Secularization, R.I.P - rest in peace

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 1999 by Rodney Stark

For nearly three centuries, social scientists and as sorted western intellectuals have been promising the end of religion. Each generation has been confident that within another few decades, or possibly a bit longer, humans will "outgrow" belief in the supernatural. This proposition soon came to be known as the secularization thesis, and its earliest proponents seem to have been British, as the Restoration in 1660 led to an era during which militant attacks on faith were quite popular among fashionable Londoners (Durant and Durant 1965). Thus, as far as I am able to discover, it was Thomas Woolston who first set a date by which time modernity would have triumphed over faith. Writing in about 1710, he expressed his confidence that Christianity would be gone by 1900 (Woolston 1733). Half a century later Frederick the Great thought this was much too pessimistic, writing to his friend Voltaire that "the Englishman Woolston . . . could not calculate what has happened quite recently. . . . It [religion] is crumbling of itself, and its fall will be but the more rapid" (in Redman 1949: 26). In response, Voltaire ventured his guess that the end would come within the next 50 years. Subsequently, not even widespread press reports concerning the second "Great Awakening" could deter Thomas Jefferson from predicting in 1822 that "there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian" (Healy 1984: 373). Of course, a generation later, Unitarians were as scarce as ever, while the Methodists and Baptists continued their spectacular rates of growth (Finke and Stark 1992).

Subsequent prophets of secularization have been no less certain, but they have been somewhat more circumspect as to dates. Thus, just as Jefferson's prophesy failed, back in France, Auguste Comte announced that, as a result of modernization, human society was outgrowing the "theological stage" of social evolution and a new age was dawning in which the science of sociology would replace religion as the basis for moral judgments. But, Comte did not say exactly when all this would be accomplished. In similar fashion, as often as Frederich Engels gloated about how the socialist revolution would cause religion to evaporate, he would only say that it would happen "soon." In 1878 Max Muller (p. 218) complained that:

Every day, every week, every month, every quarter, the most widely read journals seem just now to vie with each other in telling us that the time for religion is past, that faith is a hallucination or an infantile disease, that the gods have at last been found out and exploded.

At the start of the twentieth century, A. E. Crawley (1905: 8) reported that "the opinion is everywhere gaining ground that religion is a mere survival from a primitive . . . age, and its extinction only a matter of time." Several years later, when Max Weber explained why modernization would cause the "disenchantment" of the world, and when Sigmund Freud reassured his disciples that this greatest of all neurotic illusions would die upon the therapist's couch, they too would be no more specific than "soon."

A generation later, however, "soon" became "underway" or "ongoing." For example, the distinguished anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace (1966: 264265) explained to tens of thousands of American undergraduates that "the evolutionary future of religion is extinction," and while he admitted that it might require "several hundred years" to complete the process, it already was well underway in the advanced nations. And throughout his illustrious career, Bryan Wilson (1982:150-151) has described secularization as "a long term process occurring in human society" and pointed out that "the process implicit in the concept of secularization concedes at once the idea of an earlier condition of life that was not secular, or that was at least much less secular than that of our own times."

Then in 1968, in contrast to all of this intellectual pussy-footing, Peter Berger (1968: 3) told the New York Times that the by "the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture." Unleashing his gift for memorable imagery, Berger said that "the predicament of the believer is increasingly like that of a Tibetan astrologer on a prolonged visit to an American university." In light of the recent lionization of the Dalai Lama by the American media and his cordial welcome to various campuses, Berger's simile now admits to rather a different interpretation. In any event, when his prediction had only three years left to run, Berger gracefully recanted his belief in secularization (as I discuss at the end of this essay). I quote his statements during the 1960s only because they so fully express the mood of the times, a mood that I shared (cf., Stark 1963).

Notice five things about all of these secularization prophesies.

First, there is universal agreement that modernization is the causal engine dragging the gods into retirement. That is, the secularization doctrine has always nestled within the broader theoretical framework of modernization theories, it being proposed that as industrialization, urbanization, and rationalization increase, religiousness must decrease (Hadden 1987; Finke 1992). Keep in mind that modernization is a long, gradual, relatively constant process. Wars, revolutions, and other calamities may cause an occasional sudden blip in the trend lines, but the overall process is not volatile. If secularization is the result of modernization or, indeed, is one aspect of it, then secularization is not volatile and, rather than proceeding by sudden fits and starts, it too will display a long-term, gradual, and relatively constant trend of religious decline, corresponding to similar upward trends in such aspects of modernization as economic development, urbanization, and education. In terms of time series trends, modernization is a long, linear, upward curve, and secularization is assumed to trace the reciprocal of this curve, to be a long, linear, downward curve. Indeed, since modernization is so advanced in many nations that "postmodernism" is the latest buzzword, it must be assumed that secularization is at least "ongoing" to the extent that a significant downward trend in religiousness can be seen.