Religious Decline or Religious Change? Making Sense of Secularization in Europe

Abstract The sociological theory of secularization has long served as the dominant explanation for what has happened to religion in modern European history, but the theory has fallen out of favor in recent decades. New theories and models have emerged, many of them focusing on religious change in modern European history and on what makes religion in Europe exceptional when compared with the United States and the global South. In this article, I provide an overview of the debate over secularization in Europe, surveying its nineteenth‐century origins, the emergence of the theory of secularization in the 1960s, and the alternative theories and models arising from a variety of disciplines since the 1980s. I argue that the best understanding of modern European religious history is one that takes seriously both religious decline and religious change. I conclude with brief reflections on the future of secularization studies and particularly on the two themes that hold the most promise for enhancing the secularization debate: gender and immigration.