Secularization is the process by which the sacred gives way to the secular, whether in matters of personal faith, institutional practice, and political power. It involves a transition in which things once revered become ordinary, the sanctified becomes mundane, and the otherworldly loses its prefix. Whereas the term ”secularity” refers to a state of sacredlessness and ”secularism” is the ideology devoted to that state, secularization is a historical dynamic that may occur gradually or suddenly and may be replaceable (if not reversible).
The concept of secularization has been both an organizing theme and a source of contention among scholars of religion since the beginning of the European ”Enlightenment” in the seventeenth century. One might expect an increasing consensus on a matter so long on the scholarly agenda, but discord has crescendoed in recent years. Secularization has taken on different meanings in different camps. It matters whether the reference is to religion’s displacement, decline, or change; to the sacred at the level of the individual, the institution, the community, or the culture; or to a pattern that is long term, linear, and inevitable or short term, cyclical, and contingent.
The object of this essay is to disentangle both the issues and the combatants. After describing the early protagonists and more recent sociological proponents of secularization, this article considers recent arguments against their theses. In the face of a seemingly intractable conflict, it is important to describe the issues in dispute. This will lead to a consideration of secularization and sacralization as opposite phenomena that actually are more mutually linked than mutually exclusive.
EARLY AND RECENT CONCEPTIONS OF SECULARIZATION
Any conception of the sacred is likely to engender skeptical—if often marginal—detractors. While both the process and the thesis of secularization have precursors early in Western history, it was the Enlightenment that provided their first codification.
The term ”secularization” dates back to France in the mid-seventeenth century. The first high priest of this antichurch was the French bourgeois intellectual Voltaire (1694-1778). A professed ”deist” whose belief in impersonal forces stood in sharp contrast to ”theistic” conceptions of a personal God, Voltaire railed against the Catholicism’s superstitions and ecclesiastical trappings (Voltaire 1756). However, Voltaire was not the most materialist figure of his day and he was distinguished more by the expression of his views than by their substance, including his sense that the end of religion was near, possibly in his life time. The main thrust of his views was shared by many Europeans and Americans, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
The prophets of secularization soon multiplied. By the second half of the nineteenth century, they included the father or at least namer of ”sociology,” the French positivist Comte (1852). Comte’s conception of a future that belonged more to the social sciences than to religion was shared by Britain’s Spencer (1874), whose sales rivaled those of Dickens. Marx ([1844] 1963) envisioned a denarcotized future once the masses learned the real secret of their misery, substituted class consciousness for false consciousness, and exchanged otherworldly sighs for this-worldly action.
Weber and Durkheim continued the tradition in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Both provided key statements about the importance of religion: Weber’s ”Protestant ethic” as a precondition of capitalism and Durkheim’s conception of religion as the latent worship of society. However, neither was personally religious, and both envisioned a secularized future without predicting it directly.
For Weber ([1905] 1993), secularization was an implication of the ”rationalization” that was uniquely characteristic of the West. He was ambivalent about the results. On the one hand, he appreciated its cultural underpinnings of everything from capitalism and bureaucracy to architecture and music. On the other hand, he wrote in the tradition of German historiography and a concern for the spirit of every age. Weber lamented a dark side of rationality that would lead to secularized disenchantment. Toward the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he commends the cynical sentiment:
Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved. ([1905] 1993, p. 182) Durkheim worked selectively within the tradition of Comte and French positivism and therefore was more positive about secularization. Durkheim (1961) was optimistic about a secular morality and an autonomous ethic for society. Although religious beliefs would be displaced by science, the sense of society as a sacred collectivity would remain. On the eve of World War I, he described France as undergoing a period of ”moral mediocrity,” but he was certain that it would soon be revitalized through a sense of ”collective effervescence” and sacred renewal, possibly independently of conventional religion (Durkheim 1912).
By the middle of the twentieth century, secularization had become one of the master motifs of the social sciences. It was at least implicit in major transitional distinctions such as Durkheim’s ”mechanical versus organic solidarity” Toennies’s ([1887] 1957) ”Gemeinschaft” versus ”Gesellschaft” societies, and Redfield’s (1953) ”folk” versus ”urban” cultures. At the same time, prophecies had given way to theories as sociology began to develop more nuanced versions of secularization. The 1960s produced a bumper crop of new works, among the most influential of which were Berger’s The Sacred Canopy (1967) and Wilson’s Religion in Secular Society (1966).
