India is the most religious country in the world, Sweden is the most secular country in the world, and America is a country of Indians ruled by Swedes.

Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful.

Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization

Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones.

So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.

Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy