Provincializing Christendom: the case of Great Britain

Church History, March, 2006 by Jeffrey Cox

The insular traditions of British ecclesiastical history have been transformed since the 1960s, when scholars began to pay attention to the theory of secularization, an inherently comparative and global theory of social change. More recently a wave of interest in imperial and colonial history has brought the foreign missionary enterprise into focus, and even more broadly the relationship between western religion and imperialism. (1)

In British academia, scholars who concerned themselves first with secularization were not historians, but sociologists. In the 1960s and 1970s, a small group of sociologists of religion--Alasdair MacIntyre, Bryan Wilson, and David Martin--set British religion in a comparative frame in beautifully written essays, at a time when American sociological theory was still dominated by the unreadable prose of Talcott Parsons. (2) Even though they were sociologists, they approached the problem of secularization historically as well as comparatively. Bryan Wilson's Religion in a Secular Society (1966) employed the classic sociological theory of secularization in the form of a sustained meditation on the contrast between the state of religion in Great Britain and the United States.

By the 1960s the contrast between the vigor and growth of the American churches and the sustained, long-term decline of Britain's churches was unmistakable. It was all the more notable because both countries were predominantly Protestant nations with a range of denominations that had, more or less, the same names. Britain had state churches, but also many other denominations, including Baptists, Methodists, (Scottish) Episcopalians, and Congregationalists, and even scattered outposts of the Assembly of God and the Disciples of Christ. In Britain, though, it appeared that relatively few people attended these churches, which was demonstrably not the case in the United States. This raised a difficulty for the theory of secularization, which is a global theory of social change. Wilson's theory of secularization explained the decline of the European churches, including the British churches, neatly and comprehensively. One way or another, modernity and religion are antithetical. As modernity progresses, whether in the materialist forms of urbanization, industrialization, and the functional differentiation of society, or in the idealist forms of science, skepticism, and agnosticism, religion is inevitably pushed to the margins of society.

This left America as a problem to be dealt with, one recognized by Wilson although it posed for him few serious intellectual problems. In the theory of secularization, survivals of religion in the modern world are explained by reference to unusual circumstances relating to the exceptional history of the locality. Wilson resorted to an explanation rooted in American exceptionalism, a theory popular in the 1950s and 1960s for a variety of reasons including the absence of socialism in the United States. American exceptionalism has been a popular theme among American church historians during the last few decades. Peering over the Atlantic at Europe's empty churches, historians have concluded that Americans simply do a better job of sustaining religious faith and religious institutions than decadent Europeans. One of the consequences of the theory of American exceptionalism is relative indifference to the issue of secularization on the part of American historians of religion. Secularization simply does not apply to the land of the free. Whether it is because of Nathan Hatch's "whirlwind of religious liberty," or perhaps merely because we are especially good at selling God in the marketplace of culture, as Laurence Moore would have it, we are, in Jonathan Butler's deft phrase, "awash in a sea of faith." (3)

Wilson, however, although willing to concede that America was exceptional in the vigor of its religious institutions, was unwilling to concede that America was therefore more religious than Britain. As a modern country, America must be a secular country. For Wilson, American religion was not really religion, but a secularized residue of religion, a continent wide and an inch deep. American religious faith prospered only by evacuating itself of any serious religious content, and the American churches succeeded only because of what he referred to as the "vacuousness of popular religious ideas." (4)

David Martin systematically outlined the theory that secularization is normal and religious vitality the exception in his General Theory of Secularization (1978), where he identified different paths of secularization in modern Europe, making due exception for the (then) exceptional cases of Ireland and Poland. (5) Martin's underlying assumption was that it is just a matter of time, at least in Europe. Standing behind him one could almost hear T. H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, who summarized the voice of the modern secularized intellectual in his comments for the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910): "That this Christianity is doomed to fall is, to my mind, beyond a doubt; but its fall will neither be sudden nor speedy." (6)