Citizenship, Secularisation and the State

Religion and Modern Society
Bryan S. Turner

Religion is now high on the public agenda, with recent events focusing the
world’s attention on Islam in particular. This book provides a unique
historical and comparative analysis of the place of religion in the emergence
of modern secular society. Bryan S. Turner considers the problems
of multicultural, multi-faith societies and legal pluralism in terms of
citizenship and the state, with special emphasis on the problems of defining
religion and the sacred in the secularisation debate. He explores a
range of issues central to current debates: the secularisation thesis itself,
the communications revolution, the rise of youth spirituality, feminism,
piety and religious revival. Religion and Modern Society contributes to
political and ethical controversies through discussions of cosmopolitanism,
religion and globalisation. It concludes with a pessimistic analysis of
the erosion of the social in modern society and the inability of new
religions to provide ‘social repair’.
bryan s. turner is the Presidential Professor of Sociology at the City
University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and Director of the
Committee on Religion, and Director of the Centre for the Study of
Contemporary Muslim Societies, University of Western Sydney, Australia.
He is a prominent figure in the field of the sociology of religion and editor
of The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (2006).