Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2012
This historiographical review offers a critical reconsideration of a central component of modernization theory: the model of secularization devised within the sociology of religion, and especially the version sustained by sociologists in the UK. It compares that model with the results of historical research in a range of themes and periods, and suggests that those results are now often radically inconsistent with this sociological orthodoxy. It concludes that an older historical scenario which located in the early modern period the beginnings of a ‘process’ of secularization that achieved its natural completion in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries is finally untenable, and it proposes a broader, more historical conception of ‘religion’ able to accommodate both persistent religiosity and undoubted changes in religious behaviour.
1 Bryan Wilson, ‘Secularization: the inherited model’, in Philip E. Hammond, ed., The sacred in a secular age: toward revision in the scientific study of religion (Berkeley, CA, 1985), pp. 9–20, at 12, 14. The editor introduced secularization: ‘Even today, scholars do not – and probably cannot – doubt the essential truth of thesis’, p. 1. A notable exception among British sociologists of religion to this homogenizing tendency has been David Martin; for his retrospect see his On secularization: towards a revised general theory (Aldershot, 2005). For another notable exception see the work of Grace Davie, especially The sociology of religion (London, 2007): ‘it is as modern to draw on the resources of religion to critique the secular as it is to draw on the resources of the secular to critique the religious’, p. 1.
2 Bruce, Steve, God is dead: secularization in the West (Oxford, 2002), pp. xiiGoogle Scholar, 1, 186 and passim. It appears as ‘the secularization thesis’ in Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, ‘Secularization: the orthodox model’, in Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and modernization: sociologists and historians debate the secularization thesis (Oxford, 1992), pp. 8–30. Despite this volume's offer of a debate, the sociology of the subject which is hegemonic in Britain has not subsequently allowed itself to be revised in the light of historical research. Bryan Wilson, ‘Reflections on a many sided controversy’, in ibid., p. 210, contended that academics now ‘take secularization for granted’ and dismiss ‘serious attention’ to religion ‘with some amusement’.
3 Casanova, José, Public religions in the modern world (Chicago, IL, 1994), p. 211Google Scholar.
4 MacIntyre, Alasdair, Secularization and moral change (London, 1967)Google Scholar. At least one philosopher, however, was able to draw a different conclusion even from such reductionist premises, since ‘the contingency of history mocks our predictions’: Leszek Kolakowski, ‘The revenge of the sacred in secular culture’, in Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on endless trial (Chicago, IL, 1990), pp. 63–74, at 64.
5 Taylor, Charles, A secular age (Cambridge, MA, 2007), pp. ixGoogle Scholar, 14.
6 Jeffrey Cox, ‘Master narratives of long-term religious change’, in Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The decline of Christendom in Western Europe 1750–2000 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 201–17, at 201.
7 Nash, David, ‘Reconnecting religion with social and cultural history: secularization's failure as a master narrative’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2004), pp. 302–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 302–3.
8 Wilson, ‘Secularization: the inherited model’, p. 10; idem, Religion in sociological perspective (Oxford, 1982), pp. 1, 5. Wilson argued for a distinction between ‘secularization’, an objective study, and ‘secularism’, a normative campaign; the contributions of secularists had been ‘at best, marginal to the momentum of the process of secularization’ (ibid., p. 149). It is not clear that this distinction has been securely established. Even in 1965, another sociologist had argued: ‘Since there is no unitary process of secularization one cannot talk in a unitary way about the causes of secularization. The whole concept appears as a tool of counter-religious ideologies which identify the “real” element in religion for polemical purposes and then arbitrarily relate it to the notion of a unitary and irreversible process, partly for the aesthetic satisfactions found in such notions and partly as a psychological boost to the movements with which they are associated’: David Martin, ‘Towards eliminating the concept of secularization’, in Julius Gould, ed., Penguin survey of the social sciences, 1965 (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 169–82, at 176.
