SECULARIZATION

SECULARIZATION . The term secularization came into use in European languages at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, where it was used to describe the transfer of territories previously under ecclesiastical control to the dominion of lay political authorities. The term secularis was already in use, and the distinction between sacred and secular, roughly equivalent to the differentiation of Christian conceptions of the supernatural from all that was mundane or profane, was widely invoked to assert the superiority of the sacred. Furthermore, the church had long distinguished between those priests called "religious" and those designated as secular priests, that is, between those clergy who functioned within a religious order and those who served the wider society. Later, the term secularization was applied in a different, though related, sense, to the dispensation of priests from their vows. The term was applied in even more diverse ways once the concept acquired a more general, sociological connotation in the twentieth century. Sociologists have used this word to indicate a variety of processes in which control of social space, time, facilities, resources, and personnel was lost by religious authorities, and in which empirical procedures and worldly goals and purposes displaced ritual and symbolic patterns of action directed toward otherworldly, or supernatural, ends.

The term was later applied to denote a pattern of social development that earlier sociologists, including Auguste Comte (1798–1857), had already recognized before the term secularization was in general sociological use. In the process thus described, the various social institutions become gradually distinct from one another and increasingly free of the matrix of religious assumptions that had earlier informed, and at times had inspired and dominated, their operation. Prior to this change, social action over a very wide field of human activity and organization (including work, decision-making, social and interpersonal relationships, juridical procedures, socialization, play, healing, and life-cycle transitions) is regulated in accordance with supernaturalist preconceptions. The process of structural differentiation in which social institutions (the economy, the polity, morality, justice, education, recreation, health maintenance, and familial organization) become recognized as distinctive concerns operating with considerable autonomy is also a process in which conceptions of the supernatural lose their sovereignty over human affairs, a pattern broadly identified as secularization. Conceptions of the supernatural are gradually displaced from all social institutions except those specifically devoted to cultivating knowledge about, and maintaining relationships with, the posited supernatural order. While those agencies still seek to influence other areas of social life, they become recognized as separate and increasingly circumscribed religious institutions.

Definitions

This brief discourse already indicates the changing nature of the concept of secularization and the difficulty of providing a fully encompassing definition for it. The concept is distinguishable from secularism, with which it is sometimes confused. Secularization relates essentially to a process of decline in religious activities, beliefs, ways of thinking, and institutions that occurs primarily in association with, or as an unconscious or unintended consequence of, other processes of social structural change. Secularism is an ideology; its proponents consciously denounce all forms of supernaturalism and the agencies devoted to it, advocating nonreligious or antireligious principles as the basis for personal morality and social organization. Secularism may contribute in some degree to processes of secularization, but the evidence, even from officially secularist societies such as those of the former Soviet Union, suggests that it does so only very gradually and much less fundamentally than do broad processes of social structural change such as industrialization and urbanization.

Definitions of secularization are intimately bound to definitions of religion. As long as religion is defined substantively, as beliefs, orientations, attitudes, activities, institutions, and structures pertaining to the supernatural (the definition assumed in this article), it is possible to assess the extent to which religion declines or loses significance for the operation of society. Some sociologists, however, have defined religion in functional terms, that is, as any set of beliefs, ideas, and activities that fulfills certain social functions. (The use of functionalist analysis, which is a standard sociological method, does not, of course, imply commitment to functional definitions; indeed, the combination may produce circular arguments.) Where religion is defined functionally, a wide variety of ideologies and activities that have no reference to the supernatural, to morality, faith, destiny, ultimate meaning, or final purposes, may sometimes be held (by definition) to be religion. Insofar as certain functions are regarded as indispensable for the continuance of society or for its cohesion, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, once functionalist definitions are used, to speak of secularization, since religion is identified by definition with whatever supplies certain indispensable functions. The very discussion of secularization and of the social processes that lead to the decline of supernaturally orientated activities and beliefs implies that a substantive definition of religion is being employed. When reference is made not to religion but to specific religions or religious systems, the definitional problem (itself partly an artifact of the sociological penchant for abstract universalistic concepts) disappears.

