Is Religion Dying? Secularization and Other Religious Trends in the World Today

The first section offers a brief historical overview of the concept of secularization and how it has become a master narrative in thinking about religion and modernization. The master narrative, however, can be problematic and has been contested in terms of what secularization really means and whether it is indeed a linear process. To address these problems, I then present the different nuances by which the concept of secularization has been clarified and explained. But again, because of its status as a master narrative, its relevance to the vibrant state of religion in other societies has been called into question. From thereon, I would suggest that perhaps the question “is religion dying?” needs to be rephrased to allow other analytical possibilities. The last section deals with the “coexistence thesis” in which secularization is just one of the trends concerning religious change in the world today