1st Edition
Secularization, Social Order, and World History Toward a Global Perspective
Introduction
Part I: Religion
1. Escaping the Frame of Religion
Part II: Sacred-Social Order
2. Under Heaven: Sacred Order and Social Order
3. Sacred-Social Orders in World History
4. Complexities of Sacred-Social Order
5. A Revolution in Sacred-Social Order: The Christianization of Rome
Part III: Secularization
6. Western Secularization as a Revolution against Sacred-Social Order
7. The Rise of the Secular Order: A Historical Sketch
8. All under Heaven? Secularization and the World
Conclusion
Biography
Kevin N. Flatt is Professor of History and Associate Dean of Humanities at Redeemer University in Ontario, Canada, and a Research Fellow at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Societal Futures. His scholarship focuses on secularization in modern societies and the history of Protestantism in Canada. His first book, After Evangelicalism: The Sixties and the United Church of Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), examined the transformation and decline of the country’s largest Protestant denomination.
"In his new book, Kevin N. Flatt offers a refreshing, new take on secularization. He painstakingly exposes the weaknesses of the standard conceptual framing of secularization theory, convincingly establishing the importance of a broader appeal to anthropological and cross-cultural studies. The result is a profound challenge to common assumptions about the apparent waning of religion in the West and beyond. This excellent book is essential reading for students of secularization."
- Peter Harrison (University of Notre Dame, Australia)
"Secularization, Social Order, and World History is an engaging read that addresses some of the core criticisms of secularization theory with well-fleshed-out conceptual tools that don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. This book breaks the reader out of the Western religious/secular dichotomized mould, and dives into world civilizations where sacred social orders have and do still reign, to contrast their key characteristics and dynamics with today’s Western secular social order. It adds important substance to a once empty understanding of secularity. A must read for those interested in religion, secularization, societies, global North-South power dynamics, and world history."
- Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme (University of Waterloo, Canada)
"The growing critique of the concept of ‘religion’ has shown that the way that people today use this concept is a product of social changes that only began in Europe and North America about three hundred years ago. But how might we understand patterns in world history without the concept of ‘religion’? Kevin N. Flatt takes this critical project seriously and puts forward a constructive theoretical proposal, illustrating with multiple cases from around the world how we can think ‘after ‘religion.’’ The result is a promising new framework for how we might grasp secularization across cultures."
- Kevin Schilbrack (Appalachian State University, the United States)
