Intermarriage and the demography of secularization (original) (raw)
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Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2020
The nature of secularization is of enduring interest in the social science of religion. Numerous recent papers have established downward cohort trends as characterizing religious change. We examine potential mechanisms by assessing cultural participation and secular engagement during the formative period of one cohort. We provide estimates of active and nominal religiosity, nonreligion and religious belief for those born between 1933 and 1942, using multiple surveys fielded between 1957 and 2018. We model the association between religiosity and secular cultural and social participation for this cohort in 1957, then examine how cultural socialization in childhood relates to religiosity in their later adulthood using surveys fielded between 2005 and 2007. Increased secular competition is found to be associated with less active religiosity. These trends were underpinned by an ethic of increasing autonomy for the young. We conclude by affirming the link between increasing secular competition, long-run modernization, and changing cultural socialization.
Secularization in Europe: Religious Change between and within Birth Cohorts
Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe, 2011
There is ample evidence of religious decline in Western Europe but no general consensus on the situation in the East. Analysis of three waves of the European Values Study (from 1990, 1999 and 2008) adds to the evidence base on secularization across the continent. As expected, older people in most countries, even in Central and Eastern Europe (though not in parts of the former Yugoslavia), seem to be more religious than the rest of the population. More surprisingly, the data suggest that religiosity increased in Northern as well as Eastern Europe during the 1990s, though it is not certain that these apparent rises are genuine. It still seems fair to say that society is changing religiously not because individuals are changing, but rather because old people are gradually replaced by younger people with different characteristics. Much remains to be understood, though, about why recent generations are different. Parents may be partly responsible, by giving children more control over their own lives. The composition of society has changed, but so has the context in which people are raised. Young people acquire different values and face new conditions. Which factors are most important remains to be determined.
When was secularization? Dating the decline of the British churches and locating its cause
British Journal of Sociology, 2010
Dating the decline of Christianity in Britain has a vital bearing on its explanation. Recent work by social historians has challenged the sociological view that secularization is due to long-term diffuse social processes by asserting that the churches remained stable and popular until the late 1950s and that the causes of decline lie in the social and cultural changes associated with the 1960s. We challenge this interpretation of the evidence. We also note that much of the decline of the churches is explained not by adult defection but by a failure to keep children in the faith. Given the importance of parental homogamy for the successful transmission of religious identity, the causes of decline in one generation may well lie in the experiences of the previous generation. We focus on the disruptive effects of the 1939–45 war on family formation and use survey data to argue for a staged model of decline that is compatible with the conventional gradual view of secularization.
The Intergenerational Transmission of Religious Service Attendance
Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 2012
Religious change is often described with aggregate figures on affiliation, practice and belief. Such studies tell us that secularisation happens because each cohort is less religious than the one before, and that socialisation in childhood and habits formed in young adulthood are overwhelmingly responsible for religious decline. In this article we use data from the International Social Survey Programme to consider the extent and magnitude of religious decline at the level of families, whether parental influence is greater in more religious countries, and which individual variables influence the intergenerational transmission of religious practice and whether these vary between different countries. We find that secularisation happens largely because many people are a little less religious than their parents, and relatively few are more religious. We also find that the patterns of transmission are remarkably stable: parents are no more influential in religious countries than in nonreligious countries, and there is no indication that they have lost influence over time.
The Impact of Religious Denomination on Mentality and Behavior: an Introduction
2017
»Die Prägung von Einstellungen und Verhalten durch die Konfession. Eine Einführung«. For at least 500 years, differences in denomination have helped shape social life in Europe. How have religious perspectives influenced the perception of the other, lifestyles, and living conditions? How do we weigh the influence of religion in relation to other social characteristics-and is religion still relevant in modern Europe? This collection of papers in this HSR Forum addresses the role of religious affiliation and belief on demographic and social behavior in the past. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative sources, the authors seek to understand how attachment to particular religious denominations shaped the attitudes and behavior of people in a variety of European societies in previous centuries. The papers focus on denominational differences in demographic and economic behavior in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Poland and Albania. While aware that religion was not the only determinant of differences in thought and behavior, they argue that religion influenced mentalities and actions, especially in societies divided by denomination.
This article presents an alternative account of comparative trajectories of secularization and religious change in Europe and America. Building on (1) 'supply-side,' (2) neo-orthodox secularization, and (3) historicist schools, the authors develop a synthetic explanatory framework which emphasizes changed conditions of religious belonging amid the transition to modernity. Modernization, they suggest, disrupted older, parochialized forms of religious community which emerged in the Middle Ages. The authors describe the rise and diffusion of newer, de-parochialized forms of religious belonging and organization in the 18th and 19th centuries and stress their comparative compatibility with modernity; here the authors draw special attention to the impact of missionary organizational schemas derived in colonial environments and re-purposed for domestic evangelism. They argue that mass unchurching was positively related to the persistence of parochialism and negatively related to the spread of post-parochialism. The salient comparison is therefore not merely between Western Europe and the US, but rather between national cases in which de-parochialization accompanied political and economic modernization and those in which it did not.
The End of Secularization in Europe?: A Socio-Demographic Perspective
Sociology of Religion, 2012
Much of the current debate over secularization in Europe focuses only on the direction of religious change and pays exclusive attention to social causes. Scholars have been less attentive to shifts in the rate of religious decline and to the role of demography-notably fertility and immigration. This article addresses both phenomena. It uses data from the European Values Surveys and European Social Survey for the period 1981 -2008 to establish basic trends in religious attendance and belief across the 10 countries that have been consistently surveyed. These show that religious decline is mainly occurring in Catholic European countries and has effectively ceased among post-1945 birth cohorts in six Northwestern European societies where secularization began early. It also provides a cohort-component projection of religious affiliation for two European countries using fertility, migration, switching, and age and sex-structure parameters derived from census and immigration data. These suggest that Western Europe may be more religious at the end of our century than at its beginning.