade Clark. 1998. Modernity, the Religious, and the Spiritual. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558(1): 211–224. Predicting the future is interesting. And here I will refer you to the European Values Study, the prototype for the World Values Survey. The European Values Study has now been done three times: in 1981, 1990 and 1999-2000. Those dates slip a bit in different countries. The thing I want to draw your attention to is what came out in the 1999-2000 study, which was a pattern that nobody had predicted; it is, moreover, a very interesting finding to reflect on.

Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. 2011. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. New York: Cambridge University Press. 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: Where we start is nearly 12 years ago, when the book called Religion in Britain since 1945 was published — an unremarkable title. But the subtitle contained this phrase, “Believing Without Belonging,” which retrospectively, was an inspirational moment for me, because it is this phrase that everybody remembers and can associate with my work.With this question we are in the vicinity of a familiar story of Europe’s becoming modern that the Handbook wants to complicate. The editors want to hold on to ‘nuances’ that are lost in the too-simple story of inexorable ‘disenchantment’ and the end of religion that belongs to the standard secularisation thesis (6). The basic nuance the Handbook affirms is unquestionably important: namely, that there is no inevitability to the decline of religion, even in an increasingly secular Europe – and that is because this increasingly secular continent, like everywhere else, also remains stubbornly religious. Presidents of the Association 1938-2016" (PDF). Association for the Sociology of Religion . Retrieved 16 March 2018. Just two or three remarks on believing without belonging, before I move on, because I really don’t want to center on this too much. It is vital to remember that the disjunction of active and inactive, of dropping in or regular commitment, is as common in secular life as it is in religious life. If you look at political parties, trade unions, attendance at football matches, cinema-going, all the graphs go in the same direction. Interestingly, if you look at football and cinema, you find J-curves; they drop very sharply in the postwar period and they turn up from the late ’80s, and ’90s into the 21st century. I don’t see why that is not possible for religion, but it hasn’t happened yet.