Berger dealt with both the rise and the decline of religion. Having described religion’s importance as a source of meaning for a cosmos that is often inchoate, he then noted factors involved in religion’s erosion. These included privatization, pluralism, and a new religious marketplace, all of which contributed to a secularization he defined as ”the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols” (1967, p. 107). Berger did not place all the blame for the decline of religion on external factors. Liberal clergy and theologians were often ahead of the process in diluting religion to avoid conflicts with a secular society.
If Berger’s conception of secularization suggests society pulling away from a still-religious core, Wilson conveys a scenario in which religion recedes to the margins and suffers a diminution of influence. For Wilson, secularization is ”the process whereby religious institutions, actions, and consciousness lose their social significance” (1966, p. xiv). However, Wilson was aware of a profound difference between the declining influence of the established churches and the surging growth of sectarian movements (Wilson 1998): As society becomes more complex, all its institutions become more differentiated from each other and have more autonomy but less influence. However, the process does not occur equally, and traditional institutions such as religion are more affected by these changes. Often seen as part of a larger process of ”modernization,” differentiation has been a prominent theme among functionalists such as Parsons (1977) and Luhmann (1982) and neofunctionalists such as Bell (1976) and Habermas (1988).
Differentiation takes different forms and exacts different tolls. The Belgian scholar Dobbelaere (1981) draws a parallel between secularization and the French term ”laicization,” which Durkheim and others used to denote a loss of priestly control, with a consequent decanonization of religion. While developing the concept for European settings, Dobbelaere draws two sets of distinctions: between the processes of differentiation, decline, and change (1981) and between the levels of the individual, the organization, and the society (Dobbelaere 1985).
By this time, secularization had become a major priority for social scientists examining religion. In analyzing the United States, Fenn (1979) stresses that secularization involves a blurring rather than a sharpening of the boundaries between the sacred and the secular; more recently, Fenn refers to secularization as the ”domestication of charisma” (1993). Meanwhile, the concept is at least a subtheme of Bellah et al. (1985) in a work that depicts the community’s losing struggle with individualism, perhaps the ultimate form of differentiation at the personal level.
Roof and McKinney (1987) describe a similar pattern as a ”new voluntarism” that has displaced old denominational loyalties. Similarly, Wuthnow (1988) notes how other forces of differentiation have shifted religious action away from the denominations and congregations and in the direction of ”special-purpose groups” whose single-issue agendas are often more a reflection of political morality than of religious doctrine or theology. Wuthnow also describes a differentiation between America’s liberal and conservative ”civil religions” and the rise of a third national faith in the form of secular technology.
Finally, Chaves (1993) documents the emergence of differentiated ”dual structures” within denominations. This duality represents a split between declining ”religious” authority and increasing secular ”agency” authority. This formulation is consistent with other traditions of organizational analysis in religion, including the classic distinction between ”sects” and ”churches” and the process by which the purity of sects is compromised by their transformation into accommodating churches.
SECULARIZATION MYTHOLOGIZED
Originally, the detractors of secularization were defenders of the faith. More recently, they have portrayed themselves as critics of a very different faith, which they have played a large role in constructing. Recent years have seen the attribution of a full-blown ”secularization thesis” that is not so much a series of questions for investigation as a definitive answer with all the qualities of an epochal narrative. Here the older eighteenth-century prophetic vision of secularization has been substituted for more recent and less sweeping versions. Secularization is presented as a tenuous article of faith that is suspended between two mythical points. The first point involves the fiction of a deeply and universally religious past; the second involves the conceit of a religionless present and future (Stark 1992). Thus, secularization has been recast as a sweeping saga that serves as a sort of antisacred doctrine, in its own right—though it is important to bear in mind that it is the critics of secularization who have both popularized this version and savaged it.
