Religion always expresses itself through and across the social psychology of a people and time. For if a people and time are primitive, their religion will be primitive also.

Religion: Faith, Fact, or Fantasy
Ian Guthridge

In this new world, those Christians who most single-mindedly devote their time and energy to prayer (people known hitherto as ‘contemplatives’) begin to seem like ‘experts’ in an esoteric branch of knowledge. And, since they seem to have some difficulty in straightforwardly communicating quite what it is that they are on about, theirs appears to be a secret knowledge, a knowledge of extraordinary facts, obtained by people who enjoy unusual experiences. This new field of expertise deserves a name: let’s call it ‘la mystique’ (or, as Certeau’s translator nicely coins it, ‘mystics’ — to set alongside ‘ethics’ and ‘dogmatics’). And the experts who work in this field? We’ll call them ‘mystics.’

The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’
Nicholas Lash

Ours is a secular age not because God is absent from the world, but because we now have “a plurality of options” for understanding the purpose of our existence and creating meaning in our lives. Secularism is not about the elimination of religion, but about the proliferation of choices.

God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age
Galen Guengerich