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GeoJournal (2006) 67:373376 DOI 10.1007/s10708-007-9069-9
P. Norris and R. Inglehart, Sacred and secular. Religion and politics worldwide
Cambridge University Press, New York, 2006 (original 2004) 329 pp, (Paperback: 17.99), ISBN-13: 978-0-521-54872-4
Herman van der Wusten
Published online: 8 May 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
The writing of this book may have been prompted by 9/11 as the very start of its preface suggests, but its contents are dominated by the accumulated experience of conducting and analysing mass surveys on questions presumably relevant to that event for a long time. Pippa Norris has been a major contributor to political sociology since the late 1980s, Ronald Inglehart helped initiate a number of international comparative surveys one of them the Euro barometer. This book is about religiosity in different societies all around the world, its dynamics and its political and social consequences. Religiosity is a multi-dimensional attribute of individual persons and larger numbers expressing their position between the sacred and the secular. It has to do with behaviour (atten-dance of church/temple/mosque services, but also private encounters with the sacred sphere in prayers, and membership of religious institutions), with beliefs (like in God, hell, heaven, life beyond death in Christianity; and also with moral attitudes towards issues like abortion, marriage, gender equality although the link with religion remains unspecied) and with values (importance of religion, of God in ones life). Some will dispute that the sacred and the secular are necessarily polar opposites on one
underlying continuum, but I will leave that point aside here. The relevance of politics in this connection that is the ultimate subject of the book is potentially twofold. The dynamics of religiosity (or in the following example perhaps even more the statics) may have political consequences like in Huntingtons clash of civilizations. Politics may also affect the dynamics of religiosity as in studies that explain the effects of different church-state regulations on religious life in European countries (see the papers in this issue).
The major database for this text comes from four waves of World Value Surveys during 19812001 that deal with a varying number of countries (more over time), some of them repeatedly. The wording of many questions has been identical in the different waves. All in all these surveys have by...