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The contrast between institutional and popular (or folk) religion is used by some social historians to rebut the sociological secularisation thesis. This article uses a re-examination of religion in the north Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes to consider how some elements of popular religion change with the decline of institutional religion. It concludes by suggesting that, far from enduring despite the decline of the Christian Churches, popular religion is doubly vulnerable to secularisation: it is directly eroded by secularising forces and it is indirectly undermined by the decline of the Churches. Without an institutional core, a popular religious culture cannot be sustained.
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Steve Bruce (2011) studied this question.
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