Secularization

Secularization, the process by which church and state become separated and by which individuals gradually lose the sense of awe and mystery often associated with religious beliefs. Secularization generally occurs because forces such as urbanization and natural science undermine established community‐based belief systems. In Europe, where royal authority and ecclesiastical power were often allied against emerging forces of rationalism and natural science, battles to secularize political power have been particularly hard fought and perennial. In America, despite the close connections between church and state in the Colonial Era, later political battles over secularization were minor. But while political participation did not involve ecclesiastical requirements, a religious sensibility remained a lively and continuing presence in the minds of Americans.

The initial European settlers in America brought with them a God‐centered vision of the world. In the South, the Jamestown colonists desired both financial profits and conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. In the North, John Winthrop well captured the religious zeal of Puritanism with his proclamation of a “city upon a Hill.” The rhetoric of the Revolutionary War retained much of a Calvinistic theology of sin and redemption. While the First Amendment to the Constitution specifically separated church and state, the Declaration of Independence had invoked a notion of Americans as “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

In late eighteenth‐century America, the strength of religion seemed to be waning, as Enlightenment beliefs transformed God from a majestic, mysterious figure into a passive clock‐maker who had set the universe into motion and then withdrawn. However, in the midst of secularizing forces, Americans remained intensely religious. The Second Great Awakening played a major role in antislavery, temperance and prohibition, and other reforms. Moreover, an impending sense of apocalypse contributed to the political stalemate that led to the Civil War, a conflict that President Abraham Lincoln comprehended in religious terms.

The years after the Civil War brought multiple pressures toward secularization, with massive immigration, urbanization, mobility, demographic changes, and labor movements upsetting traditional beliefs. Many middle‐class Americans found their belief in God compromised by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, advanced in The Origin of Species (1859), with its view of the natural order as an arena of unending chaos and struggle. Yet many Americans resisted the secularizing thrust of evolution and urbanization. Evolutionary theories that invoked the idea of God as a first cause gained popularity because they retained a sense of progress under the direction of divine power. Although the growth of cities had undermined traditional bonds of community, religious reformers attempted to reinvigorate religion in the immigrant cities through revivalism, the social gospel, and Progressive reform.

As immigrants from southern and eastern Europe flocked to America, the ideal of the United States as a religiously homogeneous Protestant nation became increasingly difficult to uphold. In response, many native‐born Protestants reasserted traditional beliefs through politics and culture. Thus, some states banned the teaching of the theory of evolution. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was in part a reaction against the growing secularization of American society. Throughout the 1920s, however, with the power of consumerism and the mass media (radio, magazines, film), Americans increasingly viewed worldly success as a matter of individual initiative, severely distanced from any religious imperatives.

For a time after World War II, the further secularization of American society seemed assured. While large numbers of Americans professed religious belief, the depth of their conviction appeared weak. God could be referred to by an actress, in all seriousness, as “a living doll,” while cultural pluralism, in theory and practice, suggested that religion played an important social rather than spiritual role. Indeed, in The Secular City (1965), the theologian Harvey Cox took it for granted that America had become, once and for all, a secular culture. As he and others later realized, however, such a perception was premature. As the twentieth century ended, religion appeared to grow in strength, while secularization receded. Fundamentalist Protestantism became central to many Americans’ religious lives and political activities. The once neat division between church and state came under attack, as many religious Americans sought to return prayer to public schools. Prophetic Christianity defined the political understanding of both U.S. history and world politics for millions of Americans. A religious sensibility clearly remained vital in American culture, undermining the hypothesis that as a nation becomes more urbanized and mobile, more influenced by mass culture, and more open to the interpretive power of science, it must become more secular. But one component of secularization, the American tradition of a firm separation between church and state, while occasionally bending under pressure, did not appear to be in serious danger.
See also Bill of Rights; Church and State, Separation of; Deism; Education: Rise of the University; Fundamentalist Movement; Great Awakening, First and Second; Modernist Culture; Science: Science and Religion.

Bibliography

James Turner , Without God, without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, 1985.
Paul Boyer , When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, 1992.
George Cotkin , Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900, 1992, pp. 1–26.
Andrew Delbanco , The Death of Satan: How Americans Lost the Sense of Evil, 1995.
Martin E. Marty , Modern American Religion: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960, vol. 3, 1996.

George Cotkin