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Major theories of secularisation have been gender blind, with the result that men's experience of modernisation has been made central to explanations of religious decline. This paper attempts to show how greater attention to women's distinctive experiences can help extend the explanatory power of secularisation theory. It begins by introducing two main 'stories' of secularisation, articulated by Weber and Marx, which have shaped much subsequent theory about religious decline. Looking first at industrial society, it shows how the distinctive experiences of modernity, which Weber and Marx discuss, have to do with largely masculine forms of labour. Women's labour, far more confined to the domestic sphere, would not necessarily have had the same secularising impact – which may help explain why industrial modernity witnesses only relatively gentle rates of congregational decline. Women's continuing commitment to the churches also helps explain many transformations in the nature of Christian belief and practice in the modern period. Moving into the period of late modernity, from the 1960s, the paper notes a significant increase in the rate of church decline in recent decades, and suggests that this can be explained in terms of changing patterns of women's labour, as differentiation between male and female work begins to diminish. Persistent differences, however, including women's continuing disproportionate responsibility for the work of care, continue to impact upon the nature of male and female religious and spiritual participation in contemporary west-ern societies.

This article presents a biographical approach to the history of the changes in the theoretical appraisal of the secularisation concept, grounding on personal relations of the author with its two major theoreticians: Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The theory of secularisation is gradually presented as unsuitable for interpreting the ideological/religious dimension of the liberal cultures of Western Europe. It states, that what is currently interpreted as secularisation is in fact the dissolution of imposed fateful ideological monopolies. The result is the development of not mono-colored/secular, but ideologically multicoloured/pluralistic societies. The group of the atheised and of consistently believing and practicing Christians are typologically on the fringes of the society, while the largest groups are the skeptics, the insecure, but also the privately-religious. The question is raised about coping strategies of contemporary people, living in the inconsistent world of constant collusion of the secular and the religious realities.

Scholars of International Politics have recently come to grip with the global resurgence of religion. Since the inception of the field of International Politics, the secularisation thesis had been taken for granted and religion dismissed as unimportant. But in line with the current transformation affecting societies worldwide as well as with the re-consideration of the secularisation thesis by Sociologists, new resources must be developed within IR to better understand current events. While theories and concepts have been developed within Sociology and the Political Sciences, no such tools are available in International Politics. Thus, this article provides a tentative theory of secularisation drawing on resources endogenous to the field. Drawing on recent advances in the broadly Constructivist tradition, this article re-interprets secularisation as a protracted international crisis of legitimacy.