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

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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. Bellah, Robert N, Richard Madsen, William M Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M Tipton. 2008[1985]. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. The last preliminary is to put a geographical limit on what I’m going to talk about because Europe is large and diverse. I’m going to talk primarily about the present definition of the European Union, not because I’m particularly wedded to the European Union as such. But the point I want to draw to your attention is that post-May 2004 the European Union is coterminous with Western Christianity, with the exception of Greece and Cyprus. That, in my view, is not a coincidence. What I’m talking about, then, is Europe of the Western Christian tradition. I’m not, for the moment, referring to the Orthodox world and the issues that raises, but by all means raise them when we get to questions. What is the sociology of religion? What are its particular concerns, dominant themes and defining methodologies? Where did it begin, and how has it evolved? This interview with Grace Davie, the first in our BSA SOCREL series, introduces this important and historically influential approach to the study of religion.

Daiber, Karl-Fritz. 2002. Mysticism: Troeltsch’s Third Type of Religious Collectivities. Social Compass 49(3): 329–341. and in this capacity, program chair of two major international conferences (Québec 1995, Toulouse 1997) each of which gathered 300 plus scholars from over 30 countries. Much has changed in Britain since the first edition of Religion in Britian was published in 1994, when Davie first introduced the notion of “believing without belonging” to describe the religious habits of many in the UK, in particular the place of religion within public life. The secularization hypothesis of the increasing marginalization and personalization of religious belief and practice has come in for serious scrutiny, but to simply declare it wrong is perhaps an oversimplification of a complex picture. Davie herself has developed her own thinking on the topic, introducing the notion of “vicarious religion” to complement that of “believing without belonging,” by which she means a small minority believe on behalf of the masses, and are subject to critique if they “do not do this properly” (p.6).

Should Scholars of Religion be Critics or Caretakers?

But where the church is no longer able to discipline belief or behavior, which is the case across most of the continent, young people do not, it seems, turn to secular rationalism; they begin to experiment. Now, whether this will be of significance in a decade or whether it will be something that grows, is too soon to say. All I will say now is that nobody predicted the shift in the mid-1990s. Something is happening; something that I need to think about as I prepare a new edition of this book for the 21st century. But so much for believing without belonging. 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] 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. a growing realization that patterns of religious life in the UK (indeed in Europe) are the global exception, not the global norm.

It is with respect to the third phenomenon that one might see a sort of internal limit marking Davie’s own social scientific approach to ‘religion and Europe’. The ‘trend’ in Europe is, Davie suggests, ‘clear’ to all social scientists: ‘this is a part of the world that by and large has become less Christian, more secular and more religiously diverse as the decades pass’ (270). Davie herself rejects the early and still-too-teleological sociological thesis that secularisation is ‘in any way an inevitable pathway’ for any society undergoing modernisation (270). In other parts of the world, modernisation takes place without significant secularisation. Nevertheless, secularisation does significantly accompany modernisation in Europe. Why is Europe an exception in this respect? Wuthnow, Robert. 1998. After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. This new, updated edition offers a reliable introduction to the main ways in which sociology has illuminated religion and religious change. But more than that, it raises profound questions about how religion, and its refusal to die, challenges sociology - a discipline founded on belief in the inevitability of secularisation Winter, Michael, and Christopher Short. 1993. Believing and Belonging: Religion in Rural England. The British Journal of Sociology 44(4): 635–651.

De Groot, Kees, and Jos Pieper. 2015. Seekers and Christian Spiritual Centers in the Netherlands. In A Catholic Minority Church in a World of Seekers, edited by S. Hellemans and P. Jonkers, 97-127. Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. That’s a nice nuance. However, what is not even considered here is that Europe remains stubbornly religious precisely in its preference for secularity. For reasons I will try to explain, this possible alternative to the standard secularisation thesis – conceiving secularity as a socio-political preference internal to a specifically Christian religious position – is not represented in the Handbook at all. The only connection between the religious and the secular that is considered is external: ‘the waning of Christianity’ in Europe is simply the unavoidable flipside of its ‘growing secularization’ (10). Davie, Grace (2014). "Grace R.C. Davie: Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Waco, Texas: Baylor University . Retrieved 2 November 2020.

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: I was the co-director of both WREPand WaVEboth of which fed into the establishment in Uppsala of a Linnaeus Centre of Excellencein Uppsala concerned with the Impact of Religion:Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy .My involvement in this Centre resulted further visits to Uppsala, which continued into retirement. 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. Lucas, Phillip C. 1992. The New Age Movement and the Pentecostal/Charismatic Revival: Distinct Yet Parallel Phases of a Fourth Great Awakening? In Perspectives on the New Age, ed. J.R. Lewis and J.G. Melton, 189–211. Albany: State University of New York Press. Davie is best known for three distinctive phenomena that she identifies in her influential interpretations of the data on belief and non-belief in Europe. All three are important reference points for many of the essays in the second half of this collection. First, the phenomenon she calls ‘believing without belonging’ – people in Europe maintaining a belief in God or spiritual beliefs in general but with declining participation in church activities (658). Second, the phenomenon she calls ‘vicarious religion’ – where the historically dominant religious tradition in Europe (Christian worship) is now performed only by a minority but where that very performance is still approved of by the majority (658). The third is highlighted in Davie’s own contribution, where she explores the phenomenon she calls ‘exceptionalism’ – modern Europe’s secular culture explained not by its becoming modern, but by its being European (282).

Similar Sociology resources:

Europe-The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World Sarum Theological Lectures (2002) ISBN 978-0232524253 Campbell, Colin. 1972. The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization. A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 5: 119–136.