SECULARIZATION

Hartmut Lehmann

In his famous speech "Intellectual Labor as a Profession," delivered in Munich on 7 November 1917 and subsequently published as Science as Vocation in 1919, Max Weber explained that increasing intellectualization and rationalization, the hallmarks of the modern world, had caused not only the growth of science but also that of disenchantment (Entzauberung). In his 1954 Cambridge inaugural lecture, "De descriptione temporum" (Description of the course of the ages), C. S. Lewis spoke eloquently of the "un-christening" of Europe as a fundamental process of change that had occurred sometime between the age of Jane Austen and his own time and that surpassed the kind of change Europe had undergone "at his conversion," or, as he called it, the "christening." As a result, Lewis considered most of his contemporaries "post-Christian."

Weber introduced the term "disenchantment" as a synonym for "secularization," and Lewis used the term "un-christening" for the same phenomenon. Historically the roots of the term "secularization" are the Latin noun saeculum, which translates as "age," "epoch," or "century," and the Latin adjective saecularis, which means "long-lasting," that is, lasting for a whole century. In the Middle Ages, under the influence of the theology of St. Augustine, the meanings of saeculum and saecularis became more specific. Both terms were applied mainly to worldly or secular matters as opposed to the realm of the spiritual and the divine. As a result, "to secularize" began to mean to liberate certain areas of life from the influence of the church, of the clergy, of theology, or of an attachment to the divine. With these different and in some aspects vague meanings, the term "secularization" was used in a special sense to describe the transfer of property from ecclesiastical to civil possession. Specifically the term represented the view that public education and other matters of civil policy should be conducted without the introduction of religious elements or theological considerations. Moreover, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries "secularization," in many similar linguistic variations, became an integral part of western European languages.

In the course of the twentieth century, "secularization" acquired new and specific meanings as it was linked to specific theories of modernization. As the terms used by Weber and Lewis indicate, "secularization" joined a distinct group of terms that try to define and describe the various aspects of the liberation of modern science from theology, modern ethics from the Ten Commandments, and therefore modern lifestyles from Christian tradition—in short, the modern world from a world shaped and governed by the teachings and examples found in the Old and New Testaments.

Many synonyms for secularization are closely related to terms that attempt to define the opposite. Therefore, the concept of secularization includes "sacralization." Accordingly, terms such as "christianization" or "rechristianization" are linked to the notion of "dechristianization," a term mainly used in modern French scholarship. "Anticlericalism" is a special term for opposition to the clergy, mainly within Catholicism, and "profanity" is a special word for disrespect for God and things holy. Furthermore, the verb "demythologize" characterizes skepticism vis-à-vis all things religious, and related verbs are "deconfessionalize," "despiritualize," and "desacralize." Terms describing the forces opposed to secularization include "revival," "awakening," "spiritual awakening," and "reawakening."

ORIGINS OF SECULARIZATION

The respective range of the synonyms for secularization has no precise definition, and to complicate matters further, the terms have somewhat different meanings in the various western European languages. This is true even for "secularization" itself, which cannot be translated into French or German without an additional specification of the precise meaning.

The rapidly changing scholarship on the processes of modernization in the fields of sociology, economics, and history accounts for the difficulty in defining secularization. For a scholar like Weber at the beginning of the twentieth century, secularization or disenchantment was mainly a topic of intellectual history; but research later in the twentieth century located the processes, causes, variations, and consequences of secularization in the everyday lives of common people as well as in economics and politics. What had been a problem of intellectual history, that is, the philosophy and the literature of the cultural elite, was transformed into a problem of the history of behavior and mentalities of all social strata. In the same manner, what had been defined as a matter related to theology and the church only became a matter of religiosity in a wider sense.

