Conclusion

The Conclusion to Part II recaps the most important outcomes of the study so far which can be summarized as follows: The decline in the significance of the religious is closely connected to the transformation of its dominant forms. That means assumptions of secularization theory and of individualization theory are not mutually exclusive. It seems that people’s ties to religion and church begin to loosen in the dimension of practice. The theorem of functional differentiation can by and large be regarded as corroborated. Processes of vertical differentiation, the pulling-apart of the constitutive levels of the social element, treated mainly under the concept of individualization, essentially have a negative effect on religious and church ties, especially on conventional ties to the church. Processes of religious individualization take place within the church and outside of it. Religiously diversified societies display no higher level of religiosity than ones that are more religiously homogeneous.