Säkularisierung – und was dann?

Secularization is not a descriptive category, but an interpreting category by intellectual observers of religion in modern society. This paper sketches the history of the concept and of its critics. Whereas the dominating perspective understood Secularization as the process of definitive decline of religion, in Germany secularization took also positive connotations by protestant theologians. Actually the religious decline in Europe is considered no more as forerunner for the modernizing world but as a special case, which is moreover not uniform within European nations. Until now no convincing term has been proposed to characterize the religious situation in Europe after the decline of the secularization thesis. The paper concludes by posing a number of open questions concerning the actual role of religion and secularity.