Three ways to define religion — and why it matters

The definition you choose determines your answer to the secularisation question. This is not a technicality; it is the whole argument in miniature.

• Substantive definitions — define religion by what it is: belief in a supernatural power or god (Weber). Strength: clear and precise. Weakness: exclusive and arguably Western-centric — it excludes belief systems such as some forms of Buddhism that have no creator god. And if you define religion narrowly, decline looks steeper.
• Functional definitions — define religion by what it does: whatever provides social integration, moral order or answers to ultimate questions (Durkheim, Yinger). Strength: inclusive and non-ethnocentric. Weakness: so inclusive that football, nationalism and consumerism start to count as religions — and if everything is religion, then nothing has declined.
• Social constructionist — refuse a universal definition altogether. Religion is whatever members of a society define as religion, and the sociologist's job is to study how that definition is made and contested.

Use this deliberately in the essay. A substantive definition makes secularisation look obvious; a functional one makes it almost impossible to demonstrate. Point that out, and you are analysing the debate rather than merely joining it.

Churches, sects, cults, NRMs and NAMs

• Ernst Troeltsch drew the classic line. A church is large, bureaucratic, formally organised, often linked to the state, claims a monopoly of truth, and draws members from all classes (though its leadership skews upper). A sect is small, exclusive, demanding, often built around a charismatic leader, and rejects the wider world.
• Denomination — H. Richard Niebuhr's category: between church and sect. It accepts society, tolerates other faiths, and does not claim a monopoly of truth. Niebuhr's key argument: sects are inherently unstable and typically become denominations within a generation, as the charismatic founder dies and the second generation is born into the group rather than converted to it.
• Cult — loose, individualistic, tolerant, often focused on personal fulfilment. Stark and Bainbridge distinguish audience cults (no commitment, media-based), client cults (a service provided to a consumer) and cultic movements (more demanding, more organised).
• New Religious Movements. Roy Wallis (1984) offers the classification OCR expects: world-rejecting (demanding, communal, hostile to the outside world), world-accommodating (breakaways from mainstream churches, focused on personal religious experience while living normal lives) and world-affirming (offering techniques for success, therapy and self-improvement — closer to a business than a church).
• New Age Movements. Paul Heelas characterises the New Age by self-spirituality — the sacred is found within the self, not in an external god — and by detraditionalisation: authority rests with personal experience, not with scripture or priesthood. Followers assemble beliefs eclectically from many traditions.

Which type of religious organisation?

Tap a feature, then tap the type of organisation it describes.

Measuring belief, belonging and religiosity

OCR names four concepts here, and the last two are the heart of the secularisation debate.

• Religious belief — what people actually believe. Measured by surveys, which are cheap and wide but suffer from social desirability bias and from the fact that people's beliefs are often vague, inconsistent and hard to express.
• Religiosity — the depth and importance of religion in a person's life. Almost impossible to operationalise: attending church every week may mean deep devotion, or habit, or a wish to get a child into a faith school.
• Believing without belonging — Grace Davie's central concept (1994). Church attendance has fallen sharply in Britain, but belief has not fallen nearly as fast. People retain religious belief while abandoning institutional membership. On this reading, falling attendance measures the decline of obligation, not the decline of faith. Religion has become privatised, not extinguished.
• Vicarious religion — Davie's later concept (2007): religion performed by an active minority on behalf of a much larger majority who implicitly approve. Most people never attend — yet they want the church there for weddings and funerals, they expect it to speak at moments of national grief, and they are outraged if it is threatened. The apparently indifferent majority turn out to hold the institution in reserve.

The counter-attack. Voas and Crockett ('Religion in Britain: Neither Believing nor Belonging', 2005) analysed survey data and argued Davie is wrong: both belief and belonging have declined, and they have declined together, generation by generation. Each cohort is less religious than its parents. Learn this as the direct rebuttal to Davie — having both sides is what gets you into the top band.

Davie vs Voas and Crockett

Functionalism: religion as the worship of society

• Émile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912) studied totemism among Aboriginal Australian clans and reached a startling conclusion. The totem — a carved emblem — is treated as sacred, set apart from the profane world of everyday life. But the totem is simply a symbol of the clan. Therefore, in worshipping their god, people are in fact worshipping society itself. Collective ritual generates collective effervescence, binding individuals to a force greater than themselves, and reinforcing the collective conscience.
• Bronisław Malinowski, from fieldwork with the Trobriand Islanders, found that ritual clustered around uncertainty and stress: fishing in the calm lagoon required no ritual, but the dangerous, unpredictable ocean was surrounded by it. Religion manages anxiety at exactly the points — death, birth, danger — where social life is most fragile.
• Talcott Parsons — religion supplies the ultimate values that underpin the social order, and provides answers to ultimate questions (why do the innocent suffer?) that would otherwise threaten it.
• Robert Bellah — civil religion: in a religiously diverse society, a quasi-religious devotion to the nation itself (flags, anthems, founding myths, ceremonies) can perform the integrative function that a shared church once did.

