Counting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020: Secularization in Statistical Context

Counting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020, the fourth volume in the author's chronological history of British secularization, sheds significant new light on the nature, scale, and timing of religious change in Britain during the past half-century, with particular reference to quantitative sources. Adopting a key performance indicators approach, twenty-one facets of personal religious belonging, behaving, and believing are examined, offering a much wider range of lenses through which the health of religion can be viewed and appraised than most contemporary scholarship. Summative analysis of these indicators, by means of a secularization dashboard, leads to a reaffirmation of the validity of secularization (in its descriptive sense) as the dominant narrative and direction of travel since 1970, while acknowledging that it is an incomplete process and without endorsing all aspects of the paradigmatic expression of secularization as a by-product of modernization.

Clive D. Field, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham, UK

bClive D. Field/b is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of History and Cultures at the University of Birmingham. An Oxford history graduate, his career was spent in academic librarianship in the UK, latterly as Director of Scholarship and Collections at The British Library. He has researched and published extensively on the social history of religion in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present day and is a particular authority on the history of religious statistics and of Methodism. He is co-director of the British Religion in Numbers website, a British Academy Research Project.