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For some while there has been a keen debate in the sociology of religion about whether the future of religion is presaged by the three hundred million or so people of Western Europe (in particular North-Western Europe ) or instead by an equivalent number of people in the United States. The debate involves some major theoretical stances on the subject, and in particular it activates a long-term issue about the presumed effects of modernization on religion, given that both regions have been foremost in the process of modernization. A long time ago I wrote that it all turned on whether or not you thought that France, as the model for the clash between Enlightenment and religion, gave us a preview of the global future, or reserved that honor for Scandinavia, as the model for an internally secularized Protestantism. The oddity is that the United States, in its origins and development, presents an alternative to the French version of the Enlightenment and a quintessential Protestant culture, while being the most religious of modern societies (though there have, of course, been those who have argued it is secularized from within). Inevitably a debate of this kind involves some scholars writing about incipient signs of secularization in the baby boom generation in the United States, and evidence for disaffiliation among young people today, while others canvass what Andrew Greeley has called "Unsecular Europe." A phenomenon like the amazing spread of Pentecostalism in the developing world does not count because the societies in which it expands are not properly modern. You can even dismiss it as a premonition of secularization if you take Protestantism to be just the first step on the way to the secular future.
More recently the debate has taken on a seemingly new form with the popularity of the notion of post-secularity. One version hails a return of religion to the public square, even in Europe. The most recent expression of this is a book entitled God Is Back (2009) by Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, which might be paired with Steve Bruce's God is Dead (2003), but the argument already has a long history. Gilles Kepel's The Revenge of God appeared in 1994. José Casanova argued against the supposed privatization of religion in his influential Public Religions in the Modern World(1994), and this points up a major oddity of the current debate about post-secularity, given that religion has been a consistent presence in the public life of Europe throughout the postwar period. After all, the church was central to the emergence of Christian Democracy, and the diminution of its influence, say in Spain or Holland, is a continuing process that bears none of the marks of something called the post-secular.
I suspect we are witnessing a largely intellectual return to the consideration of the role of religion, for example in the new book by Jürgen Habermas entitled Between Naturalism and Religion, which is as sociologically naïve as it is philosophically sophisticated. This intellectual interest is not prompted by anything new in the evidence, in Western or even in Eastern Europe, but by the impact of Islam, including the sizeable migrant populations of Muslims in Europe itself, and by the inclusion of highly religious ex-communist countries like Poland, Romania, and Slovakia in the European Union. There has been a religious revival in Russia and Ukraine of major political significance, but that is hardly the center of the debate. Moreover the debate proceeds as if the challenge to secularization theory were quite recent, whereas the present author initiated it as far back as 1965, interestingly enough just at the time when "the death of God" was at the height of its intellectual popularity. In 1969 I also put forward the idea that the course of secularization (understood most plausibly as a process of differentiation whereby major functions like socialization and welfare are transferred from religious to secular agencies) was significantly channelled by national histories ("path-dependency" in recent parlance), in particular by the type of Enlightenment experienced (French, British, German, or American), and by whether religion played a positive role (as in Poland) or a negative role (as in France) in the emergence of the nation.
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