The Complexities of Urban Evangelicalism

Intriguingly, at the very moment when grand theories predicting mass secularization came under fire, scholars began to take greater interest in the cultural significance of “the secular.” As luminaries like Talal Asad, Jose Casanova, and Charles Taylor have shown, “the secular” is best understood not merely as the absence or opposite of “the religious,” but as a relevant category in the study of many aspects of social life (including religion) that have been shaped by the ideas, institutions, and technologies that made the project of Western modernity possible. It refers to a process of classification, rather than negation. Religion did not wane with the advance of secularism so much as get consigned to a specific role and purpose in the world. Secularization theory is dead, long live secularism.