Interesting debates about the nature and the meaning of secularization emerge. First, where are the beginnings of this process? Leaving aside the view that Europe was never fully christianized in the early Middle Ages and remnants of a pre-Christian worldview were present in European society throughout the Middle Ages, two main theories address the origins of the secularization of Europe. Some scholars have argued that the Western world started to become more secular during the Renaissance, particularly in relation to Renaissance court life, the rise of modern science in the era of Francis Bacon, and the rapid changes in economic development, technology, and warfare in the Thirty Years' War. According to this view secularization commenced in the late sixteenth century, but other scholars have pointed to the eighteenth century and the enormous impact of the Enlightenment. For them secularization was caused by the new philosophical outlook propagated by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and Voltaire, by new secular subjects introduced into university curricula, and by political theories that advocated the basic rights of the people over the divine right of kings. The first to argue explicitly that the modern world began in the eighteenth century was the theologian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch, a friend and colleague of Weber at Heidelberg. In the years before 1914, almost all scholars, German and non-German alike, were convinced that Martin Luther and the Reformation had led the way to the modern world. Much to their dismay, Troeltsch insisted that the Middle Ages had lasted well into the eighteenth century and that it was the Enlightenment that had brought about the decisive change.

The causes and chronology of secularization are further complicated by the vantage point of social history. While the rise of science had some impact on popular views of religion even during the eighteenth century, other developments also competed with religious concerns. Thus growing interest in material consumption could be part of a popular secularization process. But other developments, like increased sexual activity, did not, in the minds of those who participated, necessarily indicate a renunciation of religion, even when clerics attacked the behaviors in question as irreligious. Working-class disaffection from formal churches during the throes of nineteenth-century industrialization did not always mean secularization. The transitions from religion to socialism were often complex and incomplete.

PROGRESS OF SECULARIZATION

After the 1950s scholarly opinion held almost unanimously that secularization, once started, had progressed continuously until its culmination in the twentieth century. By the end of that century another argument proposed that the theological view of secularization was much too simple, a self-assertion out of the mouths of secularized people. Instead of the steady progress of secularization, the argument suggested a complicated scenario of phases of secularization and sacralization or dechristianization and rechristianization. The forces that supported secularization coexisted with others that advanced sacralization in the Western world after the eighteenth century.

Understanding the impact of these forces requires complex models. According to this theory, secularization of European society and culture did indeed commence in the Renaissance, but early secularization met much resistance. The Renaissance and the baroque period that followed were also characterized by movements such as Puritanism in Britain, Jansenism in France and Italy, and Pietism in Germany, Sweden, the Baltic countries, and Switzerland. These revival movements were redefined in the context of this interpretation as the first major forces of the rechristianization of post-Reformation, pre-Enlightenment Europe. With the Enlightenment, however, another tidal wave of secularization swept through most countries of Europe, only to be countered by another wave of Christian revivalism in Methodism, the success story of the Moravians or Herrnhuter, and the First and Second Great Awakenings. In this sense early nineteenth-century missionary societies and Bible societies in Britain and elsewhere were Christian efforts to turn back the tide of radical rationalism in the late Enlightenment and to overcome the secularizing effects of the French Revolution. This struggle between pro- and anti-Christian elements continued throughout the nineteenth century and well into the second half of the twentieth century.

This interpretation has some major problems, however. Perhaps most vexing, secularization was vastly different in most countries of Europe and North America. While in North America politics and culture seemed firmly in the grip of Fundamentalist pressure groups in the last decades of the twentieth century, in Europe the scales seemed to tip from interest in the sacred to interest in the secular. In contrast to North America, twentieth-century Europe appeared largely secularized if not dechristianized. Within the European context, forces such as urbanization and industrialization seemed to result in secularization. By contrast, the same factors seemed to support rather than hinder the triumph of Fundamentalism in the New World.

Without doubt, the juxtaposition of Europe and North America may be much too simple. Explanations of the variations of secularization in the Western world need a closer look at the development of individual European nations and even certain regions within those nations. The Netherlands, for example, became the most secularized country of Europe, but that occurred late in the twentieth century. All through the nineteenth century the Dutch people considered theirs a Protestant nation with a Catholic minority. By the end of the nineteenth century, most people in the Netherlands adhered to one of three political camps, neo-Calvinism, Catholicism, or socialism. In the 1970s these "columns," as they were called, dissolved, and at exactly that time secularization started to progress rapidly. In another instance, Ireland experienced rising religiosity in the nineteenth century, delaying secularization until the late twentieth century.