The British anthropologist Douglas (1982) was among the first to chastise proponents of secularization for imagining a mythical past against which the present inevitably comes up short. In her case, the past involved those simple, undiffer-entiated societies studied by anthropologists but used by others as convenient foils. Thus, even here religious piety and participation are not always deep or universal. If these societies are the beginnings of the neoevolutionary process of modernization, their religion has inconvenient similarities with the religion of complex societies toward the end of the process.
Stark (1998) elaborates this point for early Western societies. To the extent that a secularizing trend depends on a contrast with a pious ancient and medieval Europe, Stark cites evidence suggesting that this past is also mythical. Once one looks beyond the public displays of ecclesiastical officialdom, the masses appear to be antichurch, if not antireligious. Attitudes toward organized faith were conspicuous for their alienation, corruption, and raucousness. Many ”Christian” nations founded in the late middle ages were only inches deep as surface monopolies atop an impious base.
What of the myth of religious demise? Martin (1969) was among the first to find religion in the midst of putative nonreligion, in this case in ”highly secularized” Great Britain. In fact, Martin called for dropping the term ”secularization” because of the confusion it had elicited, though ten years later he adopted the semantic fashion by publishing A General Theory of Secularization (1978).
Stark has also been a relentless critic of the second myth, and he has had company. His book with Finke, The Churching of America (Finke and Stark 1992), uses actual and reconstructed church membership data to argue that the real ”winners” over the past two centuries have been conservative churches while liberal (and more secular) churches have been the ”losers.” Critics note that the work is not without problems; for example, its thesis refers to rates of growth and decline rather than absolute size, and it assumes that membership is a reliable measure of general religiosity over time (Demerath 1992).
Many other scholars have noted the continued vitality of religion in America. Warner’s ”new paradigm” (1993) provides a systematic description of how the American case may differ from the European scene that spawned secularization theory. Meanwhile, Stark has taken his methods and ”market” model of religion abroad. He and the economist Iannaccone (1994) developed a nonmonopolistic, ”supply-side” interpretation of European religion, arguing that its death and secularization have been greatly exaggerated. This argument has had both supporters (Davie 1994; Swatos 1997) and detractors (Bruce 1995; Dobbelaere 1993; Wilson 1998).
Meanwhile, the dispute over secularization is not restricted to the West. In fact, the Western version of the debate is comparatively innocuous because it is confined largely to scholars removed from political conflicts and because the politics of religion has generally been laid to rest except in a few cases, such as the tragic violence in Northern Ireland and the anticlimactic decision of Sweden to sever state ties with the Lutheran Church as of 2000. Once one leaves the West, however (Demerath 2000), assessments of secularization and secularity have become volatile public issues exacerbated by the ideological conflict between forthright pro-and antisecularists.
Moving from Poland and eastern Europe through the remains of the Soviet Union to Afghanistan, from the Balkans through Turkey and into Iran, from Algeria through Egypt to Israel, from Pakistan through India to Sri Lanka, and from Indonesia through China to Japan, one sees countries whose national identities are being defined by a prolonged conflict over secularization (Juergensmeyer 1993). In each case, the struggle involves less one religious group versus another than religion generally versus secular alternatives.
In addition to what might be termed a ”bottom-up” process of seeping secularization, there are instances of a ”top-down” coercive scenario, and the two are not mutually exclusive. The former Soviet Union, Turkey, and China illustrate the latter process through political systems headed by Lenin, Ataturk, and Mao Tse-Tung and their followers, respectively. This structurally imposed secularization had cultural effects as specifically defined state rituals became common alternatives to traditional religious ceremonies. However, in all these countries, traditional religion remains in evidence in the private sphere and occasionally bursts into the public arena.
Although there are examples of externally coerced secularization (e.g., the U.S. insistence on Japan’s abolishing ”State Shinto” after World War II), secularization generally takes a far less direct form. Consider India as a case in point. Over the centuries, the south Asian subcontinent has given the world Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, but from the early sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, it was dominated by outside rulers representing first Islam in the Moghul period and then Christianity under the British ”raj.” When independence was won in 1947, the partitioning of Pakistan and India created two states, one Muslim and the other dominantly Hindu. The religious resorting involved a massive cross-migration as long-time residents of each area moved to the other so that they could live among their coreligionists. The violence that ensued is estimated to have left from 250,000 to 500,000 people dead.
