What comes after the Secularization Thesis? Religious and Secular Sources of Moral Universalism

For many decades, the so-called secularization thesis has dominated studies about religion in the humanities and social sciences. This thesis has never been a mere statement of facts about religious decline but claimed to offer an explanation for such processes in the sense of a strong causal connection between the modernization of societies and the weakening of religion. In the last twenty years, however, this thesis has lost much of its plausibility. This talk will ask (1) what the reasons for this change of mind are, (2) what a superior explanation could be, (3) how these changes affect our views about the “prehistory” of modern European secularization and (4) what a more fruitful perspective on long-term religious change could be.