Is religion dying out in Western societies? Is personal spirituality taking its place? Both stories are inadequate. Institutional religion is not simply coming to an end in Western societies. Rather, its assets and properties are redistributed: large parts of the church have gone into liquidation. Religion is crossing the boundaries of the parish and appears in other social contexts. In the field of leisure, health care and contemporary culture, religion has an unexpected currency.

The metaphor of liquidation provides an alternative to approaches that merely perceive the...