Religious conflict has continued in both areas, but in each case, it is not simply one religion against another but also religion versus secularity.
After independence, India instituted a national government that followed the Western model of a secular and thus religiously neutral state. However, after a half century, a series of violent conflicts between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs have left a cloud over India’s state secularity. In the 1990s, the dominant and secularist Congress Party lost its voting plurality to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Momentum is gathering on behalf of a Hindu state that would reflect the country’s Hindu majority. Nor is the movement confined to right-wing religious zealots. A number of India’s most prominent intellectuals have entered the fray and produced a series of strident exchanges (Nandy 1990; Madan 1998 Beteille 1994). For many people, the commitment to state secularity has ebbed; paradoxically, secularism has been secularized.
FINDING A MUDDLED GROUND
Today it is common to hear that secularization has been categorically ”disproved” and that anyone who still uses the term is more of an ideological antediluvian than an au currant scholar. Yet one must be wary of throwing out the baby with a bathwater both drawn and drained by the critics themselves. And certainly one must always be suspicious of prophets who predict the vindication of their own ideology. Most of the early visionaries of secularization and a disproportionate number of the theorists who have followed have been personally nonreligious, if not necessarily antireligious. At the same time, the ranks of the antisecularizationists have included a number of theorists with personal religious loyalties. Although a scholarly discipline should provide methods to avoid or transcend these biases, history indicates otherwise.
A full review of the empirical literature on the secularization debate is beyond the scope of this article, and it is not feasible to conduct an investigation that would constitute a critical test. However, this is not an issue that can be settled empirically. Statistical arguments will be irrelevant until a series of pressing ideological and conceptual issues are confronted.
One must decide what to test before deciding how to test it. Because the two great myths attributed to the secularizationists by their critics are by their nature overblown, they are not hard to puncture. Debating the matter at such mythical levels lends an all-or-nothing quality to the dispute: Insofar as the thesis fails to document a shift from all to nothing, it is suspect. However, no recent secularization theorists stake their claim in those terms.
It is not difficult to refute the first myth of secular dynamics concerning a seamless and universal religiosity in tribal settings and in the historical past. However, for the past to be more religious, it is not necessary for it to be either consistently or totally so. For a society to have been dominated by religion as political power, it need not have been more religious at the level of the individual and vice versa. Even at that level, of the individual, the past may be more religious in terms of personal piety and belief without necessarily being more religious in terms of formal institutional participation. Also, to say that one group or society’s past was more religious than its present is not necessarily to say that another’s must be the same. Finally, there are multiple pasts, none of which need be linear in their linkages.
Meanwhile, the second myth of secular dynamics is even easier for critics of secularization to deflate. The notion of religion’s actual death and disappearance has shifted from the sublime to the ridiculous, especially in the formulations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures, some of whom foresaw the end in their own lifetimes (Stark 1998). Somehow religion survived the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not to mention the twentieth. Again, however, it is not clear that this is either necessary or sufficient to disprove a more nuanced conception of secularization. Today it is common to reject the concept of secularization simply because religion persists, but mere persistence masks a host of questions concerning religion’s changing terms and circumstances.
The ”secularization thesis” with a mythical beginning and a mythical end is erroneous, but it is a largely noninstructive error akin to ”denying all climatology and the particular hypothesis of global warming because we have not yet been burned to a crisp and the nights do, after all, still get cooler” (Demerath 1998b, p. 9).
Clearly secularization as a textured social process remains a fruitful concept. In fact, once the focus shifts to a less extreme version, the consensus widens considerably. Consider two recent remarks from arch critic Stark:
This refers to a decline in the social power of once-dominant religious institutions whereby other social institutions, especially political and educational institutions, have escaped from prior religious domination. If this were all that secularization means, there would be nothing to argue about. Everyone must agree that, in contemporary Europe, for example, Catholic bishops have less political power than they once possessed, and the same is true of Lutheran and Anglican bishops. . . . Nor are primary aspects of public life any longer suffused with religious symbols, rhetoric, or ritual.
