Abstract
In the last issue of Theology my article on Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics (1966) was the first of a new series on ‘Cult Books Revisited’. Ted Peters has now written the second article in this series on a book first published in the same year: Ian Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion. I first read this wonderful book shortly after publication when I was working on my PhD and I found it enormously exciting. Many philosophers at the time regarded theology and science as wholly alien to each other (to the detriment of theology), but here was an academic trained in both subjects who could make fascinating connections between the way, say, physicists work and the way critical theologians work. Not only was this exciting (Ted captures this exactly in his article), it also inspired some theologians to engage in interdisciplinary studies – in my case theology engaging with sociology.
Given my particular interests, another book written in 1966 would also have been an obvious candidate for an article on Cult Books Revisited: the late Bryan Wilson’s elegantly written Religion in Secular Society. But the Aberdeen sociologist of religion Steve Bruce has beaten me to it, editing and introducing:
Bryan Wilson,
Religion in Secular Society: Fifty Years On
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); 258 pp.: 9780198788379, £27.50 (hbk)
In the emerging, rediscovered discipline of the sociology of religion in the 1960s, Wilson’s book was a seminal text. Reading it alongside David Martin’s The Religious and the Secular (1969), I realized that a key debate about secularization had been largely overlooked by theologians at the time (even though the latter used the term ‘secularization’ abundantly and uncritically). This debate inspired my very first (and long forgotten) book The Social Context of Theology (1975), which sided more with Martin than Wilson while being stimulated by both – who, being perfect gentlemen, seldom referred to each other’s books despite making contradictory claims about secularization.
Steve Bruce’s inclinations were exactly opposite to mine. While being befriended by both Martin and Wilson – both were hugely generous in giving their time to younger colleagues – he sided, and continues to side, mainly with Wilson even though most sociologists of religion today do not. Bruce remains unconvinced by most of his colleagues, defiantly entitling one of his most recent books Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (2013). There is more than a bit of irony involved in all of this. Religion in Secular Society outlined in detail some of the empirical evidence emerging in the 1960s that the Church of England was facing very serious decline, even though few senior figures in the Church at the time were prepared to acknowledge this publicly. The statistical evidence that Wilson used was not as good as it could have been even in 1966 (Owen Chadwick had already noticed much higher Victorian churchgoing statistics that could have bolstered his argument). Yet Wilson’s instincts have been proved to be largely accurate. Sociologists of religion and social historians working on local churches, alike, now largely agree that the last century-and-a-half has seen a massive numerical, political and social decline in the Church of England. But they seldom now conclude that this decline has been caused by a process of secularization, itself arising, so it was argued (and Bruce still argues) from the ineluctable forces of modernization. But why, if that is the case, is the most modern society in the world (the United States) still so church-bound?
Steve Bruce has done a good job introducing Wilson’s book, putting it into context, changing its engendered and now politically incorrect terminology (the deeply conservative Wilson might have thoroughly disapproved) and valiantly defending its main theses against all comers. He even defends Wilson’s use of both declining churchgoing in England (he seldom mentioned the rest of the UK) and that resilient churchgoing in the United States (on the grounds that the latter was socially insignificant) as evidence of secularization. I am still not convinced, but I am grateful to Steve for trying and, especially, for contextualizing this important and pellucid cult book (how Wilson would also have hated the term ‘cult’) for a new audience.
There is plenty more to enjoy in this issue of Theology. Elaine Graham offers important insights into ‘New directions in practical theology’. This is followed by three articles linking theology to the arts: David Jasper gives us another article, this time on the novelist Jim Crace; Jem Bloomfield writes on Suzanne Collins’s novel The Hunger Games; and the artist Libby Byrne illustrates practice-led theology. Finally, Wendel Sun’s ‘Difficult Text’ is Romans 6.14.