Europe

Europe Synopsis

Europe: the Exceptional Case examines the nature of European religion within a global context, concluding that Europe increasingly looks like an exceptional case when it comes to matters of faith. Europeans find this hard to believe: they are prone to think that what happens in Europe today will happen elsewhere in the world tomorrow. Hence their conviction that as the world modernises, it will necessarily secularise.

But quite simply this hasn't happened and empirical evidence suggests that it won't in the foreseeable future. In this important book, Grace Davie shows that even if we restrict the discussion to Christendom, there is scant evidence for secularisation in, for example, the United States, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, despite convincing indicators of modernisation in some if not all of these places. She argues that European religion is not a model for export; it is something distinct, peculiar to the European corner of the world and needs to be understood in these terms.