Secularization from the Perspective of Globalization: A Response to Dobbelaere - response to article by Karel Dobbelaere in this issue, p. 229

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 1999 by Peter Beyer

The term globalization, much like that of secularization, is subject to a variety of meanings which, while perhaps not contradictory, also do not necessarily imply each other. Without clarity at the beginning as to what we mean by globalization, therefore, the same sort of confusion is likely to result that has so often plagued discussions of secularization: different people use the word in different ways all the while assuming that we all mean the same thing. Moreover, globalization has already become, like secularization, a charged term laden with implicit or explicit commitment as to whether the process is good or bad, whether it should happen or shouldn't. This feature has the tendency to politicize discussions involving either term, a perhaps unavoidable outcome, but one about which it is best to be aware.

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBAL SOCIETY

I begin, therefore, with statements of what I mean by globalization. First and foremost, I mean that my primary unit of analysis is a single, globally extended society. That, of course, assumes or hypothesizes that there is such a society. More important, however, it implies a concept of society that, above all, does not accept the straightforward equation of societal boundaries with state boundaries. From this perspective, we can and at times must speak about, for instance, society in the United States or society in China because states are powerful forces in the contemporary world and it makes a difference whether one is in China or in the United States. Indeed, much of the debate about secularization has centered on matters such as "church/state relations" or "market regulation," for which state boundaries are of course decisive. Nonetheless, to accept without further qualification that the category of society as such coincides self-evidently with that of (nation-)state is to make the mistake of adopting uncritically certain nonscientific, but culturally powerful, self-descriptions as the basis for a key sociological concept. The globalization perspective that I take here therefore accepts state boundaries as one of the differences within global society that makes a difference when one asks the question of secularization. Yet it is not the only such important difference: others are the difference among religions, among religious organizations, among regions, and among cultures; none of these necessarily follows state boundaries. Overall, however, the principal question that I ask is whether global society as a whole is secularized or secularizing. Sectional differences are part of that larger question.

The insistence on global society as the primary unit of analysis points to a particular perspective on globalization that allows this unit to appear precisely as a society. For this purpose I rely on the adaptation of various concepts taken from the social theories of Niklas Luhmann (1975, 1982, 1995, 1997). These include above all the notion that a society is bounded by the range of the communicative processes that constitute it, not by the range of political surveillance nor by a sense of commonality or belonging that its participants supposedly share. Other critical notions are those of functional societal systems and, for the purposes of examining the question of secularization, his tripartite typology of social systems: interaction, organization, societal systems. To the latter I add a fourth type, the social movement. In this respect, my view is more or less in accord with that presented by Karel Dobbelaere in his article. Accordingly, I see the structural basis of global society as the global extension of communication based primarily but not exclusively on a set of independent but also interdependent technical, instrumental, or functional societal systems. These institutional systems include, among others, the capitalist economic system, the political system of states, the scientific/technological system, the system for mass information media, systems for academic education and medicalized health, and a religious system of religions. Here cannot be the place for a closer examination of any of these, nor for justifying this view of the structural bases of globalization (see Beyer 1994, 1998). I should, however, point out that these systems are not all that there is to globalization or to global society. A more complete presentation would have to include, at the very least, the complex cultural dimensions of the historical process (see Robertson 1992; Featherstone 1990, 1995), especially the diverse ways in which these systems receive cultural respecification in different regions of the world.

Looking at global society in terms of these societal systems articulates rather directly with standard theories of secularization such as those of David Martin (1979), Bryan Wilson (1966), Peter Berger (1967), Thomas Luckmann (1967), Talcott Parsons (1966), Luhmann (1977), and, of course, Dobbelaere (1981). In particular, the focus on functionally differentiated societal systems as a key moment of globalization parallels the notion that secularization refers to the consequences for religion of the dominance in modern societies of this form of differentiation. The central idea is that, as the other societal systems render themselves more independent of religious determination - certainly in their internal operations - religious institutions are at the very least challenged to recontextualize and even restructure themselves in terms of that new situation. As Jose Casanova (1994) has argued, it is this meaning of the concept of secularization that is and probably always has been of the greatest relevance for analyses of the contemporary social world. The global perspective I am offering here, therefore, has the question of secularization built into it at the very foundation of the analysis. For consideration of the more precise consequences for religion, however, we must, with Dobbelaere, use a multidimensional view of secularization, above all to avoid the simplistic notion that such functional secularization necessarily implies the straightforward decline of institutional religion.