Evaluation: functionalism explains integration but not conflict — Northern Ireland, India, the Middle East. Religion has divided societies as often as it has bound them. It also assumes a value consensus that a diverse, multi-faith society does not have. And Durkheim generalised from one small-scale society to all of humanity.

Conservative force or force for change?

This is the single most examinable debate in the option.

• Marxism — religion as ideology. Karl Marx called religion 'the sigh of the oppressed creature... the opium of the people'. Read the whole phrase, not the slogan: religion is both a protest against real suffering and a consolation that dulls it. It cushions oppression by promising reward in the afterlife, by legitimating the existing hierarchy as divinely ordained, and by producing false consciousness — so the oppressed do not revolt. Religion is a conservative force.
• Neo-Marxism — religion as a potential force for liberation. Antonio Gramsci noted that religion can become counter-hegemonic: popular religious ideas can be turned against the powerful. Otto Maduro argued that religion has relative autonomy from the economic base, and pointed to liberation theology in Latin America, where Catholic priests actively sided with the poor against military dictatorships. Religion, in other words, is not necessarily conservative — it depends who is holding it.
• Weberianism — religion as a cause of change. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is the great counter-argument to Marx. Calvinists believed in predestination: nothing you do can alter whether you are saved. This produced an unbearable salvation anxiety. In response, Calvinists sought signs of election in worldly success, and adopted this-worldly asceticism — working relentlessly, living frugally, and reinvesting rather than spending. The result, unintentionally, was the accumulation of capital: a religious idea helped bring capitalism into being. Note Weber's care — he never claimed Calvinism caused capitalism alone, only that it supplied a necessary spirit where other conditions were present.

Weber's argument

Three more views of the role of religion

• Feminism. Most major religions are patriarchal in their organisation and their texts: sacred writings are largely written by men and feature men; women have historically been excluded from priesthood and leadership; and religious law has regulated women's bodies, dress and sexuality. Simone de Beauvoir argued religion works for women as Marx said it worked for the proletariat — it compensates for suffering rather than ending it. Karen Armstrong traces women's exclusion from religious hierarchy; Nawal El Saadawi argues religion has been used by patriarchy rather than being inherently patriarchal. Linda Woodhead makes the essential qualification: religion is not only oppressive — women are the more religious sex, and many use religion as a source of meaning, status, community and even resistance. The veil, for some women, is a chosen assertion of identity, not a symbol of submission.
• Phenomenology. Peter Berger (The Sacred Canopy, 1967) argued that religion provides a sacred canopy — a universe of meaning stretched over the terrifying chaos of existence, making the world feel ordered and life feel purposeful. Berger originally argued that modern religious pluralism destroys this canopy: once you know your neighbours believe differently, your own certainty is relativised. He later publicly changed his mind, arguing the world today is 'as furiously religious as ever' and that the secularisation thesis was mistaken. A theorist recanting his own famous argument is a gift in an essay.
• Postmodernism. Lyotard: religion is a metanarrative, and metanarratives have lost authority. But religion does not vanish — it relocates. David Lyon (Jesus in Disneyland, 2000) argues religion has migrated from the institution to the consumer sphere, becoming something people pick and mix. Danièle Hervieu-Léger describes 'spiritual shopping' and the breaking of the chain of memory that once transmitted faith between generations. Belief becomes fluid, personal, disorganised — and, crucially, uncountable by the old measures.

Match the sociologist to the idea

Tap a sociologist on the left, then their idea on the right.

Who is religious? Class, gender, ethnicity, age

• Gender. The most consistent finding in the whole field: women are more religious than men on almost every measure. Explanations: differential socialisation (women are socialised into passivity, nurturance and obedience — qualities religion values); women's closer involvement with birth, death and caring, the very points at which Malinowski says religion becomes necessary; deprivation (women are more likely to be poor, and religion compensates); and lower risk-taking (if you believe there is any chance of judgement, not being religious is a gamble). Woodhead adds that religion offers women a source of status and community often denied them elsewhere.
• Age. Older people are consistently more religious. Two rival explanations, and they matter enormously: the ageing effect (people become more religious as death approaches — in which case the young will follow) or the generational effect (each new cohort is simply less religious than the last, and stays that way — Voas and Crockett's conclusion). If it is generational, secularisation is irreversible.
• Ethnicity. Minority ethnic groups in Britain are on average more religious than the white majority. Steve Bruce offers two concepts: cultural defence (religion provides a focus for identity under threat — as in Northern Ireland or Poland under communism) and cultural transition (religion provides support and community for migrants adjusting to a new society). Modood found religion remaining central to identity across generations, though its form changes — the second generation often holds it more consciously and more politically than the first.
• Class. The picture is mixed and depends on the organisation. The Church of England has historically been associated with the middle and upper classes; Pentecostal and evangelical churches, and sects, draw disproportionately on the poor and marginalised — consistent with Weber's theodicy of disprivilege: religion explains and compensates for suffering, and promises that the last shall be first.

Ageing or generational?