The concept of secularization lacks a standard definition. The associated phenomena to which it refers occupy a wide social range. What those phenomena have in common is a pattern of diminishing recourse to supernaturalist explanations, diminishing resources employed for supernatural ends, and diminishing support of agencies or activities that promote relationships with, or dependence on, supernatural forces. Other, somewhat narrower terms that allude to some of the same developments include desacralization, laicization, and dechristianization. Desacralization refers specifically to the loss of the sense of the sacred as it pertains particularly to places, properties, and activities; it has less relevance to religious organization and is less applicable to thought processes. This essentially negative term fails to specify the character of what replaces the dislodged sense of the sacred once sacrality disappears. As a concept, it allows less gradation than does secularization. Laïcisation in French is sometimes used as synonymous with sécularisation, but the English term secularization has a narrower connotation: It refers specifically to the abrogation of priestly offices and functions or to the transfer of certain functions, such as judicial roles, teaching, and social work, to specialists for whom theological qualifications are no longer deemed necessary or appropriate. Laicization refers also to the disavowal of the explicitly sacerdotal claims of religious professionals. Dechristianization is clearly more concerned with the decline of only one religious tradition, particularly in its control of institutional activities. As a term it lacks the ethical neutrality of the term secularization.

Briefly defined, secularization is the process in which religious consciousness, activities, and institutions lose social significance. It indicates that religion becomes marginal to the operation of the social system, and that the essential functions for the operation of society become rationalized, passing out of the control of agencies devoted to the supernatural.

Indices of Secularization

Analysis of social structure will reveal in broad terms to what extent the order and operation of society depend on conceptions of the supernatural and activities related to it; that is, the extent to which a society is secularized. Short of a complete analysis of the social system, various social facts may serve as indications of secularization, although these vary in specificity and relevance from one social and cultural context to another. Broadly, it may be said that the increasing specialization of function and role entailed in structural differentiation has invariably reduced the influence of religion over other social institutions. Religion in the West has generally become merely a department of the social order rather than the pervasive, or even determinant, influence it once was.

One may say that religious consciousness declines as empirical and matter-of-fact attitudes develop. Depictions of the supernatural become increasingly abstract, and its operation is regarded as remote, while individual convictions concerning obligation, dependence, and remorse appear to be less compelling. Recourse to the supernatural declines, whether as a means for the cognitive understanding of the world or for personal emotional support. There is less allusion to God's will as the guide for attitudes, comportment, and action, and resort to prayers or curses is less frequent. Religious symbols lose their vibrancy and meaning, and charms, rosaries, and crosses become largely decorative items, while magic—for example, in the form of popular astrology—becomes a titillating amusement. Everyday life is negotiated by pragmatic attitudes and cause-and-effect thinking.

As religious action (action directed toward the supernatural) is regarded as less effective in relation to worldly experience, so it diminishes in scope and scale. Religious observances cease to be obligatory to members of society and become entirely voluntary; this indicates, at the least, a diminished regard for such practices by state authorities. While the abandonment of obligatory religious practice may eliminate one set of extraneous motivations for religious action, it does not eradicate others; for example, traditional habits of life, conformity with custom, or the search for social prestige may continue as possible extrareligious inducements for participation in religious rituals and collective performances. The same social act, for instance churchgoing, baptism, or religious marriage or burial, may be prompted by different motives and carry widely different meanings in different cultural contexts. However, despite these considerations, church attendance, church memberships, rites de passage, grace at meals, public prayer, pilgrimages, votive offerings, fasting, penances, religious festivals, and church weddings all decline in incidence and in the depth of their sacrality.

