Piety by the Numbers: Social Science and Polish Debates About Secularization in the 1960s and 1970s (2016)
This essay examines the statistics on devotional practice generated by sociological studies in Poland in the 1960s and the 1970s, as well as the ways in which church-affiliated and secular, regime-affiliated scholars tried to make sense of those statistics. Jim Bjork argues that these debates involved a surprising degree of underlying consensus about Poland’s susceptibility to forces of secularization driven by economic modernization. Divergent visions of Poland’s religious future ultimately depended on which regional data were seen as typical and which were seen as anomalous. The narration of a particular story of Polish religious exceptionalism did not ensure the path that Poland subsequently followed in the era of John Paul II, but it did help to make it imaginable and explainable.
...MoreBook Paul Betts; Stephen A. Smith (2016) Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe.
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