Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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statement is, deliberately, somewhat less than straightforward. For the reading I have just suggested to be the case, one would have to equate the proposition that ‘far fewer people were religious than before’ with the idea that ‘the world was becoming increasingly secular’. However, on closer inspection, I would like to suggest that these two phrases are not necessarily synonymous. And this is, in part, due to the disparity between the meanings attributed to the term ‘secular’ and its derivatives.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term ‘secular’ is derived from the same etymological root (L. sæculum) as the French word siècle, meaning ‘century’, or ‘age’. Interestingly, this derivation is evident in the astronomical use of the word secular to talk about processes of change over long periods of time, such as changes in planetary orbits. However, most people are perhaps more familiar with the usage that originated in early ecclesiastical texts, in which the term ‘secular’ was commonly opposed to ‘regular’. ‘Regular’, in this context, was a term applied to those persons subject to the rule of a monastic order. Thus, its opposite – ‘secular’ – was used to denote worldly affairs. Today, this is the most commonly understood meaning of ‘secular’.

The principal entry for the term ‘secularization’ in the OED emphasizes its institutional character. There, secularization is described as: ‘the conversion of an ecclesiastical or religious institution or its property to secular possession and use’. In contrast ‘secularism’, some sociologists of religion have argued, has a more personal orientation. It is the belief that morality should only take into account human and visible considerations. Secularists do not consider that moral codes should take into account, for instance, the existence of God, or of an afterlife. Whereas secularization is supposed to take place in the ‘public’ arena, secularism is a ‘private’ affair. Secularization, they have said, refers only to the diminishing of the public significance of religion. It does not refer to private levels of religiosity. It is, therefore, not synonymous with secularism. In fact, they have argued that the withdrawal of religion from the public domain might well imply an increase in personal forms of religiosity.

But, to complicate matters, this distinction between private religiosity and public religion has not been held universally by sociologists of religion. Peter Berger made the suggestion early on that: ‘As there is a secularization of society and culture, so is there a secularization of consciousness’ (Berger 1969: 107–8). He felt that secularization could have a private as well as a public component. It should also be noted that some who have insisted on the existence of secularization have not defined it as an irrevocable and irreversible trend. Instead, they have asserted that secularization ebbs and flows. Old religious forms die out, but they are replaced. Yet others have used the term secularization to describe a shift from ‘other-worldly’ to ‘this-worldly’ concerns within religious organizations, rather than in society at large.

Secularization theory, in other words, is one of those topics where the same word has been used in various ways on different occasions. However, as already noted, this confusion over meaning has not been the only reason for the disagreements over secularization. So, to complete our preparations for an examination of these debates, we should become conversant with the ideological antecedents of the different views being argued. To do so, we shall look briefly at the work of the two men widely regarded as the founding fathers of the sociology of religion, Max Weber (1864–1920) and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), and at the goals of ‘the Enlightenment project’.

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The antecedents of contemporary secularization theories

The Enlightenment project that matured in the eighteenth century represented a revolutionary intellectual movement. Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Voltaire and Thomas Paine believed that there was an underlying order to the world that could be progressively understood through the use of the rational faculties of men. Intellectual progress would be achieved by abandoning articles of faith, by rising above instinctual drives, and by renouncing irrationality. They assumed that men could lift themselves out of the mire of received wisdom and become autonomous human subjects. Men were capable of discovering foundational truths about the nature of reality by relying on intelligence rather than on divine revelation. These discoveries would come about by focusing on the objective facts of the world, and so discerning the laws governing life. Everything could ultimately be understood through science and rational thought. Then, once this understanding had been achieved, humanity would be able to control both Nature and its own destiny.

These assumptions permeated the intellectual milieu in which Max Weber lived, and the works of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) also represented major influences. Weber did not uncritically accept all of the tenets of Enlightenment thinking. He believed, for example, that there are some spheres in which science has no role to play. Nevertheless, Enlightenment assumptions are clearly visible in a number of his key ideas. Weber assumed that the foremost trend in Western society was towards increasing rationalization. He felt that social progress involved a move away from traditional, localized and sentimental ways of life and towards ordered bureaucracies and centralized control. Weber found this modern trend profoundly disturbing, but also inevitable. He saw it as the logical outcome of the rise of the nation state, and of capitalism. In particular, he believed, modernizing forces such as urbanization, the specialization of labour, and industrialization would have a profound impact on religion.

Weber argued – nostalgically, it has been said – that traditional life was permeated with a magical enchantment. Rationalization, he predicted, would lead to a progressive ‘disenchantment’ and, ultimately, to a world in which religion would no longer play a role in public life. This was not to say that religion would necessarily disappear altogether. However, it would increasingly become a matter of private choice. Weber believed this secularization would gradually occur because religion would no longer be able to exist in a state of unquestioned authority. Weber also suggested that Protestantism carried within itself the seeds of secularization. First, this was because it encouraged the idea that brotherly love could be manifested through ‘a peculiarly objective and impersonal character, that of service in the interest of the rational organization of our social environment’ (Weber 1930: 109). Thus, it promoted rationalization and, therefore, disenchantment. Second, he argued, Protestantism encouraged scientists to reflect upon the natural laws of divine creation as a way of knowing God. Since it allowed scientific explanations to undermine religious ones, its own internal logic would eventually undercut itself.

Weber has been described by a number of biographers as a brilliant scholar and a troubled soul. Unlike some contemporaries, he did not see the decline of religious influence as a liberating outcome of modernity. He simply saw it as unavoidable, given the social forces at play. Durkheim’s position was very different. He was an atheist, and as influenced by Enlightenment thinking as Weber. But his assessment of the future of religion was far more optimistic. His view was that religious sentiment was essential to society, whether traditional or modern. Religion, he argued, enhances feelings of social solidarity. He, therefore, did not

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see it as something that could ever be outgrown by mankind, or as something that could be fully separated from society.

