Kanji And Kuipers Analysis

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Kanji and Kuipers’ essay, A Complicated Story: Exploring The Contours of Secularisation and Persisting Religiosity in Canada, argues that secularization has not occurred in a linear trajectory in Canada, and points to the complexity of the religious climate in Canadian society. The study uses the results of the World Values Survey in order to analyze various aspects of religious life such as subjective religiosity, involvement in religious services and organizations, the role of prayer, religious beliefs, confidence in religious institutions and their advice, and how much influence people believe religion should have in politics. When comparing the average degree of religiosity of each of these dimensions, across agrarian societies, industrial …show more content…
The authors draw attention to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in their analysis, inferring that perhaps the reason for the complicated outlook of religion is that “many facets of life in advanced societies are inhospitable to religious belief… including an ongoing ideological fragmentation that is exacerbated by expressive individualism, decline in our understanding of some of the great languages of transcendence, and the individual pursuit of happiness as defined by consumer cultures.” Kanji and Kuipers present a convincing argument of the complicated nature of religion in Canada. This analysis can be seen to communicate with the process of secularisation on a global scale; although Canada, according to the World Value Survey, is more religious than other advanced industrial states, some aspects of religion worldwide have survived better than others and thus the condition of religion and secularisation processes as a whole can be considered more complicated than theorists such as Jose Casanova suggested in their

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