Abstract

Few, if any, historical developments are more complex than the long evolution that historians and sociologists commonly and too loosely call `secularization.' That term encompasses a bewildering variety of ways in which, over the span of centuries, religion and religious institutions lost much of their importance and power in western European and American culture and society. There were also a bewildering variety of reasons why religion in so many different ways found itself more and more on the cultural margins.Yet, however long and intricate the unfolding of these developments, however many the reasons, and however deeply marked Europe may still be by its Christian past, the outcome is clear. No one could plausibly describe western European culture at the present time as pervasively or profoundly religious. True, in the United States religious faith still moves a majority of the population, and some churches prosper. But the constitution excludes by law religion from all state-sponsored activities; and the informal, extralegal exclusion of religion is almost as rigorous in other American centres of intellectual influence and cultural power. In most universities, in the television industry, in Hollywood, in major newspapers and magazines, in the board rooms of giant corporations, Christianity has no more grip than it does in corresponding European institutions