Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis. - book reviews

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 1994 by Michael W. Hughey

Briefly stated, the secularization thesis holds that modernization has resulted in the diminished social significance of religion. The components of modernization generally regarded as most responsible for religion's decline are social differentiation and increasing pluralism, societalization, and rationalization. The purpose of this book is to bring together the work of scholars whose empirical research raises a challenge to the accuracy of the secularization thesis.

The book begins with a useful essay in which Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce provide a descriptive overview of the secularization thesis. This chapter serves as a backdrop for subsequent essays which in different ways point out that the secularization thesis is at odds with certain empirical facts. For example, looking at changes in church membership rates in the United States and Great Britain, Callum G. Brown suggests that urbanization and industrialization did not instigate the decline of religion. Hugh McLeod's examination of the religious history of London, Berlin, and New York lead him to reject the idea of a "master factor" (such as "modernization") as the key to secularization, and that specific political and historical factors must be examined for each case. Robin Gill, by examining statistics on church capacity and church attendance, advances the surprising argument that church decline resulted from the construction of too many churches: empty churches, he suggests, undermined religious belief. Taking English Catholicism as his paradigmatic case, Michael P. Hornsby-Smith insists that the major changes in the religion during the post-war and post-Vatican II years cannot be taken as convincing evidence of secularization; rather, they show both growth and decline along different dimensions of religious expression. Examining the rates of church adherence and contributions to churches in the United States, Roger Finke argues that urbanization, industrialization, and pluralism are not associated with secularization but with "higher levels of religious involvement". Steve Bruce questions the analytic rigor with which some researchers have used such variables as pluralism and urbanization when considering the evidence of secularization.

Most of the contributors who are critical of the secularization thesis use Bryan Wilson's work as their foil. It is therefore fitting that Wilson is given the final chapter and, thus, the last word. He makes the most of it, taking his critics to task for assessing secularization mainly through the excessively narrow criterion of church membership while ignoring such equally valid criteria as, among others, confirmation and baptism rates, public financial support for churches, and the decline in the number of religious professionals. More important, Wilson suggests, his critics fail to get at changes in "the significance religion has for the operation of the social system." He rightly questions the influence of religion on big business, trade unions, geopolitical strategy, or even domestic politics. What has become, he asks, of the power of religion in preindustrial society, a power "which once could define secular laws in usury, regulate the conditions of production in the guilds, and prohibit what today are normal business and commercial practices"? Wilson's critics in this volume say nothing about the social functions of religion, he charges, because "they have come to terms with the actual reality of an increasingly secularized society within which the role of religion has markedly shrunk".

The subtitle of this book bills its contents as a debate on the secularization thesis. If that is the case, then it is a debate Wilson wins handily. This is not to suggest that the secularization thesis is not flawed. Certainly it has often been so overstated as to give it an air of inevitability. By focusing on changes in the social significance of religion rather than on the "private religions predilections" examined by his critics, Wilson is able to assess the broader patterns of social change, to see, as it were, a bigger picture. His critics in this volume may have chipped away a bit at its foundations, but the edifice of the secularization thesis remains intact.

Michael W. Hughey Moorhead State University