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

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Ed. (with Lucian Leustean) The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

My commitment to the relationship between religion and society found a rather different application in an invitation to act (with Nancy Ammerman) as a Co-ordinating Lead Author for the chapter on religion in the report of the International Panel for Social Progress (IPSP) – an international consortium that came into existence to assess and synthesize the state-of-the-art knowledge that bears on social progress across a wide range of economic, political and cultural questions, For more information about the work and publications of IPSP and the place of religion within this, see The next stage of mywriting developed this thinking in new ways.In the first instance, this found expression in a book commissioned by Sage for their Millennium Series, which reflects on w hy the subject matter of the sociology of religion has developed in the way that it has. Why, in other words, have certain aspects of the research agenda received disproportionate attention and what are the consequences for sociological understanding? The text becomes in fact a critical appraisal of both content and method within the sociology of religion, underlining the importance of contextual factors for its development in different parts of the world (the comparative element is central).It was first published in May 2007; a new edition appeared in 2013. BRUCE, Steve and VOAS, David (2010), "Vicarious Religion: An Examination and Critique", Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 243–259. 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.

Research interests

BROWN, Callum G. (2004), review of Europe. The exceptional case: Parameters of faith in the modern world by Grace Davie, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 442-443. What the concept of “believing without belonging” effectively says is that there’s a disjunction between the hard indicators of religious life in Europe and the softer ones. In some ways I think that the phrase “believing without belonging” is a little misleading, because it isn’t that belonging is hard and belief is soft. Both of them can be hard and soft. For example, if you ask European populations — and here I’m generalizing — do you believe in God, and you’re not terribly specific about the God in question, you’ll get about 70 percent saying yes, depending where you are. If you say, do you believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, you’ll get a much lower number. In other words, if you turn your question into a creedal statement, the percentages go down. The looser your definition of belief, the higher the percentage of believers. onwards - further visits to the University of Uppsala to support the work of a new research programme onThe Impact of Religion - Challenges for Society, Law and Religion Inglis, Tom. 2007. Catholic Identity in Contemporary Ireland: Belief and Belonging to Tradition. Journal of Contemporary Religion 22(2): 205–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537900701331064. Grace Davie is one of the best analysts of religion in contemporary sociology. This book caps a distinguished record of studies of religion - first of Britain, then of Europe, then globally. This is a magisterial work, which should be read by anyone interested in the place of religion in the modern world' - Peter L. Berger, Boston University

Streib, Heinz, and Ralph W. Hood. 2011. “Spirituality” As Privatized Experience-oriented Religion: Empirical and Conceptual Perspectives. Implicit Religion 14(4): 433–453.

Abstract

Berghuijs, Joantine, Jos Pieper, and Cok Bakker. 2013. Conceptions of Spirituality Among the Dutch Population. Archive for the Psychology of Religion 35(3): 369–397. Troeltsch, Ernst. 1911. Das Stoisch-Christliche Naturrecht Und Das Moderne Profane Naturrecht. Historische Zeitschrift 106(1): 237–267. 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. Significantly, however, this social science approach itself belongs to the history of secularisation in Europe that it wants to understand: it is one of the ‘key’ developments that takes place in the historical unfolding of European secularisation (272). The ‘upheavals’ in European culture that were initially produced by ‘ philosophical’ developments in the eighteenth century have made a fundamental ‘impact’ on ‘the ways of thinking about human living’ in the following centuries, developing ‘exponentially in the second half of the twentieth century’ and eventually giving rise to the formation of the ‘European social sciences’ themselves (272). Reitsma, Jan, Ben Pelzer, Peer Scheepers, and Hans Schilderman. 2012. Believing and Belonging in Europe. Cross-national Comparisons of Longitudinal Trends (1981-2007) and Determinants. European Societies 14(4): 611–632. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2012.726367.

Davie has written several works during her career, including Religion in Britain since 1945 (1994), Religion in Modern Europe (2000), Europe: the Exceptional Case (2002), The Sociology of Religion (2013) and Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox (2015). [10] Houtman, D., and P. Tromp. 2020. The post-christian spirituality scale (PCSS): Misconceptions, obstacles, prospects. In Assessing spirituality in a diversified world, ed. A.L. Ai, P. Wink, P.F. Paloutzian, and K. Harris. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG. Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life 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.

Comments

This book should be read as a complement to the discussions of the church growth movement. It provides a good overview of the state of religion in Britain today (although, as noted above, this is perhaps overly biased towards Christianity) and thus gives people a place from which to begin. If you want to help anyone who lives primarily in a Christian environment understand the whole of British society, this is an excellent place to start. Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Florida, in December 2005 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Conference speaker Grace Davie, who has a chair in the Sociology of Religion at the University of Exeter and is the director of the University’s Centre for European Studies, challenged current perspectives on modern secularism in Europe and examined how Europeans view American religion. Britain is markedly more secular than it used to be, but by no means totally so; it is also more diverse, but unevenly – the regional variations are considerable. Indifference, moreover, interweaves with unattached belief on the one hand, and more articulate versions of the secular on the other. Each of these elements, morover, on the others (p.223). 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? To explain European exceptionalism, Davie introduced yet another new concept, "vicarious religion", meaning that modern Europeans are happy to "delegate" to a minority of active believers participation in regular church activities, something they approve of but are no longer ready to engage in. This theory was also criticized by those who adhere to classic theories of secularization, who claimed that a generalized sympathy for the religious minority among the non-religious majority cannot be unequivocally demonstrated. [16] Publications [ edit ]