Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 July 2012
Social science researchers in the UK now accept that religion has returned to public life (Spalek and Imtoual, 2008; Dinham and Lowndes, 2009), after what has been described by Gorski (2005) as a considerable period of ‘intellectual and political repression’ that began in the post-World War II era. This lasted until around the beginning of the 1980s when political events such as the 1979 Iranian revolution, the rise of the ‘moral majority’ in North America and the spread of religious political mobilisation across the world, forced social scientists to recalculate their predictions about the effective demise of religion which had been considered to be a direct consequence of processes of modernisation (Casanova, 1994; Gorski, 2005; Habermas, 2006).