Secularisation, Pentecostalism and Violence: Receptions, Rediscoveries and Rebuttals in the Sociology of Religion

David Martin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK, and Fellow of the British Academy. He was born in Mortlake in 1929 and attended East Sheen Grammar School and Westminster College. In the latter part of a seven-year period in primary school teaching he took a first class (external) degree in sociology in his spare time and won a post-graduate scholarship to the LSE. He became a lecturer in the LSE sociology department in 1962 and was a professor from 1971 to 1989. After his first book on pacifism (1965) he produced the first critique of secularisation theory (1965) and the first statement of a general theory of secularisation (1969 and 1978). From 1986 to 1990 he was Distinguished Professor of Human Values at Southern Methodist University, USA, and turned to the study of global Pentecostalism, producing the first summary statement of the worldwide Pentecostal phenomenon in 1990. He also returned to the issue of religion and violence and explored issues in music and nationalism, and sociology and theology. His intellectual autobiography, The Education of David Martin, appeared in 2013.