On Secularization

Towards a Revised General Theory

David Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351913812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'Secularization' has been hotly debated since it was first subjected to critical attention in the mid-sixties by David Martin, before he sketched a 'General Theory' in 1969. 'On Secularization' presents David Martin's reassessment of the key issues: with particular regard to the special situation of religion in Western Europe, and questions in the global context including Pentecostalism in Latin America and Africa. Concluding with examinations of Pluralism, Christian Language, and Christianity and Politics, this book offers students and other readers of social theory and sociology of religion an invaluable reappraisal of Christianity and Secularization. It represents the most comprehensive sociology of contemporary Christianity, set in historical depth.

PART I
ORIENTATIONS

CHAPTER 1

Sociology, Religion and Secularization

What follows is an account of an issue that bears centrally on the relationship of sociology to religion and of sociology to theology. It is a retrospective account of a personal encounter with this particular issue. That issue is secularization. Sociology itself emerged as part of the process of secularization because it represented the autonomous study of Man in Society. But the circumstances of its emergence meant that it gave an absolutely central place to the problem of secularization and encased that problem in an ideological frame, in part derived from the philosophy of history. Sociology itself, as John Milbank has argued, has a deep structure of ideology embedded in its very foundations.¹ However, unlike Milbank I do not believe that its whole discourse is self-contained beyond correction. Ideology, once observed, can be countered. The guiding paradigms of sociology, such as secularization, can be made analytically coherent and descriptively accurate. However, that means reducing ‘grand theory’ to tendencies which are to be observed in certain definable circumstances and not in others and, moreover, those circumstances need to be seen as varying greatly according to historical context. In what follows, I present the viable core of secularization as the sub-theory of social differentiation. Serious doubts can be raised about the sub-theory of rationalization, and an important work of José Casanova² criticizes the sub-theory of privatization (which happens also to have implications for theological reflections on society).

This is why I can be counted both as a theorist of secularization, for example by Frank Lechner,³ as well as a critic. There is a viable core and a doubtful periphery. I need only add that what follows is a personal account of my own encounter with the problem as perhaps the first person to raise the critical issue in the mid-1960s and, moreover, to do so at a time when some theologians, such as Harvey Cox, were actually celebrating a version of the secularization thesis and glossing it theologically.⁴ This is not an overview of the debate offering an assessment of such key contributors as Peter Berger, Bryan Wilson, Karel Dobbelaere, Rodney Stark, Thomas Luckmann, Richard Fenn and Steve Bruce. It is a simple personal account offered to a lay audience interested in the relation of sociology to religion, of sociology to theology and of religion to society.

One needs to recall two standard points about sociology in general before coming to the sociology of religion – and secularization – in particular. The first point is that we need to recognize how our knowledge embodies a particular historical, cultural and even personal location. We are able to see precisely because we have a standpoint. That means that the sociologist does not present a package of certified knowledge, but begins a conversation.

The second point is that we see through a grid which organizes what we see. This is not just a matter of having a focus, though it is certainly true that you need a focus. Nor is it just a matter of being personally involved, although we are. The notion of a grid refers to the way we automatically structure the whole field of vision. Certain assumptions taken together constitute a paradigm, and as Thomas Kuhn argued, we are extremely reluctant to alter that paradigm. Evidence may pile up against it, but we prefer to keep explaining away the evidence to altering the paradigm. Even science tries to achieve some stability of understanding.

What, then, of what used to be the undisputed paradigm of secularization? Sociology and modernity were born together and so the focus of sociology was on what happened to religion under conditions of modernity and accelerating change. Basically it characterized modernity as a scenario in which mankind shifted from the religious mode to the secular. Secularization was made part of a powerful social and historical narrative of what had once been and now was ceasing to be. Emile Durkheim and Max Weber founded their reflections on what they saw as the crisis of religious consciousness. So strong was this presumption that few bothered to articulate the theory in terms of concrete historical analyses and careful examination of statistical data.

