According to Charles Stewart there is ‘an emerging consensus’ among anthropologists that secularisation hasn’t happened. Is this in fact so? I would argue that there is no such consensus, and that if there is, it is wrong. There is a consensus, no doubt, that the strong secularisation thesis, as held in the 1950s – the idea that there had been, and would continue to be, a unilinear, inevitable and irreversible evolution from religious belief to rationality and consumerism – was naïve and indefensible. The strong secularisation thesis has evidently been falsified by, among other things, the rise of religious fundamentalisms (Kepel 1994). But broadly understood, and putting aside such straw men, secularisation has happened and is happening. The overall trend is for the role, power, scope and influence of religious institutions to be in decline – of course, this is just a generalisation, not a force of history; there are plenty of counter-currents and no particular situation can be predicted in terms of it. Yet I am somewhat surprised that some contributors should wish to deny this trend of the longue durée.