The Dynamics of Religious Economies 99
that one’s faith becomes valid and secure. There is little reason to believe, therefore,
that the modern necessity of having to choose one’s own religion makes that religion
any less real, powerful, or meaningful to modern believers.”
Numerous quantitative research projects have also questioned the secularizing
effects of religious pluralism. Although mired in methodological controversies (see
Olson 1998; Finke and Stark 1998), a couple of conclusions can be drawn.^1 First, the key
distinction is between areas having no pluralism and those having some degree of reli-
gious choice and competition (Finke, Guest, and Stark 1996; Hamberg and Pettersson
1997; Pettersson and Hamberg 1997). Religious markets have a saturation point beyond
which additional options do not raise levels of participation. Second, despite ardent
criticism questioning the beneficial effects of high religious pluralism, few of the crit-
ics propose a return to the old paradigm explanation. Even the critics recognize that
a monopoly church supported by the state will not increase religious plausibility and
activity.
Perhaps the most critical blow to the secularization thesis, however, is that the trend
line forecasted by the old paradigm isn’t supported by the data. A mounting body of
research has questioned the nostalgic views of past piety and contemporary accounts
of depleted religious activity. This argument has been refuted most forcefully in the
United States, where a rise in modernity was accompanied by a rise in religious activity
(Finke and Stark 1992; Warner 1993). Yet, nostalgic myths of past piety and recent
surges in religious activity extend far beyond the United States. The most prominent
historians of medieval religion now agree that there never was an “Age of Faith” in
Western Europe (Morris 1993; Duffy 1992; Sommerville 1992; Bossy 1985; Obelkevich
1979; Murray 1972; Thomas 1971; Coulton 1938). Even the strongest advocates of the
old paradigm concede that, in terms of organized participation, the Golden Age of Faith
never existed (Bruce 1997). And, when it comes to contemporary religion, the religious
revivals around the globe have become too frequent and too sizeable to ignore. From
Islam in the Middle East and Africa to Christianity in Latin America, Eastern Europe,
and Korea, religion has proven compatible with increasing modernity.
This lack of support for the secularization thesis, however, does not suggest that
religion is always increasing or that modernity is associated with an ever increasing
level of religious involvement. Although research refuting the secularization thesis has
frequently emphasized increasing religious involvement, the new paradigm does not
replace the prediction on the inevitable demise of religion with an equally implausible
prediction on the inevitable ascension of religion. Moreover, for the new paradigm,
modernity is not the causal engine driving religious change. The reasons given for
doubting (or believing) religious teachings are mostly unrelated to anything specific
to modernity and have remained relatively unchanged throughout recorded history
(Smith et al. 1998; Stark and Finke 2000). Instead, the new theoretical developments
attempt to move beyond nebulous forces of modernity leading to an inevitable religious
decline to specific propositions attempting to explain religious variation.
(^1) Mark Chaves and Philip Gorski (2001) cited Dan Olson’s work as “decisively” refuting the
hypothesis. But Olson and coauthors David Voas and Alasdair Crockett recently concluded:
“results from previous cross-sectional studies on pluralism and religious involvement must
now be abandoned” because of a “mathematical relationship between measures of religious
participation and the index of pluralism (Voas, Olson, and Crockett 2002).