Since secularization was the undisputed paradigm, relatively few sociologists took a special interest in religion apart from a debate about Max Weber’s thesis that Calvinistic Protestantism was one of the midwives of capitalism and so a sort of prelude to modernity. After all, sociologists had to consider future employment and nobody wants to spend their lives explaining why something is going to be less and less important. At one point I described the sociologist of religion ironically as ‘an academic deviant living by a non-existent subject’.⁵ But, of course, that situation varied according to the cultural situation of the sociological community in different countries. In North America, after all, church practice had risen steadily through the whole period of modernization from 1800 to 1950. Indeed, Jon Butler has described this extraordinary increase in a book entitled Awash in a Sea of Faith.⁶ Thus, in the USA, there was genuine interest among sociologists represented by such distinguished scholars as Charles Glock, Robert Bellah and Peter Berger. More than that, the political scientist Martin Lipset argued that sociologists laid too much stress on class in understanding political behaviour and should try properly to take into account the role of religion. There was also some interest in European sociology in the condition of the Catholic Church. After all, the Catholic Church was one of the pillars of the European Community after the war. Many of these studies focused on indices of religious practice, on the status groups most likely to be attached to religious institutions, on the milieux most supportive towards religion. Nevertheless, in European sociology the paradigm of secularization remained dominant. Scholars argued that people in the great cities and the administrative and industrial centres were least likely to be religiously involved. Religiosity was concentrated among women and the older groups and in more remote areas.

As for Britain, it was still in a phase of post-war reconstruction and sociologists were more interested in questions of class, living conditions, education and social mobility. There was, for example, a Marxist approach which regarded religion at best as a naïve anticipation of social change, a projection of fantastic hopes that could only be properly realized under scientific socialism. And there was also a strong emphasis on the sifting of facts and statistics. It was only in the 1960s that sociology shifted its focus towards meaning, narrative, symbol and culture, and started to show a greater interest in religion. The result of all this was that religion was treated as a remainder, something left over from the past. That showed itself in two ways. The first was in social anthropology, where the interest in non-European societies required some understanding of religion. In this area there was a very different atmosphere associated with figures such as Mary Douglas, E. Evans-Pritchard and Victor Turner. Victor Turner, for example, focused attention on rites of transition, on the richness of symbols and pilgrimages. Few people realized how important pilgrimage remained in Western society. The second focus of interest was in the emergence of small minority groups, such as Pentecostals and Adventists. Bryan Wilson’s school of sociology at Oxford concentrated on sects: categorizing them in types, describing the conditions which favoured their growth, analysing their social constituency and their dynamics. But in this area, explanation was initially dominated by the idea that this kind of religion arose from frustration and deprivation.⁷ Eventually the interest shifted to groups associated with the New Age or New Religious Movements offering different kinds of spiritual therapy. In any case, the paradigm of secularization remained undisturbed, at least in the early stages, though there were those who thought the emergence of the New Age groups offered some contrary evidence.⁸

So, where was a critique to come from which might disturb the paradigm? Perhaps in the long run from anthropology, but an important clue was offered by the work of Karl Popper. In his The Poverty of Historicism, Popper had criticized the notion of long-term inevitable trends of history from the viewpoint of a philosopher of science.⁹ It seemed to me that secularization was just such a trend. Perhaps it could be criticized as an ideological and philosophical imposition on history rather than an inference from history. So, in 1965, I offered a critique of the concept of secularization.¹⁰ First, I suggested that it was conceptually a hotch-potch of ideas, some of them contradictory. And then I suggested it was in part an ideological projection on history based on an apotheosis of reason, on an existentialist anticipation of autonomous man, and on a Marxist leap into freedom and into reality with the conclusion of the historical dialectic in class society. Not so long after, a parallel critique was launched by the American sociologist Andrew Greeley. We were both anxious to underline the extensive influence of religion even in Western European society and the sharp difference between Western Europe and North America. There was, in our view, more than one model of modernity and of the future.¹¹

At the same time, there were various important extensions of secularization theory. For example, Peter Berger analysed the growth of pluralism, that is of competing religious (and secular) alternatives, and suggested that it would be difficult to maintain secure religious commitment when faced with so many contradictory beliefs and competing social environnments. However, Berger no longer believes that pluralism leads to a decline in religious commitment. Thomas Luckmann analysed the long-term consequences of the turn to inwardness and subjectivity and argued that this would bring about privatization, which would render religion socially invisible and irrelevant. This thesis concerning the shift to privatization was a major component in revised secularization, holding that society would be run by a rational bureaucracy and by impersonal regulation. It would not require any consensus over values or a religious instruction of personal conscience.¹²

