Post-secularisation. A new paradigm in Sociology of Religion.

Abstract

After the increasing criticism on the theory of secularisation during the last decades, post-secularisation has been consolidated as a new paradigm in the sociology of religion. However, an approach to sociological production on the subject reveals two basic lines of interpretation, one that emerges from social theory and another that makes use of post-secularisation as a descriptive category.

This article focuses on the integration of both perspectives and their interaction within the post-secularisation paradigm. The relevance of this joint approach is based on both the reflections taken from the main works on post-secularisation and data from sociological analysis, including the author's research on the Spanish case of secularisation and data from the broader European context.

The critical approach to secularisation and the challenge of plurality are the two main axes of study. Both categories will allow us to explore the interaction between "post-secular consciousness" and historical sociology, on the one hand, and between the normative recognition of plurality and the challenges of its sociological analysis, on the other. This tension between theory and sociological reality, which the theory of secularisation missed at a certain point in its development, is what enables the post-secularisation paradigm to limit the excesses of its predecessor in interpreting religious transformations in modernity.