Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World

• Other Authors: Hempton, David, McLeod, Hugh
• Format: Book
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2017
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198798071.001.0001

In the early twenty-first century a flood of books and newspaper articles discussed the apparent ‘God Gap’ between a more ‘religious’ America and a more ‘secular’ Europe. Many commentators pointed to the separation of church and state as a fundamental difference, claiming that it has enabled American Christians to be more innovative in their response to secularization. Scholars and journalists who disagreed on everything else agreed that there was a profound religious divide with roots deep in American and European history. Yet this assumption was seldom based on historical research. This is the first book to compare systematically the religious trajectories of the USA and of the countries of Western Europe from American Independence to the present day. The book is based around eight themes from this history, and the authors have been placed in pairs, offering different perspectives on one of these themes and on a set of key questions. The themes are church, state, and money; Evangelicalism; American-born religious movements; gender; popular culture; world war and Cold War; Catholicism in the era of Vatican II; and the contemporary situation. In Chapters 17 and 18 the editors try to tie the story together with two contrasting overviews.