Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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credence in stage theories of societal development, nor did he believe that social scientists could identify significant general ‘laws’ of social life. Moreover, this approach ignores Weber’s very ambiguous judgment on Western modernity, and transforms it into an optimistic theory of modernization and progress. It also leaves aside Weber’s analysis of the affinity between certain classes and status groups with particular types of religious plausibility structures. Accordingly, scholars using this approach identified such diverse classes as reform bureaucrats and the military as potential carriers of modernization, classes which have little to do with the attitudes Weber has ascribed to ascetic Protestantism. Nevertheless, the Parsons School has produced some impressive studies, most importantly Robert Bellah’s (1957) Tokugawa Religion (see also Shmuel Eisenstadt 1968).
Collapsed canopies and various paths of secularization
Peter Berger’s (1967) articulation of a theory of secularization represents an alternative school of thought. Berger claims that religion’s power to shape social life has largely diminished in Western modernity because of institutional differentiation, the pluralization of worldviews, and a loss of plausibility structures. Berger grounds his theory in a phenomenological perspective, according to which religious worldviews provide shields from the chaotic, uncontrollable aspects of the world which humans inhabit. A religious worldview is reproduced through socialization; since it dominates the social contexts individuals are born into, they take it for granted and learn to interpret their experiences according to this cognitive structure. But religion can remain strong in societies only where it is supported by a dialectical, mutually sustaining, and mutually determining relationship with a social base or plausibility structure. Further, religion is at its strongest when it has a monopoly in a relatively stable society – when it comprises a ‘sacred canopy’ within which individuals understand and interpret their social existence, and where there is an absence of competing interpretationsÂ.
It follows from this characterization that secularization is an inevitable result of change within the economic and social contexts upon which religious worldviews depend. Secularization occurs when a religious worldview and the social reality no longer coincide because its plausibility structures erode, and a formerly monopolistic religious worldview becomes open to revision and a plurality of interpretations. Once the sacred canopy collapses, religion progressively loses its power to shape social life. Although Berger no longer holds these views, they represent his most influential contribution to the sociology of religion; they have had a major impact on scholars like Nancy T. Ammerman (1987) and James D. Hunter (1983).
Whereas Berger sees secularization as a necessary consequence of modernization on an abstract and general level, David Martin (1978) has focused on secularization from a concrete and historical, comparative institutional perspective. Rather sceptical about the concept of secularization, Martin shows in an admirable comparative study how secularization was conditioned by the character of religious institutions and their relationships to the state. Martin locates the occurrence of secularization at three different social levels of analysis: at the level of social institutions, at the level of belief, and at the level of a people’s ethos. He then proposes an ideal-typical schema that classifies the characteristics of nation states along several dimensions, and uses this schema to show how variation in the historical position of religion during state formation, the level of pluralism, and the logics embedded within religions practiced in particular settings, together produce different patterns of secularization. Martin’s work does not simply assume secularization as a fact, but shows how different historical
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conditions produce secularization at different levels of society. For example, historically France’s religious monopoly was politically challenged by secular institutions, which led to a comprehensive victory of secularism. In contrast, the separation of church and state and the pluralistic organization of religion in the US prevented conflict at the political level, and therefore, secularization primarily occurred on the level of the religious ethos. Martin’s work remains among the most sophisticated of empirical and theoretical studies of secularization.
Lively margins
Bryan R. Wilson’s (1982) studies of sectarianism, executed mostly in the interpretive tradition of Weber, explore an important aspect of secularization theories: the marginalization of religion. Wilson understood the central institutions of modern Western societies to be thoroughly secularized, but demonstrated that religious belief and practice endure among socially marginalized groups. He theorized the distinctiveness of these sectarian forms of religious practice.
Wilson observes that, whereas many in modern societies neither believe nor practice religion and the behaviors of mainline church members are rarely driven by religiosity, within modern sects one can yet observe the powerful social consequences of religion in individual lives. Sects shape in their adherents undifferentiated religious identities, which spill over and suffuse the whole of their lives. For the socially marginalized – for example, for temporal or generational groups such as adolescents and young adults – sects offer reassurance and comfort in the form of salvation beliefs. And with strong ethical norms and distinctive styles of life, sects bring their converts into a social world in which they can perceive themselves as integral to a social group, and in which they are aided in reinterpreting painful experiences of marginality.
Consistent with secularization theory, sectarian religion is withdrawn from the public sphere; sectarians do not engage in public discourse and have little effect on society as a whole. While incorporating aspects of modernity’s rational procedures in their organization and practices, they distinguish themselves from modern society by constituting themselves in opposition to it in their creation of undifferentiated identities and distinctive ways of life. It is Wilson’s view that social conditions for sectarian adherence include not only social marginality in its modern forms, but also the prerequisite of the lack of previous religious socialization.