France seems to offer a different case. Following the French Revolution the French people divided into a progressive, anti-Catholic camp, with strong anticlerical and laical feelings, and a conservative camp, with close ties to popular Catholicism and the Catholic hierarchy. Remarkably, for many decades neither camp made gains in relation to the other. Representatives of both camps attempted to occupy public spaces with prominent buildings and signs of symbolic value, and they tried to fill public time with processions and other rituals. But neither made advances over the other side. In Poland—which had been divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the late eighteenth century—during the nineteenth century Catholicism and nationalism formed such a close union that it became almost synonymous to be Catholic and to be a Polish patriot.

VARIATIONS OF SECULARIZATION

In order to give some sense to what may otherwise appear as a play with casuistic distinctions, Hugh McLeod proposed a typology with five different categories distinguishing between

1. "nations or regions with a dominant church, closely linked with traditional élites and conservative political parties," including France and Spain;
2. "nations or regions with a pluralistic religious structure, but where ethnicity is relatively unimportant," including the Netherlands, Britain, and the Scandinavian countries;
3. nations "with a pluralistic structure, where ethnicity is the main determinant of religious affiliation," such as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand;
4. nations "where the population is polarized between two antagonistic religious communities," for example, Ireland and Germany in the Kulturkampf (cultural war); and
5. nations "where the dominant church has become the major symbol of national or regional identity in the face of alien rule," such as nineteenth-century Poland (McLeod, pp. 21–33).

Each of these categories is a different form of secularization with a different story of the history of secularization.

Even though the typology developed by McLeod represented an important step forward, it was still far removed from a comprehensive explanation of the causes, variations, and consequences of secularization in Europe. Some problems deserve special attention as they have not yet been convincingly solved. Certainly the relationship between secularization and nationalism is the most sensitive issue, encompassing several aspects. First, one opinion is that nationalism is a kind of religion that, if fully implemented, replaces other forms of religion. Accordingly nationalism explains the past, defines the contours of the present, tells the people what the future holds for them, and spells out the sacrifices that will be necessary to achieve a brighter future. Through nationalism, with the help of rituals, episodes of the national past are sacralized, sites attain a sacred meaning, and persons appear to have performed sacred tasks for the cause of the nation. Interpreted this way, nationalism fulfills all the functions of religion. Disregarding the question of whether nationalism carries a certain amount of transcendental values and perspectives, one could call nationalism an "innerworldly" religion.

It is then a matter of further debate whether nationalism is the logical result of secularization, that is, the product of secularization carried to extreme conclusions, or nothing but a transformation or anaggiornamento of religion. This is a complicated issue that becomes even more so, considering the fact that in all European countries many people with strong religious feelings participated actively in national movements. This is true of people with progressive, liberal views and a critical distance from traditional Christianity as well as of people with strong conservative, orthodox feelings, that is, people who abhorred the ideas of 1789.

Similar difficulties confront attempts to interpret the relationship between Christianity and fascism and discussions of the role of religion in Adolf Hitler's Germany. On the one hand, the obvious pagan character of national socialism frustrates explanations of why Christians with some understanding of Christian tradition accepted the message of men like Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, particularly why they accepted Nazi racism and anti-Semitism. On the other hand, most German church leaders, Protestant and Catholic alike, welcomed Hitler's rise to power and actively supported Hitler's regime well into the late 1930s, some even until 1945. The Catholic Church had special relationships with Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy, Francisco Franco's Spain, Vichy France, and Fascist regimes in Portugal, Hungary, Romania, and other countries in Eastern and southern Europe.

