Social Compass

Catalonia is simultaneously the most secular region in Spain and the region that places the greatest priority on actively managing religious affairs. Moreover, parties comprising the Catalan Left have been particularly assertive in pushing for legislative proposals to reduce the privileges of the Catholic Church and the general presence of religion in the public sphere. This article examines the sources of Catalonia’s exceptionality in religious matters, with a focus on the entanglements between religion and nationalism in the region. Drawing on survey data, legal documents, transcripts of parliamentary debates, media reports, and historical studies, the author argues that counter-state understandings of nationhood have figured centrally in the rapid secularization of Catalonia’s populace, the Catalan government’s proactive approach to religious governance, and the Catalan Left’s insistence on church–state reform at both the regional and national levels. This analysis speaks to broader questions regarding religion, secularism, and nationalism in stateless nations.

This article is based on ethnographic research about the intersections of contemporary forms of spirituality and Catholicism in Italy, Spain, France and Portugal and analyses what social actors mean when they say that they are ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR). We need to go beyond this self-description and try to understand why spirituality is increasingly being constructed in opposition to religion and what our informants mean, when they say that they are spiritual. With this approach we discover that spirituality, religion and secularism are not completely distinct categories but mutually constitute each other (Asad, 2003 ; Fedele and Knibbe, 2013, 2020) and that the SBNR are not necessarily unchurched (Fedele, 2013 ; Fedele and Knibbe, 2013 ; Ammerman, 2013a). Through ethnographic examples I show how spirituality represents a safe middle ground between religion and secularism. It offers a lingua franca that allows describing religious experiences in increasingly secularized societies. This spiritual lingua franca is particularly useful when addressing issues related to gender and sexuality because it allows embracing secular values without renouncing to be religious.

This article offers a sociology of religion approach to the study of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) religious freedoms jurisprudence. Specifically, it presents multidisciplinary research conducted on grassroots-level impact of that jurisprudence. That research maps onto the European context North American socio-legal theory which demonstrates that the direct effects of courts, in terms of prompting legal change, entail only a very small part of courts’ potential impact on society and which encourages instead attention to courts’ ‘indirect’ or ‘radiating’ effects, such as influence on how grassroots actors conceive of, talk about, and pursue their rights at the local and national level. Our relevant research in the European context shows how little attention grassroots social actors with a vested interest in religion-related rights are paying to the relevant ECtHR jurisprudence. The article discusses the broader importance of this finding for sociologists of religion.

This article examines the movements made by the Centre d’action laïque (CAL, Centre for Secular Action), a French-speaking structure of organized secularism in Belgium, in its definition of secularism over the last twenty years. Starting from an observation of the mobilization of secularism in the written output from the CAL, the article examines the extent to which its secular ideal has become secularized both in its vocabulary and in its commitments, no longer being necessarily determined by its relationship to religion. It reveals how the written output of the CAL is gradually distancing itself from a secularism constructed in opposition to, but also and perhaps in mirror image with, clericalism, to engage instead with topics previously unknown to secularism (such as sport, drugs and prostitution) so as to better respond with a philosophical secularism that a single position vis-à-vis religion can no longer always justify.

Throughout Europe we observe a significant trend of increasing state intervention in the governance of religious practices and expressions. A growing number of policies and procedures seek to define and regulate how religion can, and cannot, be expressed in the public domain. In this article we explore how ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion are translated into policies in urban contexts. We disentangle the social imaginaries that underlie the symbolic boundaries that distinguish between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ expressions of religiosity, and the repertoires of justification used to enforce them. Drawing on empirical research in cities in France and Spain, we argue that public expressions of religion are more likely to be deemed ‘acceptable’ in public as long as they meet a series of criteria, namely being perceived as: a) aesthetic and festive, rather than outrageous, b) discrete/decent/decorous rather than interpellating and, more importantly, c) exceptional rather than ordinary, d) freely chosen rather than imposed, e) cultural rather than pious, f) being legible with existing reference frameworks and categories rather than unintelligible. In other words, religious expressions are accepted, and considered to be acceptable, if they ‘fit’ or can be made ‘fit’ certain social expectations.

The Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé radically changed in the twentieth century. From being persecuted as crime and sorcery, it has become identified as culture. Its objects and images have become works of art. This article presents this process of ‘culturalization’ through objects and images. This transformation, however, resulted in some contradictions, that left some of these objects in ambiguous positions. This case study aims to contribute to current debates on the agency of objects and images in material religion.

