The earliest settlement of what is now Brussels goes back to the year 580 and the island (Saint-Géry island) between two branches of the river Senne which ran through Brussels, on which Gaugericus (Géry), Christian bishop of Cambrai, built a chapel (Saint-Géry Chapel), which remained the oldest place of worship in the city until the building was demolished in the 1790s. Brussels is mentioned in the historical record again in 695. In the year 979, Lambert the Duke of Louvain, fortified the settlement on Saint-Géry Island - this is the traditional date of the founding of Brussels. What is now the Cathedral of Saints Michael and Gudula dates back to a parish church in 1047. In the 1100s, the Dukes of Brabant transformed the fortress on Saint-Géry Island into a inhabitable castle. The city was enclosed by the first city walls ( première enceinte - see shaded region on map to the right) in the 1200s. Brussels had developed into a substantial market town, in particular thanks...
It is a fact that in most societies of the global north, such as the United Kingdom and France, church attendance has dropped significantly since the 1800s and in places now represents a tiny minority of something like 1-2%. The term "secularisation" refers to the process by which religious faith is increasingly marginalised from society, and limited to the private lives of a small number of individual believers. A major contemporary expert on secularisation is Professor Hugh McLeod of the University of Birmingham, who is himself a Quaker. Hugh McLeod's work offers lots of statistical data and insights into the phenomenon of secularisation. The process of secularisation goes back at least as far as the 1600s, and a major contributing factor was co-existence and belligerence between rival forms of Christianity during that century. There appears to be a certain typical chronological sequence for secularisation in "Christian" countries, beginning with the co-e...