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WHY CONSERVATIVE CHURCHES ARE GROWING: A Study in Sociology of Religion with a new Preface (Rose, No. 11)

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In 1969 Peter Berger told the New York Times that religious people would soon be huddled together in little enclaves, surrounded by a sea of secularity. In doing so, he was simply making explicit the philosophy of history implicit in social theory since its founding. According to this philosophy, Christianity became Protestant, then liberal Protestant, then vaguely and privately spiritual, moving inevitably towards secularism. In the 60s and into the 70s the data on American religion seemed to support this story - at least in mainline churches. First published in 1972, this book directed attention to the surprising and theoretically problematic fact of growing conservative churches, precisely those churches that were most demanding and seemingly ill-equipped for the modern world. As secularization and modernization theory crumbled with the resurgence of conservative religion in public life in the US and around the world (see Jose Casanova's Public Religions in the Modern World), it became clear that conservative religion was not going away quietly and that social science had been dead wrong. Kelley was among the first to recognize that there was something mistaken with social science's predictions of a secular future. His book was part of a dramatic, if belated, recognition among scholars that lots of Americans find conservative, strict Churches profoundly attractive.