Disenchantment and re-enchantment in Europe, 1250–1920

The relationship of reason to religion is a preoccupation of our times. Some contemporary culture-warriors, particularly in Britain and the United States, vehemently maintain their inherent antitheticality, and imagine themselves engaged in a heroic struggle to preserve Enlightenment rationality and hard-won scientific advances in the face of a global upsurge of irrational belief. Behind much of the histrionics is a sense that history itself has gone off course. The longheld presumption of an essentially linear path of development, via such milestones as the Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment, towards a condition of benevolent and universal secular modernity has been thrown into disarray by the evident power of religious faith, not merely to maintain a fading hegemony, but to generate new forms of social identity and inspire cultural and political action across the developing and developed world. Where once the long sweep of the 'secularization paradigm' seemed axiomatic and universalizing, sociologists of religion now posit flowing and ebbing tides of 'Christianization' as a hallmark of modern European history