Steve Bruce was born in Edinburgh and educated at the Queen Victoria School, Dunblane, Perthshire. He studied sociology and religious studies at the University of Stirling. He taught at The Queen’s University, Belfast, from 1978 to 1991 when he became Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. In 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

He is the author of some 140 journal articles and essays in edited collections and 24 books including: God save Ulster: the religion and politics of Paisleyism (Oxford 1986); Religion in the Modern World: from cathedrals to cults (Oxford 1996); Conservative Protestant Politics (Oxford 1998); Choice and Religion: a critique of rational choice theory (Oxford 2000); Fundamentalism (Polity 2001); God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Blackwell 2002); Politics and Religion (Polity 2003); Paisley (Oxford 2007); and The Theory of Secularization (Oxford 2010).