To be significant in modern society, religion must be public and organized, a potential resource for all collective and public concerns, influencing the social system to operate in conformity with religious principles and with due regard to the supernatural. In the early evolution of modern societies, religious institutions occupied just such a position, but that influence has waned everywhere throughout the Christian West. This loss of social significance is manifested most explicitly in the diminishing proportion of social resources (taken, for instance, as a proportion of the gross national product) devoted to religion and to the maintenance of the personnel and property that serve supernaturalist goals. Labor, energy, skill, wealth, and time are increasingly employed for other than supernatural ends. Relative to population, the number of churches declines, as does the number of religious functionaries. The monetary remuneration and social status of clergy diminish relative to those of other professions. Ancillary agencies (schools, colleges, hospitals, social welfare facilities) pass from religious to lay, secular, and state control.

The application of the concept of secularization to society at large has an analogue in the process of change occurring within religious institutions per se. Not only is the wider society less influenced by religion, but religious institutions and behavior are themselves increasingly influenced by values and standards that prevail in the secular society. As society increasingly orders its affairs in accordance with technical and scientific criteria, religious institutions themselves are affected. The sacramentalist and sacerdotal orientations of religion become less congruous with the assumptions of everyday life, and the tendency in religious performance is for the distance between sacred and secular to diminish. The special language of liturgy is changed to accommodate secular understanding, organization is increasingly rationalized, economies of scale are sought through ecumenism, and activities necessarily adjust in duration, scheduling, style, and tenor to accommodate external secular constraints and preferences. Church leaders become less certain about the nature of the supernatural, less committed to dogma or the formal creeds to which on induction they subscribe, and increasingly devote themselves to good works, general moral exhortation, community activities within their congregations, fund raising for their churches, and occasional commentary on political issues. This pattern of change has been designated as the internal secularization of the churches.

Secularization as a Historical Process

Secularization has occurred throughout history, unevenly but in a broadly discernible pattern. In preliterate societies, apprehensions that may be considered supernaturalist were both ubiquitous and inextricably intermingled with empirical knowledge and rational techniques. Explanation invoked superempirical entities, social goals were confused with symbolic acts, and magical means were intermixed with pragmatic procedures. Steadily, the process, which Max Weber designated die Entzauberung der Welt ("the disenchantment of the world"), drained natural phenomena of their magico-religious meaning as people acquired more matter-of-fact, positivistic orientations.

In this analysis, magic may be subsumed with religion under the general rubric of supernaturalism; indeed, the establishment of a distinction between them may in itself be regarded as one aspect of the process of secularization. The development of monotheistic religions involved the rationalization and systematization of conceptions of the supernatural. This process, very evident in the history of Judaism, steadily extinguished the preexisting plethora of random, local magical ideas and local deities; it introduced a more universalistic spirit, made religious apprehensions ethical, and gradually established a coherent conception of an increasingly transcendent and universal deity. The monotheistic religions were themselves agencies of rationalization, and hence, insofar as they reduced the belief in supernaturalism, they were agencies of secularization. Magical beliefs and practices were not immediately eradicated; they sometimes persisted as subterranean currents reappearing periodically. Judaism and Protestantism were generally more effective secularizing agencies than Roman Catholicism, for although all three formally excoriated magic and folk belief, and sought to disseminate orderly, internally consistent teachings and practices, the Roman Catholic Church sometimes countenanced, absorbed, or accommodated pagan elements.

It is sometimes objected that to regard secularization as a cumulative, long-term historical trend necessarily implies the existence at some unspecified time of an unparalleled age of religious faith. Against this implication, it is argued that Christian history reveals the recurrent complaints of clerical authorities about unbelief, laxness in religious observances, and a variety of contingent derelictions. The historical evidence cannot be denied, but religiosity should not be equated with Christianity. Paganism and heresy were often indicted in the complaints about laxity, but these are manifestations not of the secularity of society but rather of its religiosity. Further, church religion and attendance are only two among many indicators of relative secularity; they intimate nothing either of religious consciousness or of the significance of religion (and its institutions) for the operation of the social system. As long as supernaturalist conceptions (of whatever sort) were effective in everyday life, or as long as religious institutions were sustained by the secular authorities and fulfilled functions as agencies of legitimation, official ideology, and social control, society had not yet experienced any radical modern process of secularization.

In recent Western history, dissociation of religious and political institutions, seen most conspicuously in the separation of church and state (now generally effective despite vestigial links that persist, for example, in England, Scotland, and the Scandinavian countries), implies the secularization of society. At times, ethnic and regional minorities have reinforced their distinctive identity and their political dissent by reasserting religious differences (as in Northern Ireland throughout this century, as in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, or, much less dramatically, as in the Netherlands). In this same manner, societies in which religion has been associated with national independence have found religion to be a conveniently available means of rallying opposition to politically oppressive regimes (as in Communist Poland). Religion may, then, become a form of surrogate politics, but the continuing vigor of religion in such circumstances is artificially sustained by the prevailing political, ethnic, or regional situation. Where no such conditions prevail, the general course of secularization results in the increasing separation of religion from other institutions, most rapidly and markedly from those on which societal arrangements depend (law, politics, economics, and, eventually, education) and more slowly from those rooted in local community life (marriage, the family, and personal morality).

Against the dominant trend, there are occasional revivals of religion. What such movements achieve has not always been contrary to secular tendencies. Reform movements that seek to purge religion of cultural, traditional, or superstitious accretations may be almost explicitly secularizing in their impact. Even religious revivals that seek a return to what are taken to be pristine ideas and single-minded dedication may have the incidental consequences of eliminating elements of folk religiosity, of widening the gap between religion and other social institutions, of more narrowly specifying religion's social role, and of encouraging privatization by emphasizing personal piety. Reform movements such as Renaissance Humanism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Deism, and Unitarianism were all secularizing forces within Christianity, purging faith and practice of immanentist conceptions of deity, progressively applying the canons of reason to doctrine, and reducing mystical, miraculous, sacramental, and sacerdotal claims. Revivalism, recurrent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Christendom (in Methodism, Holiness movements, and Pentecostalism, for example), ostensibly sought to enhance individual emotional commitment and certainly not to put religion to the test of rationality. Yet, expressive religiosity also came to demand discipline and order. When such movements, unencumbered by traditional liturgy and ritual, sought to socialize and organize their followings, they tended to do so by systematic rational procedures, sometimes adapting these from the secular society. Worship assumed forms closer to everyday styles, and the emphasis on subjective awareness, rather than on the supposed objective power of external ritual forms, led to a systematic demand for sustained and calculable performances from individual members. Arcane elements were replaced by goal-oriented methods of propaganda, mission, education, and mobilization. The demand for consistency, methodical regularity, and self-sustained individual responsibility conformed fully to the nature of demands being made in the context of secular employment. Even revivalist religion channeled secularizing tendencies into sections of the population as yet unso-cialized.

Contemporary Manifestations

Just as religious institutions have ceased to be central in society, and just as society no longer endorses religious goals as its primary ends, so religious consciousness, although less visible as a phenomenon, appears also to have diminished. These different aspects of religiosity reveal varying degrees of persistence. Thus, the formal civic representation of the church in public life is more evident in societies, such as England, with established national churches than in the United States or Germany. Religious schools are more numerous in France and in Belgium (where state and church institutions are alternatives in many departments of social organization) than in England or the United States. Church attendance is significantly higher in North America than in northern Europe, and church membership in the United States is significantly higher than in England. Such national variations reflect different patterns and degrees of secularization. They do not predicate specific consequences (such as, for instance, a growth of atheism) or a determinate loss in church affiliation or in religious observance, even though these consequences often occur. Nor do they preclude the endurance of enclaves of persisting spirituality or the emergence of new expressions of religious commitment. The patterns vary and, despite other indicators of secularization, spiritual survivals and new religious initiatives do occur.

