Global secularization reversed in the mid-1970s toward religious revival

Evidence

In the mid-1970s, as Kepel observes, the trend to secularization and toward the accommodation of religion with secularism “went into reverse. A new religious approach took shape, aimed no longer at adapting to secular values but at recovering a sacred foundation for the organization of society -by changing society if necessary. Expressed in a multitude of ways, this approach advocated moving on from a modernism that had failed, attributing its setbacks and dead ends to separation from God. The theme was no longer aggiornamento but a ‘second evangelization of Europe,’ the aim was no longer to modernize Islam but to ‘Islamize modernity.’ ” This religious revival has in part involved expansion by some religions, which gained new recruits in societies where they had previously not had them. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader ‘de-secularization’ thesis associated with Peter Berger and to critiques of modernization theory as a Western assumption that religion must decline with modernity. — connects to: Religious nationalism since the 1970s is a desecularizing movement worldwide, not ancient revival — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1498
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuine paradigm shift: the claim that modernization produces secularization, treated as near-universal social science truth for decades, was falsified at a specific historical point—and the reversal is datable to the mid-1970s. That date itself is intriguing given broader 1970s economic and political inflection points.