Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s, by Callum G. Brown
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book by Callum G. Brown brings together three powerful revolutions: the secular revolution, the demographic revolution and the revolution in women’s identities. It is the bond between these three seismic shifts that is the central focus of this fascinating analysis. They are, Brown argues, ‘intimately and causatively interconnected’ (p. 1). Each arose from the contentious, but nonetheless profound, impact of the 1960s. Together they ushered in a secular era that is, in Brown’s perception, as distinct and epochal as any previous era in the history of the west (p. 29). Indeed, this book is, at root, a highly sophisticated and contentious study of exactly what it is the sixties ‘did’ to us (p. 8). The ‘us’ in this case is four nations—Canada, Ireland, the UK and the United States. Brown’s primary intent is to explore statistically the relationship of ‘mutual causation’ that exists between religious change (most importantly religious decline and the growth of what he calls ‘no religionism’) and demographic, economic and educational phenomena; however, he does so with a firm conviction that statistics alone are not enough. It is the fundamental assertion of this book that ‘discourses, and popular revolt against them, change the way people live their lives’ (p. xi). Time series and snapshot analyses are not offered as definitive encapsulations of religious and social change, but rather as further layers that strengthen our understanding of the profound connectivity of economic, social and religious factors in the cultural landscape of late-twentieth-century society. As a reader, it is important to remember that the vast compilation of empirical data which Brown offers in this book is an extension and development of his former book, The Death of Christian Britain (2002), and also an anticipation of the final volume of the trilogy which is yet to come (p. 258). The statistics are meant to be read in close conjunction with Brown’s emphasis on language and individual testimony as a multifaceted approach to the vital task of understanding the post-modern period historically.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".