How Uruguay Became a Religious Ghetto

Uruguayan society is an outlier when considering religious intensity among Latin American societies while presenting a paradox to sociologists of religion. Embedded in a continent characterized by relatively high religiosity and religious adherence historically, how do sociologists explain that Uruguay became an intensely secular society since the turn of the twentieth century? Modernity theory has developed into a very particular theoretical model for understanding history such that secularization is believed to be inevitable, linear, and isomorphic in that it produces predictable uniformity–which is Eurocentric. In contrast, this deviant case study offers a counterfactual understanding using Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital to explain how secularization develops. This project contributes to the scholarly debate by showing that secularization is not an inevitable macro-social mechanical process imputed to impersonal and abstract forces, but is carried out by people and groups who manifestly want to laicize society and its sub-structures.