Secularization: An International Debate from a British Perspective

Abstract

Fundamental concepts like secularization are initially formulated from perspectives embedded in particular histories, and the contrast between the British perspective and the French provides a network of clues as to how secularization is systematically inflected in the British and French cases. Once one follows these clues through it becomes clear that secularization as a concept is not a neatly bounded entity suspended ahistorically in neutral ideological space but bound up with culturally constructed binaries, such as 'the religious' and 'the secular', with ideological notions of the direction of history and the teleology of progress, and with ages and stages. Secularization gathers together several semi-related changes, but should not be understood as a one-way-street.