The term ‘gender ideology’ has become a conceptual and political tool used by various religious and secular actors who defend a legal system embedded in a sexual universal morality. Although the use of the term began within the Catholic sphere, it currently characterizes the politics of different countries that are facing a wave of neoconservative activism. The article analyzes the expansion and uses of this term by considering two main aspects: first, an analysis of its emergence as a strategy by the Vatican to combat the impact of Sexual and Reproductive Rights (SRR) on Universal Human Rights; second, a presentation of the appropriations and uses of the fight against gender ideology as part of a neoconservative movement in Latin America.

Poland’s public sphere, in the three decades following the fall of communism, has been shaped by tensions between secular and religious visions of the polity. This article analyzes significant trends in the politico-religious landscape of contemporary Poland and discusses the growing polarization of Polish society around religion and politics. While the Catholic Church openly supports the country’s populist and right-wing government and remains strong from the loyalty of a significant portion on the Polish population, resistance to that political alliance and to the traditional association between Polishness and Catholicism is observable in various corners of Polish society. These include factions within the Catholic Church arguing for the depoliticization of Polish Catholicism; apostate and secularist movements; and the support for, and participation in, a notable Jewish revival. The article shows that while very different in both content and form, these movements converge in their effort to secularize Polish national identity and build a public sphere where various religious and non-religious value systems co-exist.

This article argues that quantitative secularization research has made important progress in the last 20 years in seven areas. We have gained knowledge of how religion and religiosity are connected to insecurity, education, socialization, secular transition, secular competition, pluralism, and regulation. This has led to a better understanding of the causes and the form of the secularization process. In this article, the author discusses the new ideas that have led to these advances, the evidence that supports the claims, and the new problems that have appeared due to the progress made.

This article is a critical response to Jörg Stolz’s 2019 ISSR presidential address as to the advances made by secularization research over the last 20 years. The article argues that the data presented can be boiled down to confirming what we already knew: the decline of ‘churched’ religion. Sketching a radical epistemological, methodological and empirical critique, it argues that the seven areas of ‘advances’ discussed in the presidential address erode into near insignificance. Because this quantitative research compartmentalizes religion and lacks solid contextualization in the world we live in, it completely overlooks the massive qualitative changes that have been reconfiguring religion on a global scale, and which can be understood as the result of the erosion of the nation-state container at the hands of economic globalization and the massification of neoliberal and consumer dynamics and the consequent substantial changes in global societies, well beyond the West.

Secularisation theory has been a central element of research and teaching in sociology since the middle of the twentieth century. This article discusses the current state of the art in secularisation research through the perspectives of decolonial theory, global sociology, feminist theory and the experiences of minority religions. Responding to Jörg Stolz, the article argues that current secularisation research suffers from conceptual shortcomings regarding the socio-political implications of secularism and the secular, that the parochial nature of secularisation theory has led to its entanglement in modernist, catching-up narratives, and that a feminist perspective is necessary to provide more detailed accounts of the gendered nature of processes of secularisation, particularly regarding new religious movements and the religious transformations within minority religious groups. The article concludes that secularisation theory needs to take into account minority religious experiences, the religiosity of women and religion beyond Euro-America in order to understand the significant shifts in religiosity that remain overlooked by methodologies operating solely at the level of nation-states.

The methodology of scientific research programmes, developed by Imre Lakatos, can help us to identify which theories are strong or weak. Applying this approach suggests that the secularization research programme is progressing, as Stolz argues. Some of the recent advances have been more successful than others, however. In particular, we have done better at understanding how secularization happens than why it happens.

Commenting Stolz’s 2019 International Society for the Sociology of Religion presidential address, this article further explores four key current debates in the secularization paradigm: (1) the continued search for the ultimate root causes of secularization in the West, (2) the critique from individualization theories towards the concept of secularization, (3) the substantive content of nonreligion, and (4) the risks of limiting ourselves to grand theories.

This article is a response to the articles published in this issue of Social Compass by François Gauthier, Tobias Müller, David Voas and Sarah Wilkens-Laflamme about the presidential address given by Jörg Stolz at the SISR Congress in July 2019 and titled Secularization theories in the twenty-first century: Ideas, evidence, and problems.