Ammerman, Nancy T. 2013. Spiritual But Not Religious? Beyond Binary Choices in the Study of Religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52(2): 258–278. Huss, Boaz. 2014. Spirituality: The Emergence of a New Cultural Category And Its Challenge to the Religious and the Secular. Journal of Contemporary Religion 29(1): 47–60. Davie, Grace (2014). "Grace R.C. Davie: Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Waco, Texas: Baylor University . Retrieved 2 November 2020.

A third strand of research was rather different.It developed out of my links with Swedish colleagues at the Uppsala University which have led in turn to a series of European wide collaborative projects on religion and welfare.The first of these, Welfare and Religion in a European Perspective, 2003-06,was funded by the Tercentenary Foundation of the Bank of Sweden; the second, Welfare and Values in Europe, 2006-09,was financed by the European Commission, under the Framework 6 programme.Both are central to the understanding of modern Europe and develop – both empirically and theoretically – ideas about inclusion and exclusion. WaVEis predicated on the assumption that values can best be understood through the ways that they are expressed in practice.Accordingly, WaVEaims to study values through the prism of welfare.Two co-edited books on welfare and religion in 21st century Europe are the fruit of these collaborations. I was the co-director of both WREPand WaVEboth of which fed into the establishment in Uppsala of a Linnaeus Centre of Excellencein Uppsala concerned with the Impact of Religion:Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy .My involvement in this Centre resulted further visits to Uppsala, which continued into retirement. Woodhead, Linda. 2011. Spirituality and Christianity: The Unfolding of a Tangled Relationship. In Religion, Spirituality and Everyday Practice, 3–21. Springer. My commitment to the relationship between religion and society found a rather different application in an invitation to act (with Nancy Ammerman) as a Co-ordinating Lead Author for the chapter on religion in the report of the International Panel for Social Progress (IPSP) – an international consortium that came into existence to assess and synthesize the state-of-the-art knowledge that bears on social progress across a wide range of economic, political and cultural questions, For more information about the work and publications of IPSP and the place of religion within this, see Roof, Wade Clark. 1993. A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation. San Francisco: HarperCollins.

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Stark and Bainbridge (1996) agree with Berger that secularisation theory is Eurocentric and they put this down to what they call religious market theory or rational choice theory. They argue that there was no “golden age” of religion (others agree but for different reasons) and that religiosity remains largely constant, because people are “naturally” religious and it meets various human needs. When people make any decision – and religiosity is no different – they make a rational cost/benefit analysis. They further argue that religious organisations act like businesses, selling a product. Where there is competition then the churches will try and make themselves attractive, whereas where there is a monopoly, things become stale and unattractive. They suggest there is a cycle where, as a church declines, new products come onto the market (sects, cults, etc.) which eventually leads to diversity and a religious “revival”. They use this argument to explain why (compared with Europe) religion has remained strong in the USA. No one church has ever been dominant there, and so there has always been a lively competitive marketplace. However, this does not explain the way religion has remained very strong in societies with one dominant faith in the developing world, such as in the Middle East and parts of Africa. Revisiting secularization in light of growing diversity: The European case. Religions 2023 , 14 (9), 1119; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14091119 Winter, Michael, and Christopher Short. 1993. Believing and Belonging: Religion in Rural England. The British Journal of Sociology 44(4): 635–651.

Marler, Penny Long, and C.Kirk Hadaway. 2002. ““Being Religious” or “Being Spiritual” in America: A Zero-sum Proposition? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41(2): 289–300. In moments such as these, Davie comes tantalisingly close to seeing another striking ‘religion and Europe’ connection: namely, that the ‘secularization’ that has become ‘central to the self-understanding of modern Europe’ (282), and hence central to her own self-understanding as a social scientist too, is strictly inseparable from the fact that the ‘universe’ of that self-understanding remains profoundly Christian. Just two or three remarks on believing without belonging, before I move on, because I really don’t want to center on this too much. It is vital to remember that the disjunction of active and inactive, of dropping in or regular commitment, is as common in secular life as it is in religious life. If you look at political parties, trade unions, attendance at football matches, cinema-going, all the graphs go in the same direction. Interestingly, if you look at football and cinema, you find J-curves; they drop very sharply in the postwar period and they turn up from the late ’80s, and ’90s into the 21st century. I don’t see why that is not possible for religion, but it hasn’t happened yet. Troeltsch, Ernst. 1956[1931]. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. London: Allen and Unwin.

In 1999-2000 two indicators started to rise among younger people. One was belief in a soul and the other was belief in a “God in me.” In other words, a belief in an afterlife, but also in the notion of a personal God, my God, as opposed to a transcendent God — the notion of immanence. The rise occurred right across Europe, but is most marked in those parts of Europe where the institutional churches are at their weakest. In other words, it happens in the UK, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and France. Spain is on the cusp. It doesn’t happen in Poland, Ireland or Italy, where the church is still strong and seen as a disciplinary force and is therefore rejected by young people. Predicting the future is interesting. And here I will refer you to the European Values Study, the prototype for the World Values Survey. The European Values Study has now been done three times: in 1981, 1990 and 1999-2000. Those dates slip a bit in different countries. The thing I want to draw your attention to is what came out in the 1999-2000 study, which was a pattern that nobody had predicted; it is, moreover, a very interesting finding to reflect on. Why is religion still important? Can we be fully modern and fully religious? The Sociology of Religion works at two levels. First it sets out the agenda - covering the key questions in the sociology of religion today. At the same time, it interrogates this agenda - asking if the sociology of religion, as we currently know it, is 'fit for purpose'. If not, what is to be done?