Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics) (Paperback)

by Pippa Norris (Author), Ronald Inglehart (Author) "THE SEMINAL SOCIAL thinkers of the nineteenth century - Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud - all believed..." (more)
Key Phrases: religious services these days, predominant religious culture, percentage attending religious services, United States, World Values Survey, Western Europe (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"This book is an impressive, well-documented, systematic examination of empirical evidence from many countries and cultures. It does not claim to resolve the secularization debate, but moves it to a new, more informed, and enlightening level..."
R.L. Herrick, emeritus, Westmar University

"This is a landmark book that deserves to be read widely and closely. It is rigorously grounded, carefully researched, and cogently argued ... A rare coup de grace in the form of a sharp and elegant empirical thrust to the heart of a protracted debate... Overall, this is a landmark book that deserves to be read widely and closely. It is rigorously grounded, carefully researched, and cogently argued... While not a holy text, it merits the kind of exegesis that many such texts receive."
N. J. Demerath, American Journal of Sociology

"Sacred and Secular is a very well-structured book, enriched by valuable survey data. It engages in important debates on development and secularization with its methodological elegancy and theoretical parsimony. It is a significant source to understand the classical social scientific approach to religion and a necessary basis to locate conflicting arguments on the field."
Ahmet T. Kuru, University of Washington, Comparative Political Studies

"Norris & Inglehart's book is a pleasure to read and an inspiration for scholars for its effort to generate solid knowledge on a much-debated question. Along the way, the reader will find much fascinating material..."
Sven Gunnar Simonsen, Journal of Peace Research

Sacred and Secular is a fine reference book for statistics on trends in religious observance throughout the world." Journal of Church and State Wendy Dackson

"The book is a major contribution to the life of the idea of secularization and the larger issues about the nature and meaning of modernity bound up with that idea. It merits close study."
Daniel Silver, University of Chicago

"The book's evidence and arguments-which are likely attracting the attention of a broad reading public beyond academia-certainly merit more critical discussion and focused evaluation by religion scholars, as they bear importantly on many larger concerns in the scientific study of religion and have many potential important policy implications."
Christian Smith, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

Product Description
Seminal thinkers of the nineteenth century -- Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud -- all predicted that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the emergence of industrial society. The belief that religion was dying became the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century. During the last decade, however, the secularization thesis has experienced the most sustained challenge in its long history. The traditional secularization thesis needs updating. Religion has not disappeared and is unlikely to do so. Nevertheless, the concept of secularization captures an important part of what is going on. This book develops a theory of secularization and existential security. Sacred and Secular is essential reading for anyone interested in comparative religion, sociology, public opinion, political behavior, political development, social psychology, international relations, and cultural change.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 348 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; illustrated edition edition (September 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521548721
• ISBN-13: 978-0521548724
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #255,326 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Important but Significantly Flawed, June 9, 2006

By	Christian Smith (Chapel Hill, NC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book presents a significant re-statement of secularization theory, framing religion as declining with the advance of "existential security" through modernization and human development. Along the way, the argument interestingly contradicts with strong empirical findings Stark and Finke's "religious economies theory," in a way that will demand a response from them. The book's strengths (and perhaps weakness, in some ways) are its cross-national perspective and survey data, which are all too rare in sociology of religion (although some are skeptical of the reliablity of the World Values Survey) and its attempt to seriously empirically test hypotheses deduced from significant theories. This is an important book in many ways, but note that is also compromised by a number of apparent flaws: 1. It uses mostly cross-sectional data to make claims about historical changes. 2. It perhaps wrongly assumes cohort rather than age effects in its generational analyses. 3. It does not actually even directly measure its key variable of existential security, but relies instead on indirect measures and inferences. 4. It does not well develop theoretically the social psychological and cognitive mechanisms that would lead increased existential security to secularize, leaving the reader to imagine the connections that would make that happen. 5. The major types of societies analyzed are also strongly correlated with different kinds of religions (post-industrial are heavily Protestant, agrarian heavily non-Christian), which the analysis does not always control for well. 6. It focuses on the "mass publics" of various nations, relying on calculated national means, with little attention to potentially important diversity and complexity within cases that matter for the overall argument. 7. We have very good reason to doubt that the survey measures used really work well across all religious traditions analyzed--e.g., can one survey question about church attendance or prayer really facilitate comparison across, say, Alabama fundamentalism, Japanese Shintoism, and Indian Hinduism?--very blunt instruments, indeed. 8. The book theoretically recognizes the importance of culture, but hardly touches on culture in its own analysis, other than creating regression dummy variables for different religious types, which is hardly attending to cultural analysis well--one supposes these are the limits of conducting research from a computer lab. 9. Some of the writing reflects a lack of genuine familiarity with religion as a human phenomenon per se (e.g., pg. 241 talks about "fundamentalist Evangelical churches," which anyone who knows American religious history ought to know doesn't make sense). 10. The strong linking of religion to existential insecurity seems reductionistic and two-dimensional, at least to this reader. The authors do recognize some of these problems, but recognizing them does not fix them. Thus, the book has significant potential flaws, but I think still is an important voice in an ongoing debate and is thus still worth a reading. Despite its flaws, many of the empirical correlations presented are truly impressive and need to be explained one way or another. And the empirical evidence on post-Soviet societies and on Islam and democracy is very interesting. One looks forward to Stark and Finke's reply to this book's attack on their paradigm/theory.

26 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The bottom line: poverty breeds religious faith..., October 23, 2004

By	Dolamite "Loopy" (Middlebury, VT) - See all my reviews

The single strongest argument to be found in this book -- shown through extensive data anayis, rich evidence, and clear thinking -- is that societies where people have enough to eat, housing, healthcare, good education, and jobs are societies marked by LOW religiosity: few go to church and few believe in God or that the Bible is divine. Conversely, societies whyere life is precarious, marked by poverty, corruption, sickness, low education and unemployment, are societies marked by high degrees of religiosity. Makes perfect sense. And this book spells it all out, with lots of reliable data.
The funny things as that all the social scientists of Europe from the 1800s who predicted the detah of religion WERE RIGHT -- for their own societies. Their predictions obviously didn't hold for the rest of the world, but heck, no prediction is perfect. Religion in most of Europe is dying -- as was predicted. See the work of Steve Bruce for even more solid contemporary evidence. or Grace Davie.
Greeley, Stark, and Finke are simply wrong. This book proves much of their theories wrong. Shame on Greeley for calling secularization theory "dogma" without data. Shame on Stark for mocking sound sociological evidence.
Rife with clear data and clear theoretical articulation, this is a solid look at religion the world over. Religious faith is indeed flourishing throughout much of the world, but that is only because poverty is also flourishing throughout much of the world. And why is religion so strong in the US? Hm...let;'s see...could it maybe be that we have the highest percentage of people below poverty of any advanced industrial democracy, and we have the greatest gap between rich and poor, and no national health coverage? Well heck, at least Bush is big on prayer....