The Sacred in a Secular Age

Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion

Phillip E. Hammond

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520325418
• eBook ISBN: 9780520325425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Sacred in a Secular Age, edited by Phillip E. Hammond, brings together leading scholars to reassess one of the most enduring assumptions in the sociology of religion: the secularization thesis. Long taken as conventional wisdom, the thesis posits an inexorable decline of the sacred as societies modernize. Yet the persistence—and even resurgence—of religion in new movements, conservative traditions, and political struggles around the world challenges the adequacy of this model. This volume explores these paradoxes, asking how the sacred endures, transforms, and reasserts itself within ostensibly secular contexts.

The essays span theory, method, and case studies, engaging topics from new religious movements to conservative Protestantism, from cultural institutions to private life and global politics. Contributors probe the distinction between “religion” and “the sacred,” a line blurred in much modern scholarship but central to the work of classical theorists like Durkheim and Simmel. By interrogating this distinction, the volume points toward more nuanced frameworks for understanding sacred phenomena in secular societies. Rather than discarding the secularization paradigm, the contributors refine and revise it, suggesting ways forward for a field in transition. A landmark in the sociology of religion, the collection maps both the challenges and the possibilities for the next generation of inquiry.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• I Secularization: The Inherited Model
• II Utopian Communities: Theoretical Issues
• III New Religious Movements: Yet Another Great Awakening?
• IV Social Responses to Cults
• V The Study of Social Change in Religion
• VI New Perspectives from Cross-Cultural Studies
• VII Studies of Conversion: Secularization or Re-enchantment?
• VIII Religious Organizations
• IX Church and Sect
• X Conservative Protestantism
• XI The Sacred in Ministry Studies
• XII Science and the Sacred
• XIII Gender, the Family, and the Sacred
• XIV The Sacred and Third World Societies
• XV Religion and Psychological Well-Being
• XVI Psychoanalysis and the Sacred
• XVII Religion and Healing
• XVIII Mysticism
• XIX Religion and Politics in America: The Last Twenty Years
• XX Policy Formation in Religious Systems
• XXI Social Justice and the Sacred
• XXII The Sacred and the World System
• About the Contributors
• Index