9 Exceptions are a cyclical theory of religious decline and revival based on an anthropological need for meaning (for which see Bell, Daniel, ‘The return of the sacred? The argument on the future of religion’, British Journal of Sociology, 28 (1977), pp. 419–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and what has been termed the ‘Stark–Bainbridge theory’ of the need for supernatural compensation for the non-attainment of worldly desires, a theory which is held to contend that ‘religion performs social or psychological functions sufficiently vital that it cannot disappear and hence the appearance of decline must either mask some process of substitution or be merely temporary’: Wallis and Bruce, ‘Secularization: the orthodox model’, p. 25. The second model is met with the reply that such activities do not count as supernatural religion. For the argument that high rates of church attendance are the result of denominational competition, see Stark, Rodney and Iannaccone, Laurence R., ‘A supply-side reinterpretation of the “secularization” of Europe’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 33 (1994), pp. 230–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stark, Rodney, Finke, Roger and Iannacconne, Laurence R., ‘Pluralism and piety: England and Wales, 1851’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 34 (1995), pp. 431–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Philip Hammond wrote of a conference on the subject in 1970 and its indebtedness to these founders: ‘subsequent investigators showed little in the way of systematic elaboration or development … It was as if those founders had said it all; by early in the twentieth century the social scientific study of religion had received the model bequeathed by these giants but had not gone importantly beyond it … We were still in the grip of a model conceived fifty to a hundred years earlier’: ‘Introduction’, in The sacred in a secular age, p. 2.
11 Bruce, God is dead, p. 219 (italics in original).
12 Hugh McLeod, ‘Secular cities? Berlin, London and New York in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, in Bruce, ed., Religion and modernization, pp. 59–89.
13 Casanova, Public religions in the modern world, p. 211.
14 E.g. Bruce, God is dead, ‘References’, pp. 248–63, and, even more clearly in the index, pp. 264–9, notices the work of only a few historians, and of fewer still who dissent from the secularization paradigm.
15 For a clear example of such historians see Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, ‘Introduction. Modernity and later-seventeenth-century England’, in Houston and Pincus, eds., A nation transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 1–19. Their central contentions about the late seventeenth century are ‘the increasing differentiation of politics and religion’, and that ‘Religious life was increasingly identified with the reformation of manners. Faith, word and doctrine were supplanted by work, conduct and civility’, pp. 13, 15. Their argument appeals for its authority on the validity of a notion of ‘modernity’ only to the work of ‘social scientists’, pp. 5–7.
16 ‘Essentially, what I have tried to do here is to push to the final sociological consequence an understanding of religion as a historical product’: Berger, Peter L., The social reality of religion (London, 1969), p. viGoogle Scholar. Charles Taylor explains that ‘it is a crucial fact of our present spiritual predicament that it is historical’. Taylor also accepts, as a historical episode or process, the ‘rise of modernity’: ‘The basic insight underlying the “orthodox” modes of theory in this domain is that “modernity” (in some sense) tends to repress or reduce “religion” (in some sense)’: Taylor, A secular age, pp. 25–6, 28, 290, 429. ‘Modernity’ does not appear in the index, and is not challenged in Taylor's text.
17 Martin, David, The religious and the secular: studies in secularization (London, 1969), pp. 65–6Google Scholar. Bruce now protests that the secularization paradigm does not require an earlier ‘Golden Age of Faith’, only major change: God is dead, pp. 54–6. That major change has happened is accepted in the present article, but reinterpreted.
18 Acquaviva, S. S., The decline of the sacred in industrial society, trans. Patricia Lipscomb (Oxord, 1979), pp. 84Google Scholar, 109, 159. For the essentially historical nature of this thesis, see esp. pp. 85–136. The author adds ‘the class struggle’ and ‘science and technology’ as contributing causes, pp. 106, 136, 140.
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20 Berger, Social reality of religion, pp. 113, 128, 130–1, 170.
21 Bruce, God is dead, p. 9.
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30 ‘The new wars of religion’, Economist, 385 (3–9 Nov. 2007).
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97 Bruce, God is dead, p. 17.
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122 ‘What makes the European situation unique and exceptional when compared with the rest of the world is precisely the triumph of secularism as a teleological theory of religious development’: José Casanova, ‘Beyond European and American exceptionalisms: towards a global perspective’, in Grace Davie, Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, eds., Predicting religion: Christian, secular and alternative futures (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 17–29, at 24. For one aspect of this see David Bebbington, ‘The secularization of British universities since the mid-nineteenth century’, in George M. Marsden and Bradley J. Longfield, eds., The secularization of the academy (New York, NY, 1992), pp. 259–77.
