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

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superficial. Sociologists generally hold that the dominant values of American society are not religious.

(ibid.: 112)

Religious affiliation in the United States, he argued, was part and parcel of ‘being an American’. Public American religiosity, therefore, signified a social commitment rather than a sacred one. He theorized that the United States had needed to forge a common identity during the formative years of the Union, despite the plurality of its religious organizations. This need had led to the downplaying of religious difference. Religious values had thereby been eroded. Wilson suggested: ‘though religious practice has increased, the vacuousness of popular religious ideas has also increased: the content and meaning of religious commitment has been acculturated’ (ibid.: 122).

Wilson did not see the secularization he observed in both countries as being entirely dissimilar in kind. He linked secularization, wherever it occurred, to the increasingly mobile, urban and impersonal society he associated with the modern world. Looking at Britain and the United States, he also identified two other secularizing tendencies they had in common: denominationalism and ecumenicalism. Each new denomination, he said, eroded the notion of a unitary religious authority and so fuelled further secularization. Increasing numbers of denominations meant more competing views and an increase in doctrinal tension that undermined the basis of religious control. Some scholars saw ecumenicalism as a sign of a vigorous Church ready to engage with the doctrines and practices of others. For Wilson, however, ecumenicalism was a symptom of weakness rather than a sign of strength. This was because, he argued, organizations are most likely to amalgamate when they are weak. The desire for alliance leads to compromise and the amendment of commitment.

Some scholars saw the new religious movements that appeared in the West in the 1970s and 1980s as heralding the kind of religious regeneration envisaged by Durkheim. During this period, however, Wilson continued to affirm the view that, in common with sects in general, these movements were of little social consequence. In the 1990s, in a more conciliatory tone, he commented that new religions might indeed have positive benefits for individuals, and had significance on that basis. However, he saw no indication that any of them would or could transform the structure of society. They were, therefore, private forms of religion, and not to be taken as signs of the revival of public religion.

Wilson did not particularly distinguish between religious thinking and religious institutional presence in his earlier work on secularization. He believed that both, at different rates and in different ways, were under attrition in Western society. In his later work, however, he consistently reaffirmed the public character of the religious decline he was describing. In response to reactions to his earlier work, he emphasized that his own model of secularization did not necessarily imply the growth of a secular consciousness. It did not even necessarily entail the idea that most individuals living in secular societies have relinquished their interest in religion. Secularization simply meant that religion had ceased to be significant in public life.

Responses to Bryan Wilson’s theory of secularization

Wilson was far from the first to argue that secularization was taking place in the modern world. But it is his work that was most often referred to by other sociologists as ‘the classic thesis’. And it is his writings that are seen to have initiated the contemporary debate. Before

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I turn to some alternative models that have been put forward in response, it is worth first reviewing briefly a few of the criticisms made about the specific content of his argument.

In an early rebuttal of the thesis, David Martin called for the concept of secularization to be abandoned, on the grounds that it was: ‘less a scientific concept than a tool of counterreligious ideologies’ (Martin 1969: 9). Martin went on to produce an important later comparative contribution to the debate, A General Theory of Secularization, but in this early work he objected to Wilson’s position on a number of counts. One was that the notion of secularization implied a definition of religion, but religion is notoriously difficult to define. Another was that the thesis appeared to suggest that there once existed a ‘Golden Age’ of religion from whose norms we have subsequently diverged. This ‘Golden Age’, in his view, was an ideal based on representations of eleventhto thirteenth-century Catholicism. However, said Martin, no such utopian period ever existed. A third objection he raised was that the view of ‘modern man’ put forward by Wilson was ‘over-secularized’. Instead, Martin argued that contemporary society ‘remains deeply imbued with every type of superstition and metaphysic’ (ibid.: 113).

Other commentators, including Andrew Greeley, questioned the validity of the empirical evidence Wilson had marshalled (Greeley 1972). Greeley, an American priest and scholar, argued that statistics about church membership were not necessarily accurate indicators of levels of religious practice. He pointed out that many parishes did not keep records, and noted that the concept of membership is open to a number of interpretations. Different figures can be arrived at depending upon which interpretation is used. Greeley was also one of the scholars who objected to Wilson’s view of ecumenicalism as a sign of weakness. He commented that engaging in dialogue with other Churches could equally well be seen as a response to plurality, and as a sign of strength. Generally, he rejected Wilson’s suggestion that America was increasingly secular, along with the notion that modernity has a deleterious effect on religion. Agreeing with the misgivings raised by Greeley, other scholars described Wilson’s attitude towards American religiosity and, indeed, towards sectarian religion, as unduly dismissive. They took exception to his assumption that a localized European model of religious ‘authenticity’ could be taken as a universal norm. It is worth noting, however, that in this, Wilson was not alone. A number of the early sociologists who supported his thesis assumed the European model of secularization as the norm, and evidence to the contrary as merely exceptions to the rule (Casanova 1994: 22).

