The article assesses the complexity of religious diversity through a presentation of results from the Religion and Diversity Project, a seven-year project conducted between 2010 and 2017 and centred at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Analyzing five dimensions of diversity—the religions, lived, strength, institutional and forms dimensions—it demonstrates how results from the project support the thesis that religious diversity itself is changing in all these regards, becoming more complex, and relating in complex intersectionality with other categories of diversity such as sex and gender. The article concludes by pointing to the need to expand research into religious diversity to also include the growing nonreligious diversity in Canadian and other societies.

Current debates in sociology are questioning not only the secularization thesis, that religion is inevitably declining under conditions of modernity, but also the notion of the secular and its relation to religion. Beginning with a brief look at six representative scholars who have been prominent in this debate, this interpretative essay seeks to contribute to it on the basis of a distinction between a ‘Westphalian’ and a ‘post-Westphalian’ way of understanding and structuring religion and the secular, above all in the form of the state. The argument is illustrated with three examples, India, Turkey and Canada.

Contemporary transformations in the dominant forms of religion in global context are analyzed in terms of a change from a dominance of a “Westphalian” modeling of religious and political systems to a “post-Westphalian” condition in which Westphalian modeling loses its self-evidence and gives way to a greater modeling of religion on other societal systems, especially the systems for mass information media and economy. Recent changes in sociological observation of religion are analyzed in terms of this transformation

The article argues that what is performed and understood as religion in global society has in the course of the modern centuries come to be increasingly dominated by the idea that religion is something distinct and differentiated, something distinct from what is not religion, namely the secular. It manifests itself principally as a plurality of identified and performed religions. Towards the latter half of the 20th century, however, that dominant understanding of religion has come to be increasingly challenged by alternative ways of ‘sensing religion’, alternative ways that are to some extent a reflection of new developments in this domain of religion in global society. They are also indicative of a reassessment of alternative ways of understanding and doing religion that have always accompanied the dominant sense. This reassessment allows the ‘hidden’ and ‘ignored’ to appear as religion and be recognized as such without negating the hitherto dominant form. The first of these developments is analyzed as the construction of a Westphalian system for religion; the reassessment and transformation is discussed under the contrasting idea of a post-Westphalian circumstance.