Even so, none of these manifestations of religiosity refutes the evidence of general secularization. Indeed, as religion loses significance in the public arena, it may expected that it will appear correspondingly more conspicuous in private life, commitment becoming more distinctive as it becomes more exceptional. Again, in some societies, involvement in church life may fulfill cultural or social functions little related to intrinsic religiosity, and its persistence at relatively high levels of participation (for example, in the United States) may relate more to traditions of voluntarism, the need for community identity, or a generalized search for surrogate national ideology than to the societal, or even the personal, significance of religious faith. Numerous new religious movements have emerged in recent decades, and these may even be seen as a response to general secularization: Because they provide meaning, purpose, association, and support for particular sections of the population, their appearance testifies to the inadequacy, irrelevance, or ineffectiveness of the mainstream churches, at least for this particular clientele. Given the traditional exclusivism of Christianity, religious pluralism, to which these new movements are conspicuous testimony, occurs only where secularization is relatively far advanced.

Causes

To unravel completely the complex tissue of causal agencies contributing to secularization would be tantamount to reconstructing the entire web of social history. Any trend as pervasive and persistent in the course of human affairs as this one must be extensively related to all other facets of social change. This article has noted the way in which conceptual order was developed and rationalized within the evolution of religion itself. Intellectuals (who themselves were often religious functionaries) were responsible for early secularization, but the initial marginalization of all supernaturalism is attributable to a deepening and more reflective apprehension of the natural order. The beginnings of science and, more generally, the development of empirical inquiry, detachment in observation and experimentation, and the sensed need for ordered, general concepts (incipient universalism) introduced new assumptions about nature and society. The rational and systematic coordination of empirical knowledge led both to the confutation of received supernaturalist conceptions and to an enhanced awareness of humankind's own capacity to harness nature and to organize its own economic and social well-being. Eventually, skepticism became steadily institutionalized in science, providing an implicit challenge to untested and untestable hypotheses, even though many early scientists such as Roger Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and Michael Faraday were persons whose thought encompassed both rationalist and mystic concerns.

The application of science, particularly to productive activities, and the evolution of new techniques reduced humans' sense of dependence on the divine. As society became industrialized and urbanized, increasing proportions of the population came to live their lives and make their livelihoods in ways more removed from nature. The possible intervention of the supernatural into everyday life became less plausible except in the interstices of social organization, that is, in marginal pursuits and interests, and even here only for the minority. New ways of thinking evolved as humans came to inhabit an environment that was progressively more and more a product of their own making. Magical, mystical, and metaphysical patterns of thought became steadily less congruous, particularly in all manifestly functional activities, which are governed by well-articulated structures of specific roles. Humanity's increased capacity to assess and supply its own needs led to the assumption that social well-being depended not on God's providence but on social planning. Whereas in earlier epochs the past had dominated the present—a past sacralized by the supposedly timeless truths of religion—modern society was future-oriented, and that future was mundane and material, no longer the future of postmortem salvation in some supraterrestrial existence.

Social and geographic mobility, which occurred with increasing intensity in order to accommodate the productive demands and distributive rewards of technological society, promoted individualism and detached people from the stable communal contexts and the settled order of past generations in which religious predilections had themselves been rooted. Simultaneously, social organization became less dependent on the local community. The role-articulated social system necessarily made human beings into its calculable parts, while the social environment, following the natural environment before it, became increasingly human-made. Its rational structures elicited, through the role system, rational patterns of instrumental and impersonal action and neutralized, in relations with others, those personal, affective dispositions that religion had traditionally sought to summon and sustain. Eventually, even personal and intimate relationships became invaded by impersonal techniques—for example, in the matter of birth control—so that issues once thought to be very much in the realm of the sacred became matters of rational, calculated planning. Thus, the wider course of social change produced secular contexts and induced patterns of rational social action, as well as changes in individual consciousness that expunged ideas and assumptions about the supernatural and its derivative dispositions.

