Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 1999 by William H. Jr Swatos, Kevin J. Christiano

In 1967 the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion published a collection of essays on church-sect theory that some people at the time interpreted as intending an obituary for the church-sect concept. If so, it must instead be taken as evidence for the resurrection of the dead, for at least a decade of both debate and research, use and abuse, of the church-sect framework occurred before a gradual consensus arrived in the 1980s, wherein sociologists of religion in the United States achieved a level of comfort in talking about sectarian religion and mainline denominations, spared prolegomena wherein we defend our use of these concepts. In that process, though, something else happened as well; namely, the concept of "cult" increasingly became dropped from use in the sociology of religion as already too emotionally loaded to carry scientific freight (see Richardson 1993). Like the concept "race" in ethnic studies, we at least put "cult" in scarequotes. We can talk about anticultism, like racism, but to term a group a cult is sociological bad manners: it biases analyses from the start.

Like church-sect and so many other seminal concepts in the sociology of religion, the term secularization was given to us by Max Weber (1930), but ever so lightly, and was picked up by his sometime associate Ernst Troeltsch (1958). It did not appear significantly in American sociology, however, until the late 1950s. In spite of a cautionary article by Larry Shiner as early as 1967 about the muddled meanings that had come to be attached to the term, hence his suggestion that "we drop the word entirely" (see also Martin 1965), nevertheless by the early 1970s, secularization was the reigning dogma in the field.(1)

Twenty years would pass between Shiner's expression of reservations about secularization "theory" and the next major assault on the thesis. In between, Bryan Wilson, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and Karel Dobbelaere would become the principal proponents of the concept. Not insignificantly, Wilson, Luckmann, and Dobbelaere are Europeans, and Berger is a European emigre to the United States. All were products of a European Christian intellectual heritage and educational system that, we might now say, romanticized the religious past of their nations.

It was in his 1986 presidential address to the Southern Sociological Society that Jeffrey Hadden (1987: 588) presented a clear, comprehensive, and trenchant analysis of the weakness of secularization theory in both in its genesis and its predicted outcomes. The core of his argument is that in and from its genesis secularization constituted a "doctrine more than a theory" based on "presuppositions that. . . represent a taken-for-granted ideology" of social scientists "rather than a systematic set of interrelated propositions." Over time in social scientific circles (which continued to widen in their influence), "the idea of secularization became sacralized," that is, a belief system accepted "on faith." Even more than a statement about the present, the ideology of secularization relies on beliefs about the past. (This flank of Hadden's assault, as a matter of fact, was presaged in a series of pieces by Roland Robertson beginning as early as 1971.)

The second thrust of Hadden's attack is a fourfold challenge: (1) Secularization theory is internally weak in its logical structure - "a hodgepodge of loosely employed ideas" - first so revealed, indeed, by Shiner in 1967; (2) such secularization theory as does exist is unsupported by data after more than twenty years of research, a point also made by Glasner (1977) in his critique of secularization theory as a "myth" a decade earlier;(2) (3) New Religious Movements (NRMs) have appeared and persisted in the most supposedly secularized societies - indeed, Stark and Bainbridge (1985) have shown that the lower the level of practice or saturation on the part of traditional religion in modern societies, the higher the likelihood of NRM activity;(3) and finally, (4) religion has emerged as a vital force in the world political order (cf., Hadden and Shupe 1989). Hadden concludes this thrust with a series of forecasts of the place of religion in society and in sociology for the next fifty years, concluding that we should "return once more to the past to see the future. Max Weber's search for clues about the place of religion in human society took him deeply into the study of the world's major religions. The future will take us back to where Weber began" (Hadden 1987: 598, 609 et passim).

To what extent does the debate over secularization theory, represented in the articles of this issue, reflect some of the same concerns that ran through church-sect theory three decades ago? In other words, is "secularization" an analytic tool or a value judgment? Karel Dobbelaere refers to a "descriptive concept" that denotes "the particularization in the religious subsystem of the general process of functional differentiation on the macro level." And Rodney Stark, otherwise contending with Dobbelaere, agrees that "[i]f this were all that secularization means, there would be nothing to argue about." What Stark argues, however, is that the concept carries much more freight than this and in so doing makes assertions about people's religiousness that are not so.(4) Although Stark and his colleagues once used such phrases as "limits to secularization" or secularization as a "self-limiting process" (in, e.g., Stark and Bainbridge 1985, 1987), he now wishes to bury the term.(5)