Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Making Contemporary Britain)

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Davie is best known for three distinctive phenomena that she identifies in her influential interpretations of the data on belief and non-belief in Europe. All three are important reference points for many of the essays in the second half of this collection. First, the phenomenon she calls ‘believing without belonging’ – people in Europe maintaining a belief in God or spiritual beliefs in general but with declining participation in church activities (658). Second, the phenomenon she calls ‘vicarious religion’ – where the historically dominant religious tradition in Europe (Christian worship) is now performed only by a minority but where that very performance is still approved of by the majority (658). The third is highlighted in Davie’s own contribution, where she explores the phenomenon she calls ‘exceptionalism’ – modern Europe’s secular culture explained not by its becoming modern, but by its being European (282). This book offers both an expert survey of contemporary sociology of religion and the personal reflections of one of the leading scholars in the field. Grace Davie is a good model for students and their teachers: she is clear, engaging and fair minded but unafraid to express a point of view' -David Voas, University of Manchester Zinnbauer, Brian J, Kenneth I Pargament, Brenda Cole, Mark S Rye, Eric M Butter, Timothy G Belavich, Kathleen M Hipp, Allie B Scott, and Jill L Kadar. 1997. Religion and Spirituality: Unfuzzying the Fuzzy. Journal for the scientific study of religion:549–564.

Mears, Daniel P., and Christopher G. Ellison. 2000. Who Buys New Age Materials? Exploring Sociodemographic, Religious, Network, and Contextual Correlates of New Age Consumption. Sociology of Religion 61(3): 289–313. Grace Davie's timely second edition of Sociology of Religion underlines that religion is no longer simply located within the private sphere and is rising in the public agenda. It might be a return of religion. It might also be that religion never left and that there is now a shift in perception that religion is more present in our life. This prompts a need for many disciplines to develop new tools for understanding this new process and/or shift in perception. Grace Davie's first edition of Sociology of Religion was already a more than a welcome contribution as it provided sociologists and non-sociologists with one of the best books on the topic. This second edition keeps up with the fast and evolving field of religion and provides the most up-to-date findings and theories in the sociology of religion. Needless to say, it is a must read for anyone interested in this field. Then just two years later, I turned the camera around the other way and looked at Europe from the outside. In the book is called Europe: The Exceptional Case, I argue that the patterns of religion in Europe are not a global prototype. They are, in fact, an exceptional case. European self-understanding is premised on the idea that modernization implies secularization. Europeans think that what Europe does today, everyone else will do tomorrow; they don’t find it easy to grasp that the European case is, perhaps, sui generic. So it’s the perspective of Europe from the outside that completes the picture — asking in particular if the mutations that are happening in Europe (the change from a culture of obligation to consumption in terms of religious life) are turning Europe toward America or whether this is a mutation that is genuinely European but indicative of different ways of doing things. Wuthnow, Robert. 1998. After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Davie, Grace. 1997. Believing Without Belonging: A Framework for Religious Transmission. Recherches Sociologiques 28(3): 17–37.Davie is a participating researcher in The Impact of Religion: Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy (IMPACT), a multidisciplinary research programme at Uppsala University, in the research area Religious and Social Change. [1] What is the sociology of religion? What are its particular concerns, dominant themes and defining methodologies? Where did it begin, and how has it evolved? This interview with Grace Davie, the first in our BSA SOCREL series, introduces this important and historically influential approach to the study of religion. Donahue, Michael J. 1993. Prevalence and Correlates of New Age Beliefs in Six Protestant Denominations. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion:177–184.

The chapter is by Davie, one of the editors of the Handbook, and it gives the Handbook overall a Davie stamp that is both brilliant and troubling. Brilliant because Davie’s work has been as intellectually groundbreaking as anyone’s in this field and fully deserves to be centre-staged in this volume; troubling because Davie’s incipient awareness of the religious roots of secularisation in Europe never finds properly developed expression. Nicolet, Sarah, and Anke Tresch. 2009. Changing Religiosity, Changing Politics? The Influence of “Belonging” and “Believing” on Political Attitudes in Switzerland. Politics and Religion 2(1): 76–99. Grace Davie is one of the best analysts of religion in contemporary sociology. This book caps a distinguished record of studies of religion - first of Britain, then of Europe, then globally. This is a magisterial work, which should be read by anyone interested in the place of religion in the modern world' - Peter L. Berger, Boston University Daiber, Karl-Fritz. 2002. Mysticism: Troeltsch’s Third Type of Religious Collectivities. Social Compass 49(3): 329–341.a b "Participating researchers and International Advisors - Uppsala Religion and Society Research Centre (CRS) - Uppsala University, Sweden". www.crs.uu.se (in Swedish) . Retrieved 16 March 2018.

But where the church is no longer able to discipline belief or behavior, which is the case across most of the continent, young people do not, it seems, turn to secular rationalism; they begin to experiment. Now, whether this will be of significance in a decade or whether it will be something that grows, is too soon to say. All I will say now is that nobody predicted the shift in the mid-1990s. Something is happening; something that I need to think about as I prepare a new edition of this book for the 21st century. But so much for believing without belonging. This new, updated edition offers a reliable introduction to the main ways in which sociology has illuminated religion and religious change. But more than that, it raises profound questions about how religion, and its refusal to die, challenges sociology - a discipline founded on belief in the inevitability of secularisationThe title of this Oxford Handbookspeaks to two great themes in the social sciences – and their connections. Each might be taken up on its own, but the collection’s editors, Grace Davie and Lucian N. Leustean, are keen to read the ‘and’ in their title as already called for if one wants to do justice to religion or Europe: each has fundamentally ‘shaped’ the other (1).