Reconnecting Religion with Social and Cultural History: Secularization's Failure as a Master Narrative

This article argues that the religious history written within the last thirty years has been unduly constrained by the impact of the secularization thesis. Through evaluating the original historiography and sociology that gave birth to it, and aspects of its cultural presence in Western (predominantly British) society and finally through an examination of the most recent scholarship, secularization emerges as a belief in itself. Focusing upon religion as a means of organizing responses to the world the article concludes with some suggestions about the directions the construction of religious history reunited with social and cultural concerns might wish to follow away from a now less than useful theory.