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127 Some students acknowledge ‘a basic incompatibility between religiously-based reasoning and “experiencing”, for instance, in the scientific world. Is the incompatibility intrinsic and irremediable, or is it historical and, for that reason, contingent?’: Acquaviva, Decline of the sacred in industrial society, p. 163. Green, Religion in the age of decline, p. 381, concludes that ‘no theory, for or against secularization, is consistent with all, or even most, of the evidence’. Bruce offers a definition of religion: ‘Religion for us consists of actions, beliefs and institutions predicated upon the assumption of the existence of either supernatural entities with powers of agency, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose, which have the capacity to set the conditions of, or to intervene in, human affairs’: ‘Secularization: the orthodox model’, pp. 10–11. The word ‘assumption’ seems to rule out the possibility of the validity of human experience. By contrast, historians have no authority to exclude evidence for either theism or atheism a priori.
128 Gregory, Brad S., ‘The other confessional history: on secular bias in the study of religion’, History and Theory, 45 (2006), pp. 132–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, illustrates the premises of metaphysical naturalism present in Durkheim's work.
129 Alan D. Gilbert, ‘Secularization and the future’, in Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils, eds., A history of religion in Britain: practice and belief from pre-Roman times to the present (Oxford, 1994), pp. 503–21, at 520 (italics added).
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132 Whether postmodernist critiques have been more effective is a matter for debate; see Ruff, Mark Edward, ‘The postmodern challenge to the secularization thesis: a critical assessment’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte, 99 (2005), pp. 385–401Google Scholar. Ruff suggests that the abandonment of the master narrative of secularization will only lead to the creation of a new master narrative, ‘one likely based on the so-called “feminization” narrative, the fruits of gender history’ (p. 398).
133 For a preliminary attempt, from the standpoint of the sociology of religion in and relating to the United States, see William H. Swatos, Jr, and Kevin J. Christiano, ‘Secularization theory: the course of a concept’, in Swatos and Olson, eds., The secularization debate, pp. 1–20. The authors do not engage with the historical scholarship reviewed here.
134 Micklethwait, John and Wooldridge, Adrian, God is back: how the global revival of faith is changing the world (New York, NY, 2009)Google Scholar. The analysis of this work is, however, made problematic by its normative endorsement of the category ‘modernization’. For similar appreciations of changing understandings see Marshall, Paul, Gilbert, Lela, and Ahmanson, Roberta Green, eds., Blind spot: when journalists don't get religion (New York, NY, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft, ‘God is winning: religion in global politics’, pp. 11–28; Smith, Steven D., The disenchantment of secular discourse (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar.
135 Even then, ‘Might it not be the case that Europeans are not so much less religious than citizens in other parts of the world as differently religious?’: Grace Davie, ‘Europe: the exception that proves the rule?’, in Berger, ed., The desecularization of the world, pp. 65–83, at 65. Davie argues that ‘Western Europeans are unchurched populations, rather than simply secular’, p. 68. Cf. Davie, Grace, Religion in modern Europe: a memory mutates (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.
136 Davie, Heelas, and Woodhead, eds., Predicting religion, p. i and passim. Sommerville, The secularization of early modern England, p. 3, warns that ‘we are certainly not discussing the decline of Christianity’ (although treating the changes he explores as a ‘process’, pp. 11, 179–80, or ‘various processes’, p. 178, effecting a transition from just one binary alternative to its opposite). McLeod, Secularisation in western Europe, argues that ‘rather than one simple story-line, we need a narrative in which a variety of plots and sub-plots are intertwined’, p. 286. Martin, On secularization, p. 3, proposes, in place of secularization as ‘a once-for-all unilateral process’, a model of ‘successive Christianizations followed by or accompanied by recoils’.
137 ‘Secularization is happening, yet secularization theory is wrong’: Brown, The death of Christian Britain, p. x. For an argument that this paradox entails ‘a re-examination of the nature of “religion” itself’, see Morris, ‘Secularization and religious experience’.
138 See, for example, Davie, The sociology of religion, ch. 5, ‘Modernity: a single or plural construct?’, and pp. 247–9. Her reconsideration, as yet, still accepts ‘modernity’ and seeks only to diversify its meanings.