by Paul Graham

The current manager of Newcastle United and a fellow Northumbrian is the first to appear if the name ‘Steve Bruce’ is Googled. But for those of us who dwell in the high mountain pastures of revealed religion, another Steve Bruce is the one we are (also) interested in, the Professor of Sociology at Aberdeen University, and one of the few sociologists of religion who still believe in the theory of secularisation, that modernity and religious decline go hand in hand.

This article is not a review of his latest book, British Gods: Religion in Modern Britain (OUP, 2020), which I haven’t read, but is prompted by reading a review of it in The Tablet (‘Melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’, 7th November 2020) by another sociologist of religion, and theologian, Stephen Bullivant. Bullivant agrees with Bruce that institutional religion in Britain is, more or less, in terminal decline.