The government’s changes to faith schools side with hardline religion

This month the government announced its plans to remove the 50% cap on selection by religion for faith-based free schools and academies. Here Linda Woodhead argues that in striving to protect the rights of religious minorities, the government is undermining the religious centre ground. In today’s majority ‘no religion’ society, she warns, we need to be careful: growing ignorance about religion does not have to mean growing gullibility, understanding the actual weight of religious opinion is crucial

Gendering Secularisation Theory

Major theories of secularisation have been gender blind, with the result that men's experience of modernisation has been made central to explanations of religious decline. This paper attempts to show how greater attention to women's distinctive experiences can help extend the explanatory power of secularisation theory. It begins by introducing two main ‘stories' of secularisation, articulated by Weber and Marx, which have shaped much subsequent theory about religious decline. Looking first at industrial society, it shows how the distinctive experiences of modernity, which Weber and Marx discuss, have to do with largely masculine forms of labour. Women's labour, far more confined to the domestic sphere, would not necessarily have had the same secularising impact – which may help explain why industrial modernity witnesses only relatively gentle rates of congregational decline. Women's continuing commitment to the churches also helps explain many transformations in the nature of Christian belief and practice in the modern period. Moving into the period of late modernity, from the 1960s, the paper notes a significant increase in the rate of church decline in recent decades, and suggests that this can be explained in terms of changing patterns of women's labour, as differentiation between male and female work begins to diminish. Persistent differences, however, including women's continuing disproportionate responsibility for the work of care, continue to impact upon the nature of male and female religious and spiritual participation in contemporary west-ern societies

Religion and Brexit:populism and the Church of England

Drawing on our own recent surveys on beliefs and values in Great Britain (Woodhead) and evangelical Christians in the UK (Smith) this article explores the links between religion, views and votes on leaving or remaining in the EU in the UK’s 2016 referendum. Poll data gathered shortly after the 2016 referendum (n = 3,243) allows us to test associations between religious identity and behaviour and attitudes to voting Leave, while controlling for other demographic variables. The main finding is that identifying as Church of England (Anglican) is an important independent predictor of voting Leave even when other relevant factors like age and region are corrected for. By contrast, self-defined English evangelicals (from an opportunity sample of 1,198, collected and analysed by Smith) appear to be more pro-EU and generally internationalist in outlook. Previous surveys by Woodhead on religion and values in the UK provide some explanation for these findings, and for the striking difference of UK and US evangelicals, 81% of whom supported Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. The article ends with reflections on whether the term ‘populist’ can be usefully applied to the evangelical pro-Trump vote in the US or the Church of England pro-Brexit vote in the UK. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

As diferenças de gênero na prática e no significado da religião

This paper discusses the slowly-progressing influence of gender studies on the sociology of religion, and discusses key publications in the Anglophone tradition. It shows that the introduction of a gendered perspective has far-reaching consequences. These include rethinking the concept of ’religion’ and what counts as ’real religion’ (not just those forms in which men are most visible and powerful), adjusting methods, and reconsidering dominant theories like those of secularization. Moreover, the religious history of modern western societies can be re-read in terms of changing gender relations, and their linkages with religion. The paper proposes a new framework for thinking about religion and gender, which highlights the way in which power relations established in each confirm or contest one another.Este artigo trabalha com a crescente influência dos estudos de gênero na Sociologia da Religião e faz uma síntese das principais publicações sobre o tema na literatura de língua inglesa. Mostra que a introdução de uma perspectiva de gênero tem efeitos essenciais, entre os quais podemos citar o questionamento do conceito de religião e as formas de religiosidade valorizadas, sobretudo aquelas nas quais os homens tem maior visibilidade e dispõem de um poder maior. Mas isto também implica uma adaptação dos métodos e o questionamento das teorias dominantes, como a da secularização. Graças a essa abordagem, a História religiosa das sociedades ocidentais podem ser reanalisadas em função das transformações nas relações de gênero, estabelecendo, deste modo, uma ligação entre gênero e religião. O artigo propõe, ainda, um novo contexto de análise, de modo a articular gênero e religião, esclarecendo, assim, a maneira segunda a qual as relações de poder opõem-se ou complementam-se em ambos os campos

Trends in Church Life: The Spiritual Revolution

This paper employs empirical research methods to ascertain ways in which Christianity may need to develop if it is to retain active support in the West. It describes outcomes from a two-year locality study undertaken by a team from Lancaster University with the aim of mapping ‘contemporary patterns of the sacred’ (more fully developed in the 2005 book The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead). One major finding was that ‘subjectivized’ forms of religion and spirituality (those which speak to and resource personal subjective life) appear to be growing rapidly at the expense of traditional forms of religion. The paper concludes with thoughts on ways in which Christianity could develop that would help it to make headway within a subjectivised culture

Omvärdering av offentliga religion

Under det innevarande århundradet har det också i de mest "sekulära" samhällen i Väst blivit allt tydligare att religion spelar en roll i det offentliga livet och att det inte bara kan beskrivas som något "privatiserat". Men hur skall denna offentliga roll förstås och analyseras? Denna artikel presenterar en ram för en sådan analys som tar de olika roller, som olika slags religioner spelar i de moderna samhällenas differentierade sfärer (utbildning, juridik, välfärd osv.), på allvar. Med andra ord, den laborerar med ett antal variabler: Vilken typ av religion? Vilken är relationen mellan det religiösa och det sekulära? Inom vilken/vilka sociala sfär(er)? Vilken typ av roll spelar religon? I vilka relationer till klass, gender, etnicitet och andra utgångspunkter för ojämlikhet? Denna differentierade modell tager sin utgångspunkt i en kritik av existerande uppfattningar av offentlig religion (ex. Bryan Wilson resp. José Casanova) och de antagelser som de utgår ifrån, inklusive en insnävning till det nationella, en sammansmältning av social differentiering och en snäv kyrko- eller denominations-fokuserad syn på religion. Resultatet är ett analytiskt verktyg som är bättre utformat för att kunna taga hänsyn till olika former för offentlig religion som är finna på lokalt, nationellt och transnationellt nivå i de senmoderna konsumtionssamhällena

An interview with Terhi Utriainen

An interview with Terhi Utriainen by Linda Woodhead