God, guns and gays: Supply and demand of religion in the US and western Europe

摘要

Since the September 2001 terrorist attacks, and subsequent conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, public interest in cultural and religious differences around the world has grown tremendously. Debates about secularisation theory and its recent critiques have become increasingly relevant to contemporary concerns. The idea of secularisation has a long and distinguished history in the social sciences with many seminal thinkers arguing that religiosity was declining throughout western societies. The seminal social thinkers of the nineteenth century - Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud - all believed that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the advent of industrial society (see Bruce [ed] 1992 and Aldridge 2000). They were far from alone: the death of religion was the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century. Indeed, it has been regarded as the master model of sociological inquiry, where secularisation was ranked with bureaucratisation, rationalisation, and urbanisation as the key historical revolutions transforming medieval agrarian societies into modern industrial nations (Wright Mills, 1959).