Has Secularization Reached Scotland Too?

Abstract

The question-title of this article contains two implicit assumptions that I find thoroughly embarrassing. The first is that secularization is some inevitable process gradually” reaching out to the far corners of the Western world. The second is that Scotland is, frankly, a backwater; secularization has reached almost everywhere else, and now is about to reach this last bastion of the old order. Very soon the fate of old-style religion will be sealed, and secularization will have achieved its final victory somewhere in the wild mountains of the Scottish Highlands.