The ‘religious economies’ model

It was two other American scholars, Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, who began the formulation of an alternative to Wilson’s thesis. Their model was predicated on the existence of ‘religious economies’. Notably, unlike Wilson, they defined secularization as both a public and private matter. For them, it was not only as a process affecting societies, but also one to which individual religious organizations were susceptible. Stark and Bainbridge suggested that religion arises through basic social exchanges. Within social exchanges, which are economic in nature, people attempt to gain rewards and avoid costs. Religion offers rewards in the form of ‘compensators’, these being rewards that are accepted as a matter of faith. Stark’s and Bainbridge’s view was that science alone does not offer sufficient rewards to individuals. This is because, they said, science is incapable of solving the central problems of human existence. For this reason, they argued, humans have continued to postulate supernatural entities able to meet their demands.

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Stark and Bainbridge believed that religious revival and innovation was stimulated by supply and demand. Because of secularizing forces within organizations, they argued, religious entities that can offer powerful enough compensators are sometimes in short supply. This is because, over time, religious organizations tend to become more rational and secular. In so doing, they lose supernatural credibility. Human beings, however, have a fairly constant need for powerful religious compensators. When these compensators are in short supply, new forms of religion emerge that can meet the demand by offering the rewards necessary. In other words, the two American scholars agreed with Wilson that there was evidence of secularization. But they suggested that the history of religion exhibited patterns of cyclic decline and regeneration rather than a linear decline:

Viewed in this way, secularization is not something new under the sun. It did not begin with the rise of science. . . . [and] secularization does not bring the end of religion. Rather, secularization is self-limiting in that it stimulates significant processes of reaction in other sectors of any religious economy.

(Stark 1985: 302; italics in original)

Stark and Bainbridge also challenged Wilson’s claim that new religious movements are proof of the withdrawal of religion from public life. The two pointed to European data that showed that cults – groups inspired from somewhere besides the primary religion of the culture in which they were located – were more numerous and stronger in those regions where conventional churches were weak. The data also indicated that sects – breakaway Christian groups – abounded in areas where the Church was stronger. In Stark’s and Bainbridge’s view, these facts undermined Wilson’s thesis that there was a declining interest in religion in Europe. In fact, Europe, according to them, was not secular at all in the way envisaged by Wilson.

Stark and Bainbridge, in other words, were following a far more Durkheimian theoretical trajectory. They assumed that religion had an enduring function and that it would therefore always be needed. Disagreeing with Wilson, they saw religion as a universal that was more or less constant, and rejected the notion that it would be inexorably removed from the public sphere over time. Instead, like Durkheim, they believed that religious innovation and renewal are inevitable. They parted company from Durkheim in that the latter held that society requires religion. For Stark and Bainbridge, religion was an enduring phenomenon because of individuals’ need for compensators. Nevertheless, they still clearly owed him a substantial intellectual debt.

Perhaps at least partly because of their theoretical divergence with Weber’s vision, their thesis met with friendly ridicule on the other side of the Atlantic. Their most vocal adversary was the sociologist Roy Wallis, a former student of Wilson’s. He accepted their premise that sectarian religious organizations become more rational with the passage of time. But Wallis argued that the figures offered by Stark to substantiate the view that revival and innovation was taking place in Europe were founded on too few cases. He also cast doubt on the accuracy of Stark’s statistics, and suggested they were skewed. Wallis said that Stark should not have used numbers of cult movements in Europe as a basis for his claims that the continent was still religious. His objection was that just because someone opens an office ‘does not mean that he has any customers’ (Wallis 1986: 497). In so doing, he managed to convey the impression that the Americans had no idea about the religious situation in Europe. Therefore, their views on secularization were not to be accorded any degree of seriousness.

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The ‘rational choice’ model

Stark, however, had only just begun his amicable assault on the bastions of European sociological expertise. Following other collaborative work, he reformulated his model along more sophisticated lines with Laurence Iannaccone (Stark and Iannaccone 1994). Like that of Stark and Bainbridge before, the framework of the revamped model was economic. It assumed a fairly constant need for religion since, they said, there is always human suffering that cannot be satisfactorily addressed by other means. It also assumed religious change to be a cyclic rather than a linear process. It differed from the earlier model, however, in that it focused on supply rather than demand.

Stark and Iannaccone attributed variations in devotion to discrepancies in the supply of religious services rather than to different levels of demand, or indeed to secularizing tendencies. In fact, the model dispensed with the need to posit processes of secularization entirely. Instead, it incorporated elements of rational choice theory. Consequently, it was predicated on the assumption that a free market is always more active and efficient than one dominated by a monopoly. The two presumed that this assumption holds good when applied to the religious as well as the commercial arena. Stark and Iannaccone predicted that in those countries where there is a monopoly on religion, there is little interest in religion on the part of its population, and demand is low. Conversely, in those countries where religious organizations must compete for members, such as America, a higher degree of religious enthusiasm could be expected.