Other scholars have paid attention to religion on society’s margins in studies of the emergence of new religious movements. Many recent religious movements of Asian origin, such as Hare Krishna, the Unification Church of Reverend Moon, and Soka Gakkai have been well studied, with several of these studies making important theoretical contributions to the study of religion, and especially to understanding conversion processes (Lofland and Stark 1965, 1985; Beckford 1976; Snow and Phillips 1980; Lofland and Skonovd 1983; Barker 1984; Snow and Machalek 1984; Snow 1993).
Privatization
Toward the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s, secularization theories further crystallized and affirmed the view that religious decline in the modern West would inevitably progress. Empirical evidence of secularization was abundant in religion’s increasing loss of power within political and cultural institutions, as well as in declining church attendance
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and aging congregations in many of the countries of Europe. Religion no longer occupied a place at modern societies’ centers, and scholars took for granted that this state of affairs was a necessary consequence of modernization. Even where churches thrived, as they did in the US, it seemed clear that much of this practice, especially within liberal churches, was not so much religiously as socially motivated, reflecting the internal secularization of religious institutions. For some scholars, however, this clear evidence of the decline of religion at the center of modern society propelled them to look for authentic religious Âexpression in more hidden and less public arenas.
Thomas Luckmann’s (1967) work was a harbinger of this turn: he proposed a theory of secularization as privatization which claimed that religion was not disappearing in modernity, but that its locus had shifted from the public sphere to the inner personal experience of individuals. In Luckmann’s view, religion arises as a necessary part of the socialpsychological, meaning-making process in which humans are individuated and selves created. Although religious institutions are historically common, it is not necessary that religion be institutionalized for it to endure. Rather, religion endures in human history because it is a constitutive element of the formation of selves; it is the Âanthropological conditions giving rise to religion that are indeed universal.
Luckmann describes the historical process of secularization in the West as a consequence of the endurance, growth, and internal workings of religious institutions. As churches grew, they developed secular interests and did not remain exclusively determined by their religious functions. Specialization within these institutions required that religious norms become differentiated from secular norms, and the disjuncture between the two generated inconsistencies between doctrine and its institutional expression. Therefore, where previously religion was merely taken for granted, people were given cause to reflect upon it. Human reflection thereby transformed religion into an increasingly subjective reality.
In this process, institutional religion became progressively emptied of meaning, and the erosion of public religion was replaced by its increased importance in the private sphere. In modern societies, then, religions exist in ever more privatized forms and their meanings become properties of individual selves, and thus ‘invisible.’ In this view, secularization is the process of religious institutions’ decline, but religion still endures as its social locations shift. Therefore, the new locus of religion in modernity is individuals’ inner lives, even if this inner experience is largely unavailable to empirical scrutiny.
Grace Davie (1994, 2000) has built on this perspective by analyzing the discrepancy between believing and belonging. She shows that the majority of Europeans, and the British in particular, are neither secular nor atheist. Quite the contrary, many do believe in a God or other higher powers, and membership in religious associations is rather high. It is Davie’s view that it is not Europeans’ religious believing, but only their relatively infrequent participation in religious practices compared to those in non-European countries, that has declined.
Danièle Hervieu-Léger (1999) has likewise focused on the endurance of religious belief in modernity as religion has become increasingly privatized – but interestingly, she attempts a middle way between functional and substantive definitions of religion such that she can both affirm the reality of ‘invisible religions’ and account for many empirical instances of apparent religious revitalization. She observes that, although religion has declined in modernity because of scientific rationality and the concomitant autonomy and importance accorded to the self, questions of meaning and desire for experiences of sacredness are still common among modern societies. Following the Weberian insight that religion is fundamentally transformed in modernity, she theorizes this transformation as one in modes of belief, thereby defining
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religion as a way of believing whose authority practitioners legitimize by appeal to a tradition in a ‘chain of memory.’ Although Hervieu-Léger’s definition of religion is still quite broad, it allows her to helpfully distinguish modern effervescent expressions of sacredness, such as are found in sport, from instances of religiousness which, whether collective or privatized, constitutively involve people making use of narratives – often fragmentary ones, given the nature of high modernity – to connect their beliefs and practices to a lineage.
Inspired by Luckmann or perhaps by a partial appropriation of Durkheim, other sociologists have proposed an even broader understanding of religion in modernity, where nearly any form of self-transcendence may constitute ‘religion,’ from banal everyday activities to ‘effervescent’ social gatherings. In this view, even private hobbies, shopping in a supermarket, barbecues, or soccer games can be religious phenomena, with still other quotidian experiences and practices classified as implicitly or quasireligious. This view reveals one of the primary problems in attempting to take functional definitions of religion to their logical conclusion.
