Steve Bruce > Quotes

“It is undoubtedly true that religion is often socially conservative. By binding a people together under a shared God, a common cosmology and a common morality, religion creates order and stability and its rituals create social cohesio...n. By promising to the pious poor rewards in the next life, it reconciles them to their fate in this one and thus discourages them from rebelling against their condition...
[also] religion [is] an inspiration to radicalism and rebellion. religion is a potential threat to any political or social order because it claims an authority higher than any available in this world. pp. 10-11”
― Steve Bruce, Politics and Religion

“it is difficult to live in a world that treats as equally valid a large number of incompatible beliefs, and that shies away from authoritative assertions, without coming to suppose that there is no one truth.”
― Steve Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory

“Although the charismatic movement that influenced Protestant churches in the 1970s is often seen as a conservative reaction to liberalizing trends, the reality is rather different. Although the new emphasis in charismatic fellowships on 'gifts of the Holy Spirit' as speaking in tongues, healing, and prophesying might seem like a significant injection of supernaturalism, it eroded the doctrinal orthodoxy of conservative Protestant sects and weakened the behavioral codes that had served to distinguish conservative Protestants from the wider population. The new churches recruited primarily from older denominations and sects rather from the unchurched, and much of their appeal lay in the way they disguised the extent of change with some old language. Far from being a cure for the liberalization of the faith, they made the change easier by providing easy steps away from the old orthodoxies.”
― Steve Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory

“people considerable freedom to avoid diversity. While British Christians are offered an almost unavoidable diet of programming that openly challenges or insidiously undermines their faith, US evangelicals have been able to create a system that allows them to avoid what they do not like and produce what they do like.”
― Steve Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory