Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2021
A short, literary history of secularization might go something like this: once upon a time, the people of Europe read the Bible. Then, in the year 1700, Enlightenment dawned, and the people put down their Bibles. They began to read novels instead.
But this story is getting harder to believe.
Its simplicity will raise suspicions for some. It presumes too much uniformity among Europeans, an Enlightenment too neatly opposed to religion, and a Europe untouched by its interactions with the rest of the world. What constitutes a people or a cultural formation is far more complicated, far more contested, then as now.
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