Does Modernization Lead to Secularization?

For a long time, most observers would have answered the question that informs this first chapter unhesitatingly and openly in the affirmative. At least since the second half of the nineteenth century, but to some extent even since the eighteenth century, and with particular self-assurance from the 1960s onwards, those who assumed that secularization was a virtually inevitable outcome of modernization enjoyed hegemonic status in every debate on religion and the future of modern society, whether in philosophy, the humanities and social sciences, or intellectual life in general. For nonbelievers, this assumption meant that they themselves stood at the pinnacle of world historical progress. They subdivided into those prepared to wait patiently for the disappearance of religion and more militant opponents of religion who were determined to speed up this process through state pressure and intellectual attacks. Both could enjoy the feeling, not of having lost something, but of having rid themselves of something that could only be an obstacle to progress, which everyone would ultimately abandon. Even believers, including theologians and church people, sometimes came to believe that modernization must go hand in hand with secularization. Inevitably, they perceived themselves as members of a species nearing extinction. If they were unwilling to give up all hope, they had little choice but to declare war on modernization itself in an attempt to delay or reverse it. A few believers here and there, unwilling to be pulled along in the slipstream of "anti-modern" political movements, saw secularization as an opportunity to purify Christianity, and thus as a divinely ordained challenge.

Of course, there were always those who resisted this hugely popular thesis of secularization. Hegemony, it goes without saying, does not mean universal validity or universal consent, but rather supremacy in the battle of ideas. Those expressing doubts about the hegemonic view tend to have a hard time of it; their views are laughed off as outmoded or dismissed as oddities. Over the past twenty years or so, however, things have changed radically. At present, at least in the social sciences, but increasingly among the general public as well, it is the doubters who have gained the upper hand, in other words those who, while they do not dispute the phenomenon of secularization, do take issue with the idea that it has a virtually law-like connection with modernization. Even under the hegemony of the doubters, of course, there are those who take an opposing view, but today the advocates of the formerly so dominant secularization thesis are increasingly on the defensive. How did this happen? Is it no more than a fashion that will die away as quickly as it emerged, or a symptom of crisis afflicting those incapable of dealing rationally with the difficulties of contemporary life? Hackneyed ideas such as these will get us nowhere. What we need to do is look more closely at the factors that substantiate or contradict the secularization thesis or appear to do so.

The meaning of the term "secularization"

In seeking to look more closely at the factors substantiating or contradicting the secularization thesis, however, we quickly come up against the ambiguity of the terms used by its exponents. Neither "secularization" nor "modernization" is a clear-cut or uncontested term. So what we need to do first is clarify what these terms are, and are not, going to mean for us here.

A number of instructive accounts have already explored the history of the term "secularization." It was originally a legal term that referred exclusively to the transformation of members of religious orders into "secular priests." Studies of the concept's history have shown that this quite marginal term gained wide currency only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when most church property became state property, or, in any case, the church lost its property, as a result of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. This process of "secularization" was soon followed by the philosophical-theological use of the term. The associated debates were concerned chiefly with "genealogical" links between characteristic features of modern society and culture, on the one hand, and the Christian faith, or religion as a whole, on the other. Key thinkers evaluated these developments in quite different ways. Certain Protestant theologians concluded that the emerging modernity was such a thoroughgoing realization of Christian ideals that the church as an institution separate from state and society would become increasingly superfluous. Others (on the radical Left) believed that those aspects of their era that they perceived as alarming resulted from a failure fully to overcome Christian thought. An as yet incomplete process of secularization must at last be brought to its radical conclusion.

This is not the place to look at these varied threads of conceptual history in detail. But they form the background to the modern social sciences, which emerged in the late nineteenth century, and the way they used the term "secularization." If the term was already ambiguous, it became even more so in the hands of social scientists. In our day, it is the Spanish-American sociologist of religion José Casanova who has made the most helpful attempt to clarify things. According to him, the term "secularization" as used in the social sciences has three meanings: the generally decreasing importance of religion, the retreat of religion from the public sphere, and the freeing of societal subspheres (such as economy, science, art, or politics) from direct religious control. Countless misunderstandings have arisen because these meanings blur into one another or because those engaged in dialogue have different things in mind when they use the same word. Furthermore, the concept of "religion," which is, of course, an inherent component of every variant of the term "secularization," is anything but clear-cut, and it is very difficult to measure religious phenomena. So conceptual clarification is no more than a small step forward. In itself it tells us nothing about causal connections, such as those between the processes distinguished by Casanova. If, as in this chapter, we take secularization exclusively to mean the decreasing importance of religion, it may still refer to a wide variety of things: decreