Intuitions are hard to dislodge. Doubly so when they are shared widely across the length and breadth of an entire culture. Whenever a given theory, account, or bundle of convictions about some matter of public importance passes from the realm of contest and conjecture into the realm of inherited folk wisdom, it takes an almighty effort to replace it with something else, even if that something else is something more accurate.
Probably the most culturally widespread intuition influencing our historical self-understanding as a society today has to do with how we think of secularization. Why has the West become less and less religious over recent decades and centuries? The conventional answers given to this question are false, and they are all contained within a controlling 19th-century narrative of modernization.
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