Religion, spirituality and the social sciences is an international, edited collection of work, consisting of contributions from key academics in the fields of religious studies, cultural studies, political science, criminology, sociology, health and social policy. It is part of a growing body of social science research that is increasingly including, and engaging with, issues of religion and spirituality. As such, this book is very much a product of contemporary theorising and debate around religion and spirituality, which, despite the effects of the Enlightenment and modernisation, are generating considerable and ever-expanding discussion, controversy, policy making and research.

For contributors such as John D’Arcy May, the engagement must commence with the various disciplines beginning to have dialogue with one another on questions of religiosity and spirituality so as to break down some of the artificial and unhelpful borders that have been placed around knowledge. A number of other contributors, such as Lareen Newman, Maria Frahm-Arp and Leslie J. Francis, argue that quantitative social science across a number of disciplines has ignored religion and faith identities as an important variable in data collection. They demonstrate that the marginalisation of such factors has been to the detriment of understandings about the social worlds we inhabit. Other contributions argue that the deep embedding of secularism within contemporary social science approaches has imposed rigid borders on knowledge and understandings of the experiences of people who hold faith identities. Work by Maree Gruppetta, Muzammil Quraishi, and Natassja Smiljanic demonstrates that secularism in the social sciences has operated as an oppressive structure which de-legitimises research that values faith perspectives.

This edited collection is divided into three parts. Each part brings together a series of contributions that focuses on a particular theme.

Part 1: Key debates on secularism and society

In this section contributions argue that secularism is a powerful, if largely invisible, framework of understanding. While scholars have critiqued similar frameworks over the years (for example, patriarchy, capitalism, hetero-normativity), secularism has been overlooked despite also being a framework that imposes borders on knowledge and understanding about the social world. Contributions to this section of the volume map the early engagements with religion in the social sciences and the subsequent banishment of religion and spirituality to specialist studies. They argue that religion and spirituality pose significant challenges for social scientific research as it has developed in the Western tradition.