The Desecularization of the World:Resurgent Religion and World Politics. - Review - book review

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2001 by Rhys Williams

The Desecularization of the World:Resurgent Religion and World Politics, PETER L. BERGER (ed.). Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999, 135 pp. $20.00

This is an unremarkable book. Any professional sociologist who has kept up with the literature will find little new here. There is some useful information in some of the chapters, but there is little overall coherence or much contribution to scholarly debates. The book is the product of a lecture series sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C., and is copyrighted and co-published by the Center. Its major purpose, according to the preface by Center President Eliot Abrams, is to examine major regions and religions in the world and investigate their current impact on politics and public life. It may surprise Abrams, but there actually already is an extensive scholarly literature on the involvement of religion in world politics.

Editor Peter Berger's opening chapter was the keynote lecture of the series, and of course, he is interested in doing more than just describing the current state of world politics. Berger lays out his task within a reexamination of "secularization theory." Hence the two halves of the book's title.

To be fair, a couple of the chapters make interesting points, and the book offers some perspectives on the world that the general reader may not know. But in scholarly terms, the volume does not hang together. The book's title is representative of the conceptual problems. The terms "desecularization" and "resurgent" imply change over time, and a reemergence after a period of absence or quiescence. And yet, several of the chapters seem to be at pains to indicate that the world (particularly the non-European parts of it) has not secularized in the first place -- for example, Berger claims "[the world] is as furiously religious as it ever was..."(2). Further, some of the chapters do not consider the change over time dynamic at all. Theoretically, the idea of secularization is usually used in a commonsense manner, often as a single unified theory. For example, while criticizing secularization theory, Berger does not define it, cite any relevant theorists, or disentangle any of the theory's claims. Other chapters either ignore the idea of secularization (George Weigel on Pope John Paul II or Jonathan Sacks on Judaism), or accept secularization as a reality of modernity and discuss contemporary religion's challenges in dealing with it (Tu Weiming on the PRC or Abdullahi A. An-Na'im on political Islam).

Only one chapter actually takes secularization theory seriously, a chapter on Europe by Grace Davie. She disentangles various meanings behind the term secularization, specifically as used by Steve Bruce, Jose Casanova, and Daniele Hervieu-Leger, and evaluates them based on data from the European Values Surveys of 1981 and 1990. She compares religious indicators between Protestant and Catholic European countries currently, as well as over time. Davie notes, for example, that younger cohorts are much less religious than their elders on a variety of measures, and that this is not a life-cycle effect. She concludes that it is not so much that there is less religion but that European religion is now expressed differently from how it used to be expressed; hence, Europe is less "secular" than it is "unchurched." This is a plausible conclusion, although it assumes aspects of an unacknowledged functional definition of religion.

Some of the chapters have some interesting insights in them, or set the stage for what could be serious scholarship. The chapters on Islam and Judaism have some discussion of the politics of identity and how combinations of internal and external forces shape them. The difference between the forms in which religion's public identity is expressed and the content of that identity could be a useful area for future research. The chapter on China was written before the current crackdown on the Falun Gong, although Tu Weiming explains why religious movements generally are likely to elicit such a heavy-handed social control response from the state. As a concluding comment, Peter Berger states "those who neglect religion in their analyses of contemporary affairs do so at great peril" (18). Few people reading this journal would dispute that contention, but in my view this volume doesn't do much to further that quest, nor tell us much about how those analyses should proceed.