(UN)BELIEVING IN MODERN SOCIETY

This landmark study in the sociology of religion sheds new light on the question of what has happened to religion and spirituality since the 1960s in modern societies. Exposing several analytical weaknesses of today’s sociology of religion, the authors present a new theory of religious-secular competition and a new typology of ways of being religious/secular. Drawing on a Swiss society as their test case, they use both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to identify four ways of being religious/secular in a modern society: ’institutional’, ’alternative’, ’distanced’ and ’secular’.