secularization

secularization A term used to describe a decline of the prestige and power of religious belief, practice, and institutions. During the earlier twentieth century it appeared to be an unstoppable process in Europe, triggered by: (a) industrialization and the failure of the Churches to recognize the spiritual needs of rapidly expanding new communities; (b) the partiality of a Church towards unpopular and repressive hierarchical structures, e.g. the support given by the Roman Catholic hierarchy to Franco's authoritarian regime in Spain and the Fascist Vichy regime in France; (c) the experience of World War I, which was particularly disillusioning e.g. for pacifist Nonconformists in the UK; (d) the emergence of a new kind of critical theology. As churchgoing and traditional religious practice declined, there was an increased interest in other forms of mysticism and spirituality.

Of the traditional Christian denominations, the Roman Catholic Church was better able to withstand the process of secularization than most Protestant denominations, mainly owing to the careful combination of doctrinal conservatism and exemplary adaptation to the changing social and cultural needs of society. As this balance was increasingly difficult to maintain in the more liberal Western societies from the 1960s, Catholic church attendance began to decline, though in many developing countries it continued to prosper. Among other (non-Christian) religions, secularization has manifested itself in the foundation of secular states in countries where one particular religion is socially and culturally predominant, such as in Egypt and Turkey. In recent years, secularization has been halted or even reversed in some instances by fundamentalist movements, which have been particularly successful in the case of Islamic fundamentalism. Thus, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 managed to transform a secular state into a theocracy, while the majority of secular Arab states, not least Turkey itself, have been put under threat by the growth of fundamentalist movements. Within Christianity, secularisation has been particularly pronounced on the European continent. Elsewhere, Christianity has remained strong, even though there was some shift away from established religions to more independent evangelical denominations.