Critics of secularization theory have recently focused upon religion’s public role to put forward theses about de-differentiation, post-secularity and desecularization. A strong defence of secularization theory has not been forthcoming because its proponents have tended to assume, rather than demonstrate, that religion has lost social significance. Drawing upon a neosecularization theoretical approach that highlights the scope of religious authority, this article examines evidence from qualitative studies of the attempts of English mainstream Christian organizations to bring religious messages into the public space and to engage in welfare provision. This re-assessment shows that religious organizations are increasingly co-opted by secular authorities, in ways neither anticipated by, nor explored in, orthodox accounts of secularization. But rather than blurring “the religious” and “the secular,” their distinction is heightened. This situation involves an interlinked and mutually-reinforced declining scope of religious authority at the macro-, meso- and micro-levels, which, it is proposed, constitutes a state of advanced secularization.

This paper argues that the balance of power between producers and retailers depends on the relative degrees of differentiation at the two levels of the vertical structure. We propose an extension of Hotelling’s model in which two producers, competing in prices with horizontally differentiated products, face two horizontally differentiated retailers also competing in prices. We study the setting of producers’ and retailers’ margins. We show that when retailers are more differentiated than producers, they dominate the relationship and their margin is higher than producers’.