Modernity Did Not End Religion. It Reorganised It.

For more than a century, classical and mid-twentieth-century sociologists predicted that modernity would erode religion - the secularisation thesis associated with figures such as Max Weber, Bryan Wilson, and (in his earlier work) Peter Berger. Yet belief and spiritual practice persist and proliferate.

From Scientology and Falun Gong to UFO religions, wellness and holistic spirituality, and the digital terrain of WitchTok, Instagram shamans, and AI oracles, contemporary belief systems continue to evolve rather than disappear.

This book challenges classical secularisation theory and argues that modernity does not eliminate meaning - it reorganises it. Drawing on ESRC-funded doctoral research developed over two decades, it combines a longitudinal interview corpus, participant observation, and digital ethnography to present New Religious and Spiritual Movements as powerful indicators of how people construct identity, purpose, community, and transcendence in the modern world.