The Contemporary Debate on Secularization and Its Cross‐National Variation: A Systematization Through Topic Modeling

Secularization is a key concept in the social scientific study of religion, yet its meaning remains ambiguous due to varied definitions produced in the literature. This article aims to provide a data-driven systematization of the debate on religious change by analyzing 1638 academic articles published between 2001 and 2022 using structural topic modeling (STM), a computational technique for text analysis. The model differentiates the debate between institutional differentiation and individual trajectories of religious change, ranging from macro to micro dimensions of secularization. It also identifies critical perspectives, including supply-side and postmodernist theories. Finally, specific religious traditions are identified and analyzed, through a cross-national comparison, to test institutional parochialism, or the tendency for researchers to study their own communities. Results seem to discredit the idea that religious studies scholars neglect the study of non-Western religions. However, the contemporary debate on secularization is still heavily dominated by authors located in the West.