Of course, religion changes. Of course, there is more religious participation and even greater belief in the supernatural at some times and places than in others, just as religious organizations have more secular power in some times and places than in others. Of course, doctrines change-Aquinas was not Augustine, and both would find heresy in the work of Avery Dulles. But change does not equate with decline. (1998, p. 29)
These statements greatly narrow the gap between secularization’s advocates and one key antagonist. For many of the former, Stark’s first passage suggests a battlefield conversion, though it is not a new position for him (Stark and Bainbridge 1985). While the second remark is correct in that change and declension are not identical, the implied invitation to deconstruct the two should be welcomed.
There is little question that secularization has come to connote decline. Whether in its long-range mythical or short-term process form, secularization posits some variant of religious erosion, if not extinction. However, all these versions represent a myopic and one-sided perspective compared to the alternative that follows.
PARADOXES OF SECULARIZATION AND SACRALIZATION
At a time when work on secularization might be expected to yield a consensually validated paradigm (Tschannen 1991), it is far closer to producing a new set of divisive paradoxes. Much of this conflict results from the terms at issue. Both ”secular” and ”sacred” are mutually referential in that each makes a statement about the other. To be secular is to be nonsacred; to be sacred is to transcend and transform the secular. The same is true when one shifts from semantics to social processes. Just as an object must have been sacred for it be subsequently secularized, it must have been secular for it to be subsequently ”sacralized.” Just as secularization marks a decline of the sacred, sacralization denotes an increase in the sacred in one form or another and at one level or another.
However, linking the processes of secularization and sacralization can have paradoxical results. The following eight propositions can serve as examples:
1. Religious revivals and ”great awakenings” require previous eras of religious decline and secular ”naps.” American religious history has been charted in terms of its eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and possibly twentieth-century awakenings (McLoughlin 1978), but an opposite focus has equal merit (May 1949; Erikson 1966; Turner 1985). It is the combination of the two that establishes the basic rhythm of a country’s religious history.
2. Modernization may lead to both secularization and sacralization. The grand narrative of the secularization thesis is that religion beats a steady and linear retreat in the face of mounting modernization. There is considerable truth to this but also some half-truth. This is what Berger referred to in recanting some of his earlier writing on secularization (Berger 1997). Modernization often leads to forms of secularization, but those often spark a sacralizing response—one that uses the means of modernity to protest the ends of modernity. This characterizes ”fundamentalisms” everywhere, whether in the original Christian version in the United States or in the Islamic and Hindu variants around the global girdle of religious extremism. As was noted earlier, many countries demonstrate religion’s continuing presence, but these countries also bear witness to the incursions of secularity as a perceived threat to religious interests. If either religion or secularity were fully dominant in these settings, the conflicts would be obviated.
3. The rise of a vital ”religious marketplace” is evidence of both secularization and sacralization. An increase in religious competition often reflects the decline of religion’s structural monopolies and/or cultural hegemonies. Religious dominations once taken for granted are now subject to doubt and dismissal, yet the new consumer’s mentality may involve more stained-glass window shopping than long-term buying (actually joining a church). The debate over changing patterns of religiosity turns on this point, as does a current dispute over the significance of religious ”switching” in the United States (Demerath and Yang 1998a).
4. Because movements that go against the societal grain often create more friction than do trends that go with it, one must be careful not to mistake the sacred exceptions for the secular rule. It is tempting to interpret the flames of a small religious movement as being more important than the smoking embers of its larger and more secularized context. In the same spirit, one must be wary of confusing growth rates with size. Both have their place, but even small, conservative religious movements with high growth rates may be marginal to the larger population and culture. As an example, see the ”winners” and ”losers” cited by Finke and Stark (1992).
