The Protestant Reformation is one of the defining events of the last millennium. Nearly 500 years after the Reformation, its causes and consequences have seen a renewed interest in the social sciences. Research in economics, sociology, and political science increasingly uses detailed individual-level, city-level, and regional-level data to identify drivers of the adoption of the Reformation, its diffusion pattern, and its socioeconomic consequences. We take stock of this research, pointing out what we know and what we do not know and suggesting the most promising areas for future research.

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The sociology of religion is engrossed in a debate concerning the process of secularization. Some theories of secularization hold that religiosity decreases under the effects of modernization. In opposition, supply-side models of religious change maintain that declines in religiosity can be explained only through changes in the supply of religious goods. To further examine mechanisms of secularization, this article investigates the emergence of the most secularized society in the world today-eastern Germany. The extremely high percent of atheists in contemporary eastern Germany suggests that the public demand for religion has diminished. But the process of modernization did not bring about this change; instead, current drops in religious demand and religiosity in eastern Germany are the result of dramatic interventions in the supply of religious goods over the past two centuries. We trace the historical conditions that have created the most atheistic society ever.

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Although public administration scholars have long studied discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity, class, and gender, little to no research exists on whether street‐level bureaucrats provide differential services based on the religious identity of their constituents. This article reports the results from a large‐scale correspondence study of street‐level bureaucrats in the American public school system. The authors emailed the principals of a large sample of public schools and asked for a meeting, randomly assigning the religious (non)affiliation of the family. To get at potential causal mechanisms, religious belief intensity was also randomly assigned. The findings show evidence of substantial discrimination against Muslims and atheists on a par with, and sometimes larger than, the racial discrimination found in previous studies. These individuals are substantially less likely to receive a response, with discrimination growing when they signal that their beliefs are more intense. Protestants and Catholics face no discrimination unless they signal that their religious beliefs are intense.

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The religious economies model has been influential in the sociology of religion. Yet, propositions drawn from the model have been difficult to test in the comparative and historical study of religion, generally for lack of appropriate data. We develop a general theory of religious disestablishment and apply it to the Reformation in 16th‐century Europe to explain variation in the abolition of the Catholic monopoly. We suggest three principal factors—changes in demand, entry control mechanisms, and political incentives—that explain why incumbent religious firms may lose their monopoly. We then analyze the resulting hypotheses in a systematic analysis of cities in the Holy Roman Empire. Our analysis yields mixed support for demand‐side factors and entry control mechanisms, and firm support for political incentives in the institution of reform.