UNCORRECTED PROOF Date: 10:36 Friday 20 April 2012 File: Representing Religion 1P 12 the shape of post-secularity Why the United States is more religious but less Christian than Europe Adrian Pabst The transatlantic debate on secularisation has crystallised a series of disagree- ments that in reality mask a shared perspective. 1 As José Casanova has suggested, European theories that link secularisation to modernisation capture much of Europe’s evolution but they do not it the facts of religious vibrancy and denomi- national pluralism that are emphasised by American accounts, which in turn cannot explain signiicant variations across Europe. 2 This impasse has reinforced rival ideas of exceptionalism, either in relation to US religiosity or in respect of ‘Eurosecularity’ (or indeed both at once). 3 However, these competing interpreta- tions share the fundamental view that the USA and Europe constitute opposing ends of a broad spectrum of different ‘political-religious’ models. The United States is associated with the enduring – and many argue excessive – inluence of faith in politics. By contrast, most of Europe is equated with the demise of organised religion and the advance of what Rowan Williams has termed ‘pro- grammatic secularism’ in the public political sphere. 4 Given this, the European experience appears to illustrate certain versions of the ‘secularisation’ thesis whereas the American experience seems to exemplify certain variants of the ‘de- secularisation’ thesis. Common to both theses is an essentialist view of religion that relects a shared secular perspective underpinning the sociological analysis of religion in politics. 5 This chapter argues that the standard theories of secularisation and de-secu- larisation cannot explain the representation of faith in the European or the US political system. In fact, the current phase of late (or post-)modernity is synony- mous neither with increasingly secularised societies 6 nor with a sustained return to religion 7 but in fact both at the same time. What we are seeing is an increasing contest – within as well as across different religious traditions – between tradi- tional, orthodox faiths and modernising creeds. It is this contest that will largely determine the shape of the emerging ‘post-secular’ age. The irst section suggests that the sociological analysis of religion lacks certain theological concepts that are necessary for a proper account of the links between politics and faith. The second section links Protestant secularisation to North American religiosity and argues that much of mainstream US Protestantism rep- resents a post-Christian Gnostic spirituality that perpetuates the myth of American exceptionalism. The third section concedes that Europe is the most secularised