Fundamentalism and the global picture

• Fundamentalism — a reassertion of what are held to be the fundamentals of a faith, typically involving a literal reading of a sacred text, a refusal of compromise, a sharp us/them boundary, and a wish to return to a purer past. It exists in every major religion.
• Why now? Steve Bruce argues fundamentalism is a reaction to modernity — to secularisation, pluralism and the loss of authority. It arises where believers feel their way of life is under threat. Anthony Giddens frames it as the opposite of cosmopolitanism: where the cosmopolitan lives with doubt and constant reflexivity, the fundamentalist seeks the certainty that a globalised, risk-saturated world has removed. Fundamentalism is thus a product of globalisation, not a survival from before it.
• Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' (1993) argued that post-Cold War conflict would be driven by cultural and religious fault lines. It is much-cited and heavily criticised: it treats civilisations as monolithic, ignores the vast diversity and conflict within each, and can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Use it — and then dismantle it.
• The global picture flatly contradicts the classical secularisation thesis. Pentecostal and evangelical Christianity are growing rapidly across the global South; Islam is growing globally; religion remains highly significant in the United States, a fully modern society. Berger's recantation follows directly from this evidence. Secularisation, if it is happening at all, may be a specifically Western European phenomenon — not a universal law of modernity. Say that sentence in an essay.

Fundamentalism and modernity

The case FOR secularisation

OCR asks about secularisation in three dimensions: belief, practice, and the power and influence of religion in society. Argue all three.

• Bryan Wilson (1966) gives the standard definition: secularisation is the process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance. Note the phrase — it is about significance, not merely headcount.
• Practice. Church attendance, baptisms, church weddings and religious vocations have all fallen substantially in Britain over the past century. Congregations are ageing.
• Power and influence. This is the strongest evidence. Functions once performed by the church — education, welfare, healthcare, law, moral regulation — have been taken over by the state and by professionals. This is differentiation or disengagement: religion has been squeezed out of the public sphere and privatised into a personal hobby.
• Belief. Max Weber's rationalisation and disenchantment: the scientific, technological worldview leaves fewer gaps for the supernatural to occupy. Steve Bruce (God is Dead, 2002) puts it bluntly — a technological worldview does not disprove God, but it steadily reduces the occasions on which anyone needs Him. Bruce also argues that religious diversity undermines certainty: when a hundred faiths are on offer, none can claim to be simply, obviously true.

The case AGAINST secularisation

• Davie — believing without belonging and vicarious religion. Falling attendance measures the decline of obligation, not of faith. Religion has changed form, not disappeared.
• Religious market theory. Stark and Bainbridge reject the whole secularisation narrative: religion answers needs no science can meet (what happens when I die?), so demand is constant. What varies is supply. Where religion is a state monopoly it becomes lazy and complacent and attendance falls; where there is a free religious market, competition produces vigorous churches and high participation. Their evidence is the United States — highly modern, highly religious, and with no established church.
• The spiritual revolution. Heelas and Woodhead's Kendal Project (2005) counted everyone involved in religion and spirituality in one English town. They found the congregational domain (traditional churches) declining, while the holistic milieu (yoga, reiki, meditation, personal spirituality) was growing. Their careful conclusion: the holistic milieu had not yet grown large enough to replace what the churches had lost — but the shift from external authority to inner self-spirituality was real. Religion is being relocated, not abolished.
• Postmodern relocation. Lyon and Hervieu-Léger: belief migrates to the consumer sphere and the internet. It becomes individual and disorganised — and therefore invisible to measures built for congregations.
• The global evidence, and Berger's recantation — the decisive empirical objection. Modernity has not produced secularisation outside Western Europe.

The judgement. Something real has declined: the institutional power, public authority and taken-for-grantedness of organised religion in Western Europe. But 'secularisation' as a universal law of modernity is not supported by the global evidence. The defensible conclusion is that religion in Britain has been privatised, individualised and relocated — and that Western Europe, far from being the future, may be the exception.

The American puzzle

Religion, law and the state

OCR asks you to 'consider government policies in relation to religious equality, religious discrimination and religious freedom'.

• Religious freedom. Freedom of thought, conscience and religion is protected in UK law via the Human Rights Act. But freedom is not absolute — it is balanced against other rights, which is exactly where the hard cases arise.
• Religious equality and discrimination. The Equality Act 2010 makes religion or belief a protected characteristic, prohibiting discrimination in employment and services. Religious hate crime is recorded and prosecuted.
• Faith schools. The state funds many faith schools. The debate is genuinely two-sided: supporters point to parental choice, strong ethos and results; critics argue they entrench segregation, permit selection by faith, and — in a plural society — hand public money to institutions that may teach exclusive truth claims.
• The hard cases. Where religious freedom collides with equality law — over dress codes at work, exemptions from equality duties, or the refusal of services — the courts must decide which right prevails. These conflicts are sociologically revealing: they show that in a secular, plural state, religion is no longer the source of law but a claimant under it. That, arguably, is what secularisation actually looks like in practice — not empty pews, but a church that must now ask the state's permission.

The defensible conclusion

Religion, belief and faith — the big ideas

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