Secularização (ainda) como racionalização? Proposta de construção de um índice de racionalização

This paper seeks to answer two fundamental arguments: the idea that we have reached a deadlock in the secularization debate, and that we need new theoretical and empirical approaches to understand the effects of the processes of modernity on religion. In order to do this and inspired by the assumptions of one of the most prominent classical theories of secularization – rationalization – we propose the creation of an index of rationalization that can be correlated with a measure of individual religiosity. We conclude that, for the set of selected European countries and for the time period considered (1999-2014), the secularization theory, which asserts that more rationalized societies are less religious, has empirical validity.