5. Sacred manifestations may reflect secular forces, and vice versa. The relationship between any form of behavior and the motivations behind it is problematic. Standard indicators of religiosity such as civil religious loyalty, church membership, church attendance, and religious belief are all subject to myriad interpretations, not all of which are unambiguously sacred (Demerath 1998a; Haddaway et al. 1993). It may be more the case that the civil is religious than that the religious is civil: Church membership and attendance reflect a variety of sacred and secular meanings that vary across a population and across time, and affirming a religious belief may be less a matter of cognitive conviction than of cultural affiliation and continuity. Even the various ”fundamentalist” movements may not be as uniformly or fanatically ”religious” as they are often portrayed. Many of their members have a predominantly secular agenda that religion legitimizes (Demerath 2000). Similarly, a withdrawal from conventional religious frameworks may coexist with a more privatized faith (see the ”little voice” of the pseudonymous Sheila Larson in Bellah et al. 1985, p. 221). Finally, there are any number of conventionally secular commitments that take on sacred valences for their devotees (see below).
6. Moderate secularization can be a prophylactic against ultimate secularization. Changing social conditions require changing forms of the sacred. Hence, some degree of secularization may serve as a form of sacred adaptation. This has been a tactical assumption in the trajectory of liberal Protestantism over the last century as pastors and theologians have made concessions to their secularizing adherents (Berger 1967; Demerath 1992). This tactic has been challenged by advocates of strict doctrine and strict churches (Kelley 1972; Iannaccone 1994), but cleaving to strictness may have cost the churches far more defections than has the alternative.
7. Secularization and sacralization are engaged in a dialectical oscillation in which each is contingent on and responsive to the other. The presence of one does not necessarily involve the absence of the other. As was noted above, a secularization that goes too far is likely to elicit a sacralizing reaction. Similarly, sacralizing may exceed the bounds of pertinence, propriety, credibility, or convenience in a complex social context. Thus, lapsing and laicization of various sorts result in a secularizing adjustment. Without suggesting that secularization is always balanced by a corresponding sacralization to create a religious equilibrium, one can say that this mutual responsiveness is an important reason why secularization, like a sense of the sacred itself, will always be with us.
8. Focusing on the fate of old forms of religion may deflect attention from new forms of the sacred. An obsession with secularization in the past may preclude an analysis of sacralization in the present and future. Just as conventional religion may not necessarily be sacred, new sources of the sacred are not necessarily religious. Today one hears a good deal of talk about a growing distinction between religion and spirituality and about profound sacred commitments in everything from socialism to sex. Just because they have attained cliche status does not mean that these concepts should be jettisoned as possibilities for deeper investigation.
These eight propositions lead to a series of issues beyond the scope of this article: Does every individual need a sense of a sacred commitment and a regimen that is self-consciously maintained and ritually reinforced? Does every collectivity and society require something similar that is shared among its members? If the answers to these questions are affirmative, what is the relation between the sacredness required and conventional religion on the one hand and more secular sources on the other? To what extent can the sacred reside in high and low culture, moral and ethical convictions, and movements on behalf of political causes, personal identities, and nationalist ambitions? Is it possible to investigate these matters without falling into tautology and teleology? Precisely because these questions are so old, it is time for freshly conceptualized and newly researched answers.
The alternation of secularization and sacralization is a crucial historical dynamic not just for religion but for culture as a whole. Secularization without sacralization is a nearly defining characteristic of putative postmodernity, with its loss of grand narratives and collective bearings. At the other extreme, sacralization without secularization is a similarly defining characteristic of stereotypic premodernity, where the sacred is static and unchallenged. However, it is in historical modernity that secularization and sacralization play off each other in both producing and responding to change. Whether causes or effects, these are critical processes in the world of time as opposed to timelessness.
SUMMARY
The importance of any scholarly issue is revealed in the debates it engenders. By this standard, secularization qualifies as very important indeed. As a matter that seems to defy either empirical or ideological consensus, it has become a kind of Gordian knot for social scientific scholarship on religion.
Clearly, it is possible to construct versions of secularization that are either outrageous or reasonable. It matters greatly how the concept is deployed. For some, it is a prophecy of religious demise, whether a tragic jeremiad or a triumphant anticipation. For others, it is a set of historically and sociologically specified processes that move less linearly and with less certainty through time. For still others, secularization converges with sacralization to form a stream of constantly shifting conceptions and locations of the sacred. Whichever option is at issue, the stakes are high, and the sight of scholars impaled upon them is not uncommon.