These, then, were some of the reconstructions, mostly based on Western European experience. However, there was one other analysis of the role of Christianity in modern industrial society which has to be mentioned. It was provided in the 1950s and the 1960s by Talcott Parsons. He refined a key component in the theory of secularization, which was the process of social differentiation. A key text for this is his article on Christianity in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.¹³ Parsons saw differentiation as the separating out of each social sphere from ecclesiastical control: the state, science and the market, but also law, welfare and education etc. They would gain their own proper autonomy and specific expertise. But being an American reflecting on American experience, Parsons did not see this as a decline, but as change enabling religion better to fulfil its proper role. No longer, for example, was it tied into the realpolitik of the state but liberated to be itself. Social differentiation also predicted the extension of religious competition and pluralism.

Arguably, social differentiation offered the most useful element in the paradigm of secularization. It was the analytic core to which the statistical data, for example, the inverse relationship between religious practice and the size of the city, should be related. It also seemed crystal clear that secularization varied enormously. Not only was it very different in North America and Western Europe, both of them modern societies, but it varied also within these cultural areas. Social differentiation and the general statistical tendencies had to be passed through historical filters in a major effort of cross-cultural comparison. I projected this in the European Journal of Sociology in 1969 and completed it in A General Theory of Secularization, published in 1978.¹⁴ The aim was to ground the theory and turn it from an inevitable trend into something that happened in this way, or alternatively, in that according to historical circumstances.

The prime historical circumstance was the difference between those countries, mainly Protestant, where Enlightenment and religion overlapped and even fused, and those countries, mainly Catholic, where Enlightenment and religion clashed. Another crucial historical circumstance was the presence of a religious monopoly or some degree of pluralism. Thus in England and Holland there was some degree of pluralism, and in the USA an even greater pluralism that led to the separation of Church and State. The conclusion that followed from these historical comparisons was that religion flourished most luxuriantly under modern conditions where church and state were separated and where there was religious pluralism and competition. It is true that the original expansion of religion in England with the arrival of religious variety and industrial society was followed in the twentieth century by a decline. This is probably due in the main to the retention of a link between State and Church and of a link between the social élite and the Church. The question is much disputed.

However, there were other major variations on the pattern of secularization. These occurred where the Church and nation fused in a common cause against alien government. The same pattern of cultural resistance aided and infused by religion was observable in micro-nationalisms – Brittany, the Basques and so on. This raised the question whether Eastern Europe, with its pattern of government by Soviet-style dictators ought also to have a rather distinctive pattern. After all, it contained so many countries where religion was the carrier of national culture. Poland offered the pre-eminent example, but the same was true of Romania, as well as Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, western Ukraine, Greece and other countries. Also, the experience of some of those countries under communism had given religion a role as the only possible focus of an independent personal or social existence. On the other hand, there were complicated differences in secularization, for example, between highly secularized Estonia and militantly Catholic Poland, as well as between Romania and Bulgaria.¹⁵ Nothing is simple. Maybe Bulgaria, as a Slavic nation, had imitated the Russian pattern, whereas Romania with its strong Latin traditions had emphasized the union of religion with the defence of its historic culture.

However, a question had to be asked about the impact of social differentiation. That theory implied a break-up of all kinds of monopoly, whether it was of a political ideology or a religion. In the field of religion one would expect a continuing identification between historic churches and national and ethnic identity, but one would also expect the onset of pluralism and the emergence of several denominations. Initially, that would be a shock but it would also help vitalize the religious field by competition. This, indeed, is now happening. The Ukraine, for example, is already a religiously pluralistic society. After all, that development was already massively present in Latin America.

This leads on to the other major variation in Latin America. Initially, Latin America seemed to recapitulate the intense conflict in European Catholic societies, particularly in countries which were virtually European, such as Uruguay. But it became clear that something rather different was happening. First, the secularized radical élites had not succeeded in destroying the spiritual premiss in the lives of ordinary people. But beyond that the Catholic Church had, to some extent, eased itself out of its old alliances and state connections. It had emerged as a popular church, opposed to the National Security State, attacking corruption and identifying itself with the poor. Even more important perhaps was the emergence of massive pluralism, parallel to the pluralism of the USA but generated in the main from within Latin American culture. I tried to cope with this extraordinary development in a book called Tongues of Fire (1990). I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements and Sources
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Orientations
• Part II Europe
• Part III Narratives and Metanarratives
• Part IV Commentary
• Index