Secularisation Flashcards
Define
When religion loses its influence over society
Process where by religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance
Due to urban, modern industrial society
Comte and Weber’s views
Comte: science is final stage of thinking modern society will be dominated by science and not religion
Weber: modern society would be the age of technology, rationality and bureaucracy sweeping away magic and myth
Decline in church membership and attendance
Stats
Over 1 million lost to churches in the last 20 years
27% babies baptised in 1993
65% in 1990
Limitations of measuring attendance and membership through statistics
May attend and not believe
May believe and not attend
Old stats may not be reliable
Religious pluralism
Diversity
Established church loses significance
Multicultural society
How is Pluralism evidence against sec?
New age movements show that sacred is becoming important
REASCRILISATION
Religion is just being transformed
How is pluralism evidence for sec?
Gives too much choice
People reject religion
Declines outweighs the drop outs
Desacralisation
Supernatural belief is a weak force in society
Weber predicted it in a period of disenchantment
Turn to science for our problems
How have the church suffered a loses of functions
Religion becomes less important as other institutions
Church used to be educational
Leads to disengagement
Despite this: religion is still very relative everyday
What’s meant by institutions that have become secularised
Church becomes less religious
To acquire more Members
Shows commitment to the community
Not all have eg New Right
Measuring secularisation
Surveys: high levels of religiosity, quantitative data shows church attendance is low
Finding it out is complex
Hard to get old data
Research may be ethnocentric