Secularization in Other Contexts

Secularization is a Western concept descriptive principally of a process that has occurred in Western society, most conspicuously during this century. Certainly, all the world religions in some degree disciplined and systematized immanentist conceptions and magical apprehensions and practices, but they did so with varying persistence and effectiveness. Hinduism and Buddhism, unlike Judaism and Christianity, absorbed or tolerated more primitive supernaturalism rather than excluding or eradicating it. Islam, although theoretically even more rigorously monotheistic than Christianity, lacked effective centralized organization with which to regulate local magical dispositions, which have widely persisted in Muslim societies into the present day. The long-term historical processes favoring secularization—the extension of rational principles to all areas of social life—were less intense and persistent in the Middle East and in Asia. Nonetheless, as industrialization occurs in developing societies, similar pressures accumulate toward the routinizing and rationalizing of work roles, social relationships, and the framework of social and civic order. Technological development brings similar consequences by reducing the significance of religion for the operation of the social system. Yet, since so many local manifestations of immanentist religiosity persist in these contexts, the paradox of a close juxtaposition of overtly magical practices alongside sophisticated industrial techniques is often found. The course of secularization follows a different path and occurs in different sequence from that familiar in the West.

In Latin America, profound religious changes have occurred with the still incipient process of technologization, and developments that were sequential in Europe have been contemporaneous on that continent. Thus, in recent decades there has been a rapid spread of Protestantism (apparently still carrying many facets of the work ethic); political radicalization has occurred (affecting the Roman Catholic church in significant respects); some separation of the Roman Catholic church from the dominant political structure has been effected; and quasi-magical movements (such as Umbanda and Kardecism in Brazil) have significantly rationalized their teaching and organization. Supernaturalism is being relocated within the social system by diverse patterns of change of a secularizing kind.

Some Islamic countries (e.g., Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia) have undergone considerable secularization, but in others (e.g., Iran) the resurgence of fundamentalist movements indicates the strains accompanying this process and the extent to which, in the least sophisticated sections of society, religious dispositions can still be mobilized against modernization. A religion in which a specific and concrete system of law occupies so important a place cannot but find itself compromised by the exigencies of modern life. A similar situation, which is a source of conflict between orthodox and liberal (or nonreligious) parties, prevails in Israel, a secular state in which religion retains a unique ideological significance as the locus for a people so often exiled from its mythically promised land. In both Islam and Judaism, religiously enjoined behavior is subject to growing challenge from certain indispensable elements of a modern social system: a rational framework of law (both as an agency of social control and as a regulative instrument for contract); a systematic use of economic incentives and deterrents (whether through a free market or by socialist controls); the use of education to disseminate empirical knowledge, inculcate pragmatic attitudes, and teach rational procedures; and a political system concerned with economic well-being rather than with the implementation of religious principles. Nor is private life exempt from such challenges; for example, a prerequisite of rational social organization, in contradiction of Muslim and Jewish assumptions of male superiority, is equal rights for men and women, an idea that affects such matters as divorce, birth control, custody of children, remuneration for work, and even such customary matters as dress and comportment.

If secularization implied that what had decayed was necessarily a well-integrated and coherent religious tradition, then it might be maintained that this term was inappropriate to Japan, where diverse, loosely related, symbiotic religious traditions never constituted anything remotely equivalent to the "age of faith" of Christian Europe. Nonetheless, it is apparent from the plethora of its traditional magico-religious practices that Japan was eligible for secularization. The Japanese social system operates with only token reference to supernatural assumptions: The emperor is no longer divine. Most Japanese are only loosely attached to Buddhist temples or Shintō shrines. Ancestor worship has sharply declined in recent decades, and in the homes of young people, both the god-shelf (kamidana ) and the memorial altar (butsudan ) have become less common. Japan's technological advance has been so rapid, however, that magico-religious dispositions are still far from eclipsed; various magical practices continue in healing, fortune-seeking, and propitiatory acts, some of them institutionalized by the temples or in new religious movements. These phenomena occupy the interstices of institutional life, but they are as little accommodated to the increasingly rational socioeconomic order as is the Confucian precept of filial piety, which, today, is challenged by the premium that modern technology puts, not on age, but on youth.

