"Christendom" refers to a society where Christianity is essentially compulsory. Western Europe, however, has been gradually moving away from Christendom for more than two centuries towards a society where a great variety of religious and non-religious options are available and none is able to claim a privileged position. Written by historians, sociologists and theologians from six countries, and including chapters on most European countries, this study examines this process of increasing pluralism and its implication for the future.

Europe in the nineteenth century saw spectacular growth in the size and number of cities and in the proportion of the population living in urban areas. Many contemporaries thought that this social revolution would bring about an equally dramatic change in religious life. This book, written by an international team of specialists, provides an authoritative account of religious change, both at the institutional and popular level, in Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox cities, in seven European countries.

In the early twenty-first century it had become a cliche that there was a "God Gap" between a more religious United States and a more secular Europe. The apparent religious differences between the United States and western Europe continue to be a focus of intense and sometimes bitter debate between three of the main schools in the sociology of religion. According to the influential "Secularization Thesis," secularization has been an integral part of the processes of modernization in the Western world since around 1800. For proponents of this thesis, the United States appears as an anomaly and...