There are two broad issues linking Pentecostalism with secularization which will be discussed in turn. The first is the argument that the growth of the Pentecostal movement worldwide from the 1960s onwards disproves the once widely accepted ‘unilinear’ theory among social scientists that secularization is a universal and inevitable consequence of modernity.

In the 1960s it was widely accepted by social scientists that secularization was a universal consequence of modernity. The theory was an extrapolation from the evolutionary arguments underpinning the founding texts of sociol…