In the largely village-centered society of India, religious dispositions remain perhaps more powerful than in most other parts of the world, even if they have less hold in the centers of population and industry. In a society with such strong religious and mystical traditions, the secularizing effects of social change are slow. Even so, the state now stands above religious particularism, declares itself to be a secular state, and has acted against religious tradition in official disavowal of the caste implications of Hinduism. Nor is secularization very apparent in Africa, where christianization and islamization are still proceeding and magic is far from displaced. If the term is to be applied to Africa, it must refer to a relatively early stage of a long-term historical process. Even among the dominant social strata in African states, not everyone has renounced magic, but as the echelons of technical and administrative personnel proliferate, education and experience of urban life are likely to make bush witchcraft less common. Christianity is still growing and still plays a significant role in various institutional spheres, particularly education and health, despite secularization of facilities by some states. Churches remain a powerful focus of voluntary allegiance and provide important links between local, poorly organized communal life and the incipient secularized societal system.

See Also

Modernism; Modernity; Politics and Religion; Society and Religion.

Bibliography

There is an extensive, chiefly sociological, literature on various aspects of secularization and diffuse and scattered comment in the general literature on contemporary religion and society. For a comprehensive overview, see the "trend report" and bibliography by Karel Dobbelaere, "Secularization: A Multi-Dimensional Concept," constituting the entire issue of Current Sociology 29, no. 2 (Summer 1981). For theoretical discussions, see Richard K. Fenn's Towards a Theory of Secularization (Storrs, Conn., 1978) and his "The Process of Secularization: A Post-Parsonian View," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 9 (Summer 1970): 117–136. See also Niklas Luhmann's Funktion der Religion (Frankfurt, 1982). An account of secularization in diverse cultural and political contexts is provided in David Martin's A General Theory of Secularization (New York, 1978). Various facets are treated in the volume edited by Phillip E. Hammond, The Sacred in a Secular Age (Berkeley, Calif., 1985).

Secularization is a subject of controversy. For approaches that challenge the secularization thesis, see Talcott Parsons's "Christianity and Modern Industrial Society," in Sociological Theory, Values, and Sociocultural Change, edited by Edward A. Tiryakian (New York, 1963); and Thomas Luckmann's "Theories of Religion and Social Change," Annual Review of the Social Sciences of Religion 1 (1977): 1–28. A range of controversial opinions and a debate is found in The Culture of Unbelief, edited by Rocco Caporale and Antonio Grumelli (Berkeley, Calif., 1971); and La Secolarizzazione, edited by Sabina S. Acquaviva and Gustavo Guizzardi (Bologna, 1973).

For non-Western countries, see The Protestant Ethic and Modernization: A Comparative View, edited by S. N. Eisenstadt (New York, 1968); Ethel Dunn and Stephen P. Dunn's "Religious Behaviour and Socio-Cultural Change in the Soviet Union," in Religion and Atheism in the U. S. S. R. and Eastern Europe, edited by Bohdan R. Bociurkiw and John W. Strong (Toronto, 1975); Tamaru Noriyoshi's "The Problem of Secularization: A Preliminary Analysis," Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6 (March–June 1979): 89–114; and Cultural Identity and Modernization in Asian Countries (Tokyo, 1983), published by Kokugakuin University.

New Sources

Barker, Eileen, James Beckford, and Karel Dobbelaere, eds. Secularization, Rationalism, and Sectarianism: Essays in Honor of Bryan R. Wilson. New York, 1993.

Bruce, Steve. God Is Dead: Secularization in the West. Religion in the Modern World series. Malden, Mass., 2002.

Crimmins, James, ed. Religion, Secularization and Political Thought. London, 1989.

Dobbelaere, Karel. "Towards an Integrated Perspective of the Processes Related to the Descriptive Content of Secularization." Sociology of Religion 60 (1999): 229–247.

Fenn, Richard, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion. Malden, Mass., 2001.

Smith, Christian, ed. The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflicts in the Secularization of American Life. Berkeley, 2003.

Starck, Rodney. "Secularization, RIP." Sociology of Religion 60 (1999): 249–273.

Bryan R. Wilson (1987)

Revised Bibliography