An important intellectual shift has taken place in the social scientific study of religion as many of its longest held theoretical positions, passed down from the founders of the field, have been overturned. These changes have been so dramatic and far-reaching that Warner (1993, p. 1044) identified them "as a paradigm shift in progress," an assessment that since that time "has been spectacularly fulfilled" (Greeley 1996, p. 1).

Typically, the emergence of a new paradigm rests on both an empirical basis and a theoretical basis. Over the past thirty years, there has been an explosion of research on religious topics and a substantial number of new facts have accumulated. The bulk of these discoveries have turned out to be inconsistent with the old paradigm. In response to the growing incompatibility between fact and traditional theory, new theories have been constructed to interpret the empirical literature.

There are five...