Europe The Exceptional Case

Europeans are prone to think that what happens in Europe today will happen elsewhere in the world tomorrow. Hence their conviction that as the world modernizes, it will necessarily secularize. But quite simply this hasn’t happened. Grace Davie considers, for example, the situation in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and the United States where, despite modernization, there is scant evidence for secularization She shows 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.