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Welcome to the BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group Blog

Socrel, the Sociology of Religion BSA Study Group, is a successful, internationally recognised study group with a 40-year history of engaging events, and high quality research.
We pride ourselves in the number and range of opportunities we provide. Every year, Socrel organises a 3-day annual conference, a Chair’s Response day, and PG-ECR events. It also holds an Essay Competition, the Peter B. Clarke Essay Prize, as well as a funding competition, the Seed Corn Funding Competition, whereby winners can be awarded up to £5000 to support the development of significant and innovative work in the Sociology of Religion.
Socrel is not only an intellectual community, which welcomes PG-ECRs, academics and high-profile professors alike, but is also a pastoral and supportive group. Our PG/ECR events as well as out Mentoring Scheme for Women for instance demonstrate our engagement and commitment to support our Members.
This blog will bring together specialists and non-specialists, including PG and ECRs, in contemporary religious issues to increase the profile of the Sociology of Religion within Sociology.

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What has sociology of religion got to do with sexuality education?

At the time of writing the UK news media has been closely following the story of protests by Muslim and Christian parents concerned by the teaching of an LGBT rights programme in a Birmingham primary school. This controversy and the storm of commentary it has provoked should remind us that sexuality education has a deep historical entanglement with the political influence and public claims of the religious. Given the imminent implementation of statutory guidance for the teaching of Relationships and Sex Education in all English schools, this is clearly an important time for sociology of religion to attend to sexuality education. So what sort of questions might sociologists of religion want to ask regarding sexuality education? In the flurry of commentary much attention has been given to the rights/bigotry/homophobia of the protesting parents and little to the young people who lie at the centre of this issue. As such, one important inquiry concerns the way in which social constructs ...
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Lockdown liminality: evangelical formation in the age of Covid-19

By late March 2020, a previously unimaginable situation had occurred across the British church as places of worship around the country were forced to lock their doors and in-person collective worship was banned. Believers were forced to change habits that had lasted for lifetimes within a matter of days and around the country churches scrambled to move online – whether on YouTube, Facebook Live, Zoom or other platforms.     Thinking on this new state started immediately and within weeks Heidi Campbell (2020) published an  e-book drawing on reflections of both practitioners and digital religion researchers . Yet this work, along with the majority of coverage around religion in the time of Covid-19, focused on the experience of adult believers. For thousands of child and adolescent Christians, however, the disruption was just as severe, yet can be easily overlooked.    While my ethnographic study of an evangelical youth group in London ended 15 months prior to loc...
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