Secularization, Social Order, and World History

Toward a Global Perspective
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-041-07532-5
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 318 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Secularization, Social Order, and World History provides a new perspective on the nature of secularization. This book demonstrates that the concepts of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ that are assumed in traditional accounts of secularization are not universal human categories, but specifically modern and Western ideas. What if we told the story of secularization not from the perspective that secularization itself produced, but from a standpoint outside the modern West?

This book draws on premodern traditions from China, India, the Islamic world, and beyond to develop an alternative conceptual framework of ‘sacred-social order’. Sacred-social orders aim to align all of human life—from marriage to government to the calendar—with superhuman purposes and authorities. From the perspective of sacred-social order, the secularization of Western societies was not simply ‘the decline of religion’, but a revolutionary break with sacred order across all social domains and the attempt to construct a new secular order on purely human foundations. As the secular order has been exported around the world, it has provoked movements for the restoration of sacred-social order that are often misunderstood as mere religious revivals or a clash of civilizations.

Bridging sociology, history, religious studies, and philosophy, this work offers an innovative, global account of secularization and its discontents.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Flatt, Kevin N.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religion & Politik, Religionsfreiheit
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Alternative Glaubensformen Agnostizismus, Atheismus, Säkularer Humanismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction  Part I: Religion  1. Escaping the Frame of Religion  Part II: Sacred-Social Order  2. Under Heaven: Sacred Order and Social Order 3. Sacred-Social Orders in World History 4. Complexities of Sacred-Social Order 5. A Revolution in Sacred-Social Order: The Christianization of Rome  Part III: Secularization  6. Western Secularization as a Revolution against Sacred-Social Order 7. The Rise of the Secular Order: An Historical Sketch 8. All under Heaven? Secularization and the World Conclusion

Über Autor(innen)

Kevin N. Flatt is Professor of History and Associate Dean of Humanities at Redeemer University in Ontario, Canada, and a Research Fellow at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Societal Futures. His scholarship focuses on secularization in modern societies and the history of Protestantism in Canada. His first book, After Evangelicalism: The Sixties and the United Church of Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), examined the transformation and decline of the country’s largest Protestant denomination.