Shadows in Caves? A Re-Assessment of Public Religion and Secularization in England Today
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract 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 ofadvancedsecularization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".