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Cited by 932

The DOI matches its OpenAlex record; 16 of the 16 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Secularization as Declining Religious Authority

Mark A. Chaves·1994·Social Forces
DOI 10.1093/sf/72.3.749
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Abstract

Secularization is most productively understood not as declining religion, but as the declining scope of religious authority. A focus on religious authority (1) is more consistent with recent developments in social theory than is a preoccupation with religion; (2) draws on and develops what is best in the secularization literature; and (3) reclaims a neglected Weberian insight concerning the sociological analysis of religion. Several descriptive and theoretical “pay-offs” of this conceptual innervation are discussed: new hypotheses concerning the relationship between religion and social movements; the enhanced capacity to conceptually apprehend and empirically investigate secularization among societies, organizations, and individuals; and clearer theoretical connections between secularization and other sociological literatures. Ironically, these connections may indeed spell the end of secularization theory as a distinct body of theory, but in a different way than previously appreciated.

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Metadata

Authors
Chaves, M. A.
Venue
Social Forces
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Published
1994-03-01
Volume
72
Issue
3
Pages
749-749
ISSN
0037-7732 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1093/sf/72.3.749
OpenAlex
W2055923202
Cited by
932
References
16
FWCI
11.56
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Secularization as Declining Religious Authority. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/sf/72.3.749
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Chaves, M. A. (1994). Secularization as Declining Religious Authority. Social Forces. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/72.3.749

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.