So Durkheim believed that religion would never lose its social significance. Instead, he maintained that: ‘there is something eternal in religion that is destined to outlive the succession of particular symbols in which religious thought has clothed itself’(Durkheim1912: 429). Religion would persist, not because it was necessarily true but because it had a public function to perform. Society required religion in order to maintain social cohesion and to strengthen collective feelings and ideas. He believed that forms of religion could be expected to change as society changes. But, Durkheim concluded, religion itself could never be extinguished or pushed to the margins, even when disputed by science. Science had the capability to challenge outmoded religious dogmas. But new religious forms, more in keeping with the times, would inevitably arise to take their place. Durkheim acknowledged that religion was apparently in decline during his lifetime. But he felt that a resurrection was imminent: ‘In short, the former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born … [but] A day will come when our societies once again will know hours of creative effervescence during which new ideals will again spring forth and new formulas emerge to guide humanity’ (ibid.: 429).

The ideas of these two men have, at least implicitly, dominated more recent debates over secularization. Part of their legacy is evident in the type of grand theorizing involved. Weber explicitly rejected the notion that religion is generalizable in an ahistorical sense. But both men sought to understand the underlying laws governing religion, and offered large-scale explanatory models based on the trends they observed. Contemporary theories of secularization fit neatly into this genre. Their influence is also visible in the assumptions underpinning contemporary arguments. All presume that social conditions have an impact on religion. But some, including Bryan Wilson and Roy Wallis, are explicitly Weberian in orientation. Others, such as Rodney Stark, Grace Davie and Charles Taylor, exhibit elements of Durkheimian thought in their challenges to the views of the former. To review the later perpetuation of the ideas of Weber and Durkheim, I shall turn first to the classic secularization thesis outlined by the Oxford sociologist Bryan Wilson. I will then examine the reactions of other scholars, before making some more general observations on the debate.

The great secularization debate

Bryan Wilson was seen by many to be the foremost British sociologist of religion of his day. His book Religion in Secular Society, published in 1966, laid out the principles of his secularization thesis and became a founding document of the contemporary debate. Wilson defined secularization as ‘the process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance’ (Wilson 1966: 14). His argument was that religion had formerly occupied a central position in society but, by the twentieth century, this was no longer the case. Wilson largely confined his analysis to Western society and, especially, to the position of religion in Britain and the United States. He agreed with Weber’s view on the secularizing character of the Protestant ethos. He also maintained, like his august intellectual predecessor, that religion must be examined in terms of its historico-social context. Wilson allowed that in countries like Japan, concomitant with industrialization, secularizing processes were discernible. However, following Weber, he asserted that secularization was more markedly evident in Christianity than in other religions around the world. The effects of secularization were, therefore, also more in evidence in Christian, and especially Protestant, countries.

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Wilson’s adoption of a Weberian conceptual framework was unambiguously evident in his view that the onset of modernizing processes in the West were linked to the emergence of Protestantism. Before the advent of Protestantism, he believed, religious understandings were adopted as axiomatic. After it, they began to be seen as matters of faith rather than universals. The Church could no longer claim to hold sway over the hearts, minds and lives of the general populace, as it had in earlier times. Institutions that had previously been ecclesiastically governed, such as hospitals, schools and universities, began to be transferred to secular authorities. By the twentieth century, Western man was increasingly more rational than before:

It seems to me difficult to maintain that man in western society is not more rational than ever he was, within the normal usage of the term ‘rational’. So much more of his ordinary behaviour is controlled by cause-and-effect thinking, even if only because he knows more about the workings of the physical and social worlds … The dominance of economic costing over spiritual aspiration in modern society, is the evidence of the growth of rationality in our social affairs, and consequently, at least in some measure, in our own habits of thought.

(ibid.: 17)

Like Weber, Wilson regarded rationalizing processes as consequences of modernity that were both inevitable and inexorable. Due to their onslaught, religion would become increasingly marginalized and lacking in social significance. This had already happened in many parts of Europe, he said, where religion had been relegated from public life. It existed mainly on the periphery of society, where it continued to flourish in the form of socially insignificant sectarian religious organizations. Indeed, sects were evidence for secularization: ‘it is in conditions in which the sacred order has been suborned to the secular – usually the religious institution to the political – as in the Roman Empire or Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, or in twentieth century Japan, that sectarianism becomes most manifest and institutionalized’ (ibid.: 207). Wilson conceded that religious organizations had managed to remain in mainstream public life in the United States. However, he believed they were doomed to become increasingly bureaucratic and rationalized.

In this early book, Wilson included empirical evidence of processes of secularization. Although these processes were present in both countries, he argued, they followed different paths in Britain and the United States. In Britain, he used statistics published by a range of Protestant churches in England. The figures appeared to support his theme of a decline in religious membership and ‘the general standing of the Church in society’. Wilson chose infant baptism, confirmation, church weddings, and attendance at Sunday school and Easter communion, as indices of levels of religious participation. His conclusion was that a decline was statistically evident. Turning his attention to America, he was not convinced that the statistics he was given were fully accurate. But he allowed that religion appeared far more resilient in the United States, and that the numbers indicated that religious membership was increasing rapidly. The main thrust of his argument for secularization taking place in America, therefore, differed from that which he used for Britain. Instead, he began by querying the authenticity and depth of religious commitment in America:

The travellers of the past who commented on the apparent extensiveness of Church membership, rarely omitted to say that they found religion in America to be very