Secularism, pluralism, and religious resurgence
By the late 1970s it had become apparent that a resurgence of religion was taking place globally, evident from the United States to the Middle East, from South Asia and Africa even to parts of Europe. A revitalization of religion was underway in the US, as new religious movements spread across the Bay area in California and conservative religious forces – Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon – got organized in order to be saved from the 1960s (Tipton 1982). At the same time, religious revivals were taking place across the globe: Islam returned as a public force in the Middle East and beyond, religion was playing a forceful role in the shaping of ethnic identities and the fueling of ethnic conflicts from India and Sri Lanka (Tambiah 1992, 1996) to the Sudan and Ireland, and religious movements challenged the secular state in several areas of the world (Juergensmeyer 1993). This overwhelming empirical evidence of religious resurgence in modernity challenged the old paradigm of the classics and their revisionist readings and new syntheses.
Structural conditions of secularization
In the wake of empirical evidence of religious revitalization, the problematic aspects of older secularization theories became the subject of increasing criticism, revision, and reformulation, resulting in a clearer definition of the conditions of secularization and an extended elaboration of secularization as a theory of social differentiation. Recognizing the empirical reality of religious resurgence, those working within secularization theory strove to theorize secularization in ways that did not entail its inevitability and irreversibility, and moved towards conceptualizations of secularization as an historical process to be located and explored.
Following upon Martin’s groundbreaking study, scholars sought to elaborate and distinguish secularization at different levels of analysis and to systematize characteristics of secularization within a larger conceptual framework. Among those taking this synthetic approach, Karel Dobbelaere’s (1981) work is perhaps the most comprehensive. Dobbelaere’s argument for a multidimensional concept of secularization proposes that secularization be studied through the examination of interrelated processes at three different levels of analysis. Secularization can occur through laicization – the societal differentiation of religion from other social formations and institutions – through organizational religious change, such as
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may occur within denominations, and in the religious involvement of individuals. Dobbelaere suggests that the relations between secularizing tendencies at each of these three levels do not have determinate outcomes and should be empirically investigated in order to more clearly theorize them. Although Dobbelaere believes that secularization is a contingent process, not a necessary or irreversible one, his canvas of empirical studies led him to conclude that secularization is empirically, if not theoretically, linearly progressive in the modern West.
Dobbelaere’s theory has been influential in recent years, especially among those interested in analyzing organizational religious change. His formulation has been used successfully to elaborate the occurrence of organization-level secularization in the US through analyses of denominational leadership (Chaves 1993). Unlike the earlier comprehensive narratives, the newer frameworks have allowed scholars to explore the structural conditions of secularization at various levels of analysis, and have the capacity to provide explanations for empirically specific instances of secularization in modern societies.
Homo religionomicus
Concurrent with work advancing secularization theory in the 1970s and 1980s, other scholars began a move towards its wholesale rejection, and reinterpreted evidence of varying levels of religious participation among nation states and across religious denominations under a utilitarian rubric. These mostly North American scholars have been led by Rodney Stark and William S. Bainbridge (1979), who first used rational choice principles to construct a theory of religion. Stark and Bainbridge begin with the utilitarian assumption that individuals act to attain preferred ends while minimizing costs in an environment of opportunities and constraints. But the benefits desired by individuals are sometimes unattainable, either because of their social structural contexts, or because of the physical human limitations imposed by illness, disability, and the inevitability of death. In these life situations, religious rewards
– such as doctrines promising salvation and eternal life, or religious experiences providing comfort and emotional benefits – can be sought as substitutes. In this view then, religion is conceptualized as a system of compensators for benefits unattainable to individuals. And since the human condition is such that the need for compensators – especially as a substitute for the avoidance of death – does not change, demand for religion is understood as relatively constant.
Since individual preferences are left unproblematized and the demand for religious goods are assumed to be constant, the behavior of religious institutions, frequently theorized as following the laws of market dynamics, becomes a primary locus of investigation for those working within this school of thought. Some studies, such as Iannaccone’s (1994) work on the vitality of strict churches, offer explanations for why particular religious organizations are especially attractive to seekers on the religious market. Others, like the historical study of church membership in the US by Finke and Stark (1992), focus on the market behavior of religious organizations, claiming that variations in religious practice should be understood primarily as supply side phenomena. In their view, the amount of freedom allowed in the market, the degree of regulation, and the resulting level of competition among religious organizations determine levels of religious vitality in a given society.
Rational choice theories of religion have gained broad currency among sociologists of religion in recent years. At the same time, this approach has provoked heated criticism (Chaves 1995; Ammerman 1998; Neitz and Mueser 1998; Bruce 1999), especially for its use of a utilitarian psychology, which long ago was demonstrated to be an inadequate theory