The answer regarding communism, the other type of totalitarian rule, seems somewhat more simple. With few exceptions, under Communist rule churches were persecuted. It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that political pressure was reduced and that in some countries, like East Germany, attempts were made to develop a kind of coexistence between socialism, as it was called, and Christian churches. No doubt communism can be understood as an extreme form of secularization that possessed the qualities of an inner-wordly religion. It promised salvation to all who believed in the ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and who were ready to make sacrifices toward the victory of those ideas.

In all countries that had been under Communist rule for several decades, Christian traditions were weakened and in some cases severed. After 1989 the new generation of people in those countries knew practically nothing about Christian teachings. At the same time those people had a strong interest in all things religious, especially in esoteric doctrines and practices. Sectarian groups claimed impressive missionary successes. Therefore, secularization does not adequately describe these developments, but dechristianization is certainly appropriate for some aspects.

Another matter complicates a comprehensive theory of secularization. Secularization and sacralization attempt to describe processes of transformation, that is, short-term and long-term linear change. While it is relatively easy to describe the transfer of property, the transfer of buildings and land, from the church or religious orders into nonecclesiastical possession, it is extremely difficult to analyze and interpret changes of religious mentality, that is, changes in worldview, belief, and conviction. How can religiosity be measured? What indicators provide insight into the degrees of religious belief and the variations of religious practice? Where is the historical material that is suited for quantitative analysis?

One strategy for finding answers is the analysis of the books people possessed. The assumption is that the more books with a religious content people owned, the more likely it is that they felt strongly about religion. But did people in fact believe in the contents of the books in their possession? Perhaps some of these books were given to them as gifts or were inherited. How can the people whose libraries were not preserved be included? Another possible measure is the analysis of religious formulas in the last wills of people. The assumption is that the more often such formulas were used, the stronger was the attachment of those people to the church. But last wills are a special kind of document, more defined by the notaries than by the persons who signed. Moreover, they are formalistic documents that, in view of impending death, are open to religious formulas.

Other scholars tried to measure secularization using the records of church attendance or the records of persons who took part in the holy communion. However, whether those materials are valid proof of the acceleration, slowdown, or reversal of the process of secularization is questionable. Furthermore, people who felt strongly about religion went to holy communion only very seldom, that is, only when they were convinced that their souls were pure enough to confront God. Those pious men and women are statistically in the same category as those who did not attend church regularly and who refused the Sacraments because they did not believe in their value. Each case lacks sufficient historical records to trace the rise and fall of secularization.

When David Martin published A General Theory of Secularization in 1978, sociologists of religion were convinced that they had successfully deciphered one of the major mysteries of modern history. That optimism was short-lived. Historians puzzled over why secularization advanced in a remarkable manner in the era of urbanization and industrialization in Europe while the opposite occurred in North America, where fundamentalism gained strength in the late twentieth century. Equally puzzling were the factors that trace and explain the success, failure, and variations of secularization. Religious energies that in the twentieth century were no longer firmly embedded in the Christian tradition might have transferred into other kinds of belief. Strong indications suggest that the mentalities and practices of "Western" men and women did not become more rational than they were, for example, in the eighteenth century.

Is secularization, therefore, one of the main characteristics of modern Europe or a temporary phase of European history? Immigration into Europe increased during the final decades of the twentieth century. Many of those immigrants came from non-Christian cultures and had strong attachments to religion. Even those immigrants who were "uprooted" from their native soil and were without a clear religious orientation did not convert to Christianity or embrace the blessings of a sceptical, enlightened worldview. Rather they rediscovered the value of their own indigenous religious tradition as a means of stabilizing their identity in an often hostile environment.

The secularized post-Christians of Europe did not react with a new religious fervor of their own. Europeans engaged in charitable activities based on enlightened humanism on the one hand and xenophobic behavior, sometimes even racism and violent hostility, on the other. The difficult path to a multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious Europe has unpredictable cultural conflicts and confrontations and may result in the final triumph of secularization or a multifaceted coexistence of secular and spiritual norms and practices. A secularized Europe would be unique in a world dominated by several hegemonic cultures in which religion seems to play an ever more important part.

See alsoChurch and Society (volume 5).

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