Secularization

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Secularization

Secularization is commonly thought to be a process of religious decline, the eclipse of religious ideas and institutions by nonreligious ones. While this commonsense definition may seem obvious enough, both the concept and the evidence are among the most hotly debated topics among students of American religion. How should secularization be properly defined, and once defined, what will count as evidence for or against the hypothesis?

This debate is especially important because the idea of secularization has been closely tied to theories of modernization and thereby to the basic theoretical foundations of the social sciences. The German sociologist Max Weber, for instance, wrote of the "disenchantment" of the world, meaning that increasingly modern people do not perceive the world to be ruled by mysterious sacred forces, but by understandable processes that are subject to study. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim did not expect the sacred to disappear, but he did expect it to become highly generalized, amorphously resident in the ideals of our culture or in the idea of "sacred" human worth. Both were writing near the beginning of the twentieth century, in Europe, where "secularization" also meant the loss of property and power by the established churches.

These early ideas hint at the several ways in which secularization can be defined and the consequent variations in the evidence that might count toward a conclusion. The most basic definition has to do with the separation of religious authority from state authority, what is commonly known in the United States as "separation of church and state." In this sense, most modern nations are "secular." They are governed by political authorities that owe little, if any, allegiance to religious institutions. At least since the last of the colonial established churches gave up its privileges in the early nineteenth century, then, the United States has been secularized.

But that assertion seems to fly in the face of the immense institutional vitality of American religion and the fact that nearly all of the population regularly claims (in public opinion polls) to believe in God. The strength or weakness of religious institutions and religious ideas are additional dimensions to the secularization question that must be taken into account. While there is considerable debate about how many people can be found at religious services on any given weekend, estimates vary between 25 and 40 percent. In addition to the number who attend with some regularity, even if not every week, another 20 percent or more claim some affiliation with a religious body, while attending more sporadically. And still others are "mental affiliates," describing themselves as identified with a religious tradition even though not formally a member or a regular participant.

In this country, then, it is more normal to have a religious affiliation than not, a fact that contrasts dramatically with some European countries, where religious attendance is common among only a tiny fraction of the population. Overall levels of religious participation have remained relatively stable since the 1940s in the United States, despite a decline in membership and participation among the "mainline" Protestant bodies (Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and the like) that dominated American culture in the nineteenth century and remained strong until the 1960s. While they have lost members and organizational strength, many other religious bodies—evangelical Protestants, Catholic churches swollen by immigration, new immigrant religious bodies from Hindus to Muslims—have grown.

Recently, scholars have argued that the voluntarism of the religion system in the United States helps to account for this organizational strength. Because religion was not supported by the state, every religious organization had to generate its own support. Those that did not meet the needs of enough people would cease to exist. And when there were new people and new needs, no legal obstacles stood in the way of religious entrepreneurs who wished to begin new religious groups. Ironically, because government was "secular," ample social space was left for religious organizations to flourish.

But what of the influence of these religious organizations? Another way to understand secularization is to look for the ways in which religion is privatized. That is, having lost its legal authority, has religion also lost its ability to influence the public world of work and politics? Here the evidence is much less clear. Some argue that American culture has trivialized religion, making it merely an individual preference to be indulged in one's leisure time. Others argue that religious ideas often play a key role in public policy debates (from abortion to war) and that religious figures, such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Rev. Pat Robertson, have clearly exercised influence in the public arena. Beyond politics, others point to the growing presence of religious symbols, characters, and narratives in the mass media. Few would argue that the public airwaves and policy arenas are pervasively religious, but it is also clear that American culture is not utterly devoid of religious content.

A final aspect of secularization that has often been debated is the plausibility of religious beliefs in an age of reason and science. Throughout the twentieth century, people have debated evolution and creationism, cloning and space travel. Science clearly has enormous respect as a source of knowledge about the world, but most people have found it quite possible to simultaneously accept science and also believe in the reality of divine presence and power. In the pragmatics of everyday life, most people do not seem to need the elaborate theological and philosophical theories of accommodation worked out by scholars. Indeed, the very religious communities whose ideas seem to stand most at odds with modern scientific ideas about the world have thrived, at least in part because a pluralistic situation favors those groups best able to articulate a distinct identity.

The question of secularization in contemporary American culture is, then, a complicated one. Legally, secularization was long since effected. Culturally, many aspects of everyday life and mass media operate without apparent religious influence. And there has been significant decline in the organizational strength of the religious bodies that formerly held privileged positions in American society. However, other religious bodies have gained in strength, and the overall picture is still one of organizational health, fostered in large measure by the country's voluntaristic religious system. The extent to which those organizations can influence public life varies, and no definitive case can be made about long-term decline (or growth). Religious ideas are sometimes questioned by science, but just as often exist alongside science, offering an alternative or supplemental way of understanding the world. While secularization is a commonsense assumption about American society, it is far from a uniform fact that is universally accepted.

Bibliography

Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy. 1969.

Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. 1994.

Demerath, N. J. III and Rhys H. Williams. A Bridgingof Faiths: Religion and Politics in a New England City. 1992.

Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark. The Churching ofAmerica. 1992.

Hadaway, C. Kirk, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves. "What the Polls Don't Show: A Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance." American SociologicalReview 58(6) (1993):741–752.

Lechner, Frank. "The Case Against Secularization: A Rebuttal." Social Forces 69(4)(1991):1103–1119.

Smith, Christian. American Evangelicalism: Embattledand Thriving. 1998.

Warner, R. Stephen. "Work in Progress Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States." American Journal of Sociology 98(5)(1993):1044–1093.

Nancy T. Ammerman

Contemporary American Religion