Religions and Civil Society

A chapter dedicated to religious belief and practice may seem misplaced in a book on the postwar world. After all, we often read about the secularization of society during the latter half of the twentieth century, how increasing numbers of women and men explain and order their lives without reference to religion. The experience of two world wars in the space of 30 years, and in particular the suffering of millions of innocent noncombatants in those conflicts, led many influential voices to affirm the death of religion, or at least its displacement to the fringes of human life. Sociologists traced the decline of public religiosity in Western Europe during the postwar decades, and predictions about the rest of the developed world were not sanguine. As distinct religious traditions intersected in a highly mobile age, more people came to share the view that sacred stories were relative to time and place, less the mirror of some absolute reality and more the product of human imagination. Both those who applauded and those who deplored the trend believed that the religious impulse would be confined to the less-developed world at the start of the twenty-first century, a blanching relic of the prescientific mind.