Q.The chapter notes that religion continues to play a significant role in society even today. Discuss some of the reasons why this might be so.

Modernisation was expected to weaken religion's public role (secularisation), but religion persists because it has never been purely private -- it stays entangled with politics, economy and gender. …

Classical sociologists generally believed that as societies became more modern -- more industrial, more scientifically and bureaucratically organised -- religion would gradually recede into a private matter of individual conscience, losing its former influence over politics, economy and public life more generally. This expectation is what sociology calls the theory of secularisation. Contemporary evidence across much of the world complicates, rather than confirms, this expectation: religion continues to shape public life significantly in many societies, sometimes even more visibly than before, which is why the classical secularisation thesis is now treated as a partial description rather than an inevitable, universal law.

Several reasons help explain this persistence. First, religion has never really been a purely private matter; it has always had a public character, connecting it to other powerful institutions such as politics, the economy and gender norms -- and as long as those institutions remain significant in public life, religion's entanglement with them keeps giving it public relevance too. This entanglement has often worked in progressive directions: history contains numerous religiously framed movements for social change, such as various anti-caste movements or movements against gender discrimination, that drew on religious language and legitimacy even while pushing for reform -- showing religion functioning as an active public force rather than fading into private belief. …