ABSTRACT
Religion and urbanization are counter-intuitive, knee-jerk reactions against conventional wisdom: as cities grow and expand, religion shrinks. Tradition fades, long-held ties are severed particularly those of kin, family, community and neighborhood. Cities epitomize modernity. They are “laboratories of modernization” (Hitzer and Schlor 2011: 820), receptacles of novelty, sites of experimentation, vanguards of heterogeneity. The classical sociologists Durkheim, Marx and Weber all asserted the decline of religion in modern times. Each one, according to the eminent sociologist Anthony Giddens, believed “that religion is in a fundamental sense an illusion” (Giddens 2006: 536). Harvey Cox’s famous book The Secular City (1967: 17) opens with an assertion that “the rise of urban civilization and the collapse of religion are the two main hallmarks of our era and are closely related movements.” The noted sociologist of religion Peter Berger in his work The Sacred Canopy (1969: 27) writes about the “crisis of credibility” in religion and the “widespread collapse of the plausibility of the traditional religious definitions of reality.”