Like David Martin before them, but for different reasons, Stark and Iannaccone disagreed with the notion that there had been ‘a golden age of faith’. They rejected the received wisdom that medieval Europe was an era in which religiosity was high, because it went against what their own model predicted should have been the case. As the Church had a monopoly during that period, their theory suggested that religious enthusiasm should have been correspondingly low. The two scholars also pressed the case, as Stark had before with Bainbridge, that modern Europe was more religious than British sociologists were prepared to admit. In other words, they turned the Wilsonian version of events on its head. Their view was that a more religious Europe had not given way to an increasingly secular one. Instead, they argued that Europeans had been less interested in religion in the past. This was because Europe had been dominated by a religious monopoly. More recently, they said, this situation had given way to a more devout contemporary Europe, as it was supplied by a plurality of religious organizations. And they presented historical as well as contemporary data to support their argument.

Their critics were not slow to respond. Some took exception to the model because of its economic orientation. It was suggested that models of behaviour linked to commercial monopolies and the free market could not, and should not, be unproblematically applied to religion. Others poured scorn on the idea that religious affiliation could ever be the result of ‘rational choice’. Seeing the two as a contradiction in terms was in part perhaps because of the way in which religion has been associated with irrationality in dominant European discourses. The most vociferous critic of the new model in Britain, however, was Steve Bruce, a former student of Roy Wallis. A Professor at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, he, too, presented historical and contemporary data in support of his argument. Describing their ‘iconoclasm’ as ‘misplaced’, he, in by now time-honoured tradition, suggested that it was unfortunate that Stark and Iannaccone ‘… are not better acquainted with the work of British historians or with recent survey data. Only by making unreasonably light of the many signs of religiosity in pre-modern British culture and making unreasonably much of

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the very slight evidence of religious sentiment beyond the churches in contemporary Britain are they able to claim that Britain’s religious climate has not changed drastically. Britain was once religious, it is now secular’ (Bruce 1995: 428). The dismissal, once more, conveyed the distinct impression that the Americans had got ‘the Brits’, and so by implication the whole of Europe, all wrong.

Secularization and confusion

A year later, Sharon Hanson, then engaged in postgraduate work at King’s College, London, conducted an examination of the arguments over secularization. Her analysis exposed weaknesses in both camps (Hanson 1996). First, she drew attention to the fact that Bruce, Stark and Iannaccone were often talking at cross-purposes, and for this reason were not always as opposed as they appeared. One camp, she said, would often critically evaluate the claims of the other without taking into account that they were using different definitions of both secularization and religion. The result was confusion. Second, she noted that at times they seemed to use evidence to support their own view that could be more readily used to support the opposing side.

Third, said Hanson, the work she examined often relied heavily on historical data to legitimate claims. However, the data tended to be used without much circumspection: ‘Historical data is presented as unproblematic, often juxtaposed to contemporary data, without any attempt to note the difficulty of comparing contemporary and historical data. Using historical data in this way lacks rigour, sources are not properly investigated and generalisations are hastily reached’ (ibid.: 164). Hanson, additionally, pointed out that data that appears to suggest religion has lost social significance does not tell us why this might be so. Nevertheless, she said: ‘Both Stark and Iannaccone (1994) and Bruce (1995, 1996) use their purported statistical proofs and historical narrative to speak of the why. They then use this rationale as proof that religion has, indeed, lost its significance or has not done so. Thus, a cyclical self-supporting argument is set up on weak proofs and propositions, gaining artificial credibility by mere repetition’(ibid.: 164).

Notwithstanding these observations, Hanson was by no means entirely condemnatory of the positions of Bruce, Stark and Iannaccone. And all three have maintained their original allegiances thereafter (Bruce 2002; Swatos and Olson 2000). However, during the course of her critique she made a further point deserving of mention. Hanson, as others have done, noted that both critics and proponents of secularization have had a markedly ‘christocentric’ understanding of ‘religion’. The equation of Christianity with religion means that if the former appears to be in decline then so does the latter. But religious affiliation has become increasingly plural throughout the world. In some areas, it might be the case that Christianity is undergoing a decline in influence in the public sphere. Given the multitude of faiths and beliefs, however, this fact does not necessarily signal the disappearance of religion altogether.

Religious pluralism

Pursuing this line of reasoning, a third group of scholars, albeit working independently of each other, have focused on the increasingly diverse religious ‘landscape’ rather than on processes of secularization. Advocates of this approach include Peter Berger and Grace Davie. Instead of continuing the debate in terms of decline or persistence, they have identified pluralism,