Secularization

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SECULARIZATION.

RELIGION AND MODERNITY
FEATURES OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY SECULARIZATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Before the French Revolution the term secularization had a precise meaning in Catholic usage, where it denoted a change in status as a result of which a person or thing passed from the sacred to the profane. Only later was the word used—in a sense first acquired in North America—to designate a set of tendencies affecting relations between church, state, and society. Thereafter secularization and its French, Italian, and German cognates took on many connotations. Broadly speaking, secularization meant the "disenchantment of the world," to use Max Weber's expression. In other words, it embraced all those processes in the intellectual, social, political, legal, or ethical spheres that tended to create greater independence relative to religion by invoking modernity and relativizing the role of suprahuman or supernatural agency. It is important to note, however, that this does not mean that secularization was antireligious: rather, its spread resulted not in the eviction of religion from European history but merely in a change in its place.

RELIGION AND MODERNITY

Religion in no way disappeared at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe. A first wave of secularization even made it clear that religion and modernity were not necessarily at odds. The German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), and later the German scholar Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), revealed the links between the Reformation, economic modernity, and social progress. Reform, far from cultivating the past or nostalgically embracing an unchanging tradition, was called on to transform the world. In parallel fashion, a movement developed within Catholic culture that sought to abandon intransigence toward modernity and embrace the nation-state, democracy, and liberalism. There was a strong feeling, in short, that Christianity, instead of resisting the modern world, could become an agent of it that was preferable to non-Christian alternatives such as materialism. It was thus possible, by the eve of the First World War, to discern secularizing movements within the Christian religion itself. In France, for instance, where in 1905 the state had detached itself from the churches and no longer recognized them formally, members of minority faiths—Protestants and Jews—tended to support the legislation. As for the Catholics, there was deep condemnation of the end of the Concordat, or agreement between church and state, by the Holy See and the clergy, but there were others who supported the Law of Separation of 1905, the foundation of the secular French system. These dissidents made two arguments: first, that this secularization of the state gave their church more freedom, and, secondly, that the institution's new place in society would inspire renewed militancy among the faithful.

Such considerations have led some historians to view secularization as a two-pronged movement: on the one hand, it implied a religious mutation in society, which is to say a change in a given society's relationship to religion; and on the other hand it meant that religions themselves were affected as they accepted the pressure to adapt to the secularization and modernization of society at large and even to undertake some measure of "internal secularization" (Rémond). In the 1980s, the French philosopher Marcel Gauchet offered a hypothesis, considered far-reaching by some and risky by others, according to which Christianity (meaning Roman Catholicism and Protestantism—the Orthodox Church, like Islam, being a separate issue) was itself a motor of the modern. One reason among others was that it embodied secularizing and transformative forces tending, precisely, to "disenchant the world." In Gauchet's account, history will eventually come to view Christianity as "the religion that pointed the way out of religion."

This approach has been at least partially thrown into doubt by reiterated claims that, if not religion per se, then at least religiousness enjoyed a renaissance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Reviving an idea first mooted over a century ago by the French sociologist É mile Durkheim (1858–1917), sociologists and historians have evoked a permanent presence of religious phenomena in contemporary society, while at the same time stressing the difficulty of pinpointing them in view of secularization's dual impact—that on religious faiths and that on society in general. From this point of view religion is said to have taken new forms, less visible, more highly diluted within the social body, and capable of colonizing realms seemingly far removed from religion, such as sports or the ecology movement. The idea is that once secularization has occurred, religion undergoes a series of metamorphoses, but continues to play its part in the social construction of everyday life and continues to render parts of life sacred.

Other authors, while dropping the claim that organized religion has a pivotal social function, have nonetheless stressed those features of religious belief systems that have survived two centuries of secularization. In some cases such features have succeeded in exercising great influence in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century; examples would be evangelical movements or the congregations of "churchless" believers. Evangelicals and devotees of television preachers reflect trends of American provenance initiated in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. And—again as in the United States—Europe is experiencing a proliferation of philosophico-religious, existential, and charismatic groups promising adepts personal self-fulfillment.

Such groups do not always enjoy good relations with ensconced religious authorities. The same may be said, as well, for the various intransigent and fundamentalist versions of Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Islam. Within all these major faiths, dissident or radical tendencies have arisen that appeal to the double authority of tradition and scripture. Fundamentalisms built on such foundations demand that secularization be resisted, that the sole authority should be that of sacred texts, and that the state and society should likewise comply with their teachings. This is the basis, for example, of the French Catholic fundamentalism of Monseigneur Marcel Lefebvre (1905–1991), as it is of the Islamic fundamentalism of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF), whose constituency is Belgian and Swiss as well as French.

FEATURES OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY SECULARIZATION

Such orientations, however, run counter to the historical progression of secularization in the twentieth century, the main features of which are worth recalling. First of all, with respect to the triangular relationship between state, church, and society, the twentieth century was characterized by a continual rearrangement of the links between states and the religious faiths practiced within their borders. The general tendency in Europe had two aspects. On the one hand, states gradually wrested law, customary practices, science, public offices, and the formal acts of private life from the control and regulation of religious institutions. On the other hand, again in a gradual way, they gave up intervening in internal church affairs. Exception must be made for the recent past of countries where the church is an established one (as in Great Britain) or a state institution (as in Prussia, Denmark, or Finland). In eastern Europe, the autocephalous Orthodox churches were long the creature of state power, used to assert national identity, and this has left traces still readily discernible at the beginning of the twenty-first century in Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. So far as social mores are concerned, secularization produced great changes, including the continual spread of civil marriage, divorce, secular schooling, the liberalization of common law, contraception, legal abortion, equitable treatment for different religious faiths, the emancipation of women, and the extension of marital rights to sexual minorities.

In parallel with such trends, the churches have come to accept freedom of choice in religious affiliation—a shift reflected, for example, by the Second Vatican Council. They have adopted similar positions on schooling, and considerably softened their attitudes toward the divorced and the unmarried. Meanwhile, though, they have received substantial guarantees of autonomy from the state, especially with respect to the management of their own affairs. In this last respect, the negative experience of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes continues to exert an influence.

The effects of secularization on the social realm are pointed up most strikingly in two ways. First, by the continuing decline in religious practice, especially among the young: in 2000, 70 percent of Germans under thirty stated that they had no religious affiliation. Second, by a dilution of religious beliefs within society as a whole: sociological studies at the end of the twentieth century found that in many European countries, with respect to such articles of faith as the devil, hell, angels, or purgatory, the position of believers, whether practicing Christians or not, and that of people stating no religious affiliation were tending to become indistinguishable; similarly, the values invoked by both groups in connection with their individual lives were very similar, and derived from religious traditions. One author has described this phenomenon as a "privatization of the Ten Commandments."

In response to the constitution proposed for the European Union in 2005, representatives of the Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches, while supporting the idea in general, deplored the absence of any explicit reference to Christianity. They nevertheless acknowledged that the values espoused in the document's preamble and charter of rights bore the clear stamp of Christian values. Jewish or Muslim leaders could undoubtedly have made a similar claim. Secularization has thus led to a blunting of claims that Europe is a Christian project, while diffusing Judeo-Christian values throughout the Continent.

See alsoCatholicism; Islam; Jews.