Britain’s Last Religious Revival? Quantifying Belonging, Behaving, and Believing in the Long 1950s

The secularisation of the West has been profoundly ironic. In 1966, when Bryan Wilson published his seminal Religion in Secular Society, it was taken for granted by social scientists (and many religious people) that Christianity was in decline in modern industrial democracies and that the explanation lay not in specific failings of particular churches, but in the corrosive effects of a combination of linked changes glossed as ‘modernisation’: individualism, consumerism, and social diversity weakening shared belief systems, technology providing effective solutions to many of the problems previously addressed by religion, and secular institutions replacing many of religion’s societal functions. In addition, a growing sense of egalitarianism (even before it became embodied in formal democracy) prevented Western states from coercing religious conformity and encouraged toleration as the most peaceful response to growing social and cultural diversity.