Toward a sociological hermeneutics of narrative secularization: secular stories in the Spanish case of religious transformation (1960–2019)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to present a dimension of the study of religious transformation that can help us to continue the debate on secularization from an approach of sociological history: narrativity. After the presentation of the conceptual and methodological bases that support this study, I explore a specific case of secularization: Spanish society between 1960 and 2019. The acceleration of the secularization process in the second half of the century was particularly condensed in the gestation of a whole series of narratives, which led to the formation of an ‘epistemic secular regime’. This article will reflect on the particularities of three specific historical moments: the late 1960s, the period immediately after Franco’s death (from 1975 until the end of the 1980s), and the beginning of the twenty-first century. My research concludes by confirming the importance of narrative secularization to understand this process from a socio-historical perspective and proposes the study of the narrative dimension as a line of explanation for the particular acceleration and extension of secularization in other European societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Secularization
• Spain
• historical sociology
• narratives
• secular age
• social imaginaries

Acknowledgments

This work has been possible thanks to the support of the research project Modernidad y religion en la España del siglo XX: entre el consenso y la ruptura (Modernity and Religion in Twentieth-Century Spain: Between Consensus and Rupture) (PGC2018-099909-B-I00), directed by Julio de la Cueva.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All extracts from interviews and published work have been translated into English from the original Spanish by the author.

2 The FOESSA Foundation (FOESSA stands for Fomento de Estudios Estadísticos y Sociología Aplicada), linked to the Spanish Cáritas (national Catholic relief agency), has published several reports that are essential for the understanding of the religious evolution in Spain. Its reports from the 1960s and 1970s are of particular interest because of the great attention they pay to the religious situation in Spain.

Additional information

Funding

While conducting the research in which the article is grounded, the author was a beneficiary of the University Teacher Training Program (FPU) of the Spanish Education, Culture and Sports Ministry (Grant FPU14/05460).

Notes on contributors

Rafael Ruiz Andrés

Rafael Ruiz Andrés is a researcher in the Institute of Religious Sciences and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the Complutense University of Madrid. He completed his PhD in Sciences of Religions at the Complutense University of Madrid in 2019. He is the secretary of ‘Ilu: Revista de Ciencias de las Religiones, has participated in research groups and projects and in the Europaeum Scholarship Programme (2018–2019), conducted research at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, and was a junior researcher at the Foundation for Islamic Culture and Religious Tolerance in Madrid (until 2021). His research interests revolve around the historical sociology of secularization, non-belief and irreligion, contemporary religious transformations, interreligious dialogue and post-secularization—topics on which he has published in indexed journals, book chapters, and La secularización en España (2022). CORRESPONDENCE: Box 2211, Departamento de Sociología Aplicada. Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Campus Somosaguas, 28223 Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid, Spain.