Berkley Center

This article by Senior Fellow José Casanova analyzes the two divergent, though intertwined, roads of European secularization and global religious pluralism. In continental Western Europe, modernization and urbanization were accompanied by drastic secularization with limited religious pluralism. By contrast, in much of the rest of the world, in the Americas, North and South, throughout Asia and the Pacific and in Sub-Saharan Africa, modernization and urbanization have led to religious pluralism with limited secularization. In our contemporary global secular age, the parallel religious and secular dynamics are becoming ever more intertwined and interrelated. The article, modified from a speech originally given by Casanova at the International Society for Sociology of Religion's 2017 conference, appeared in the journal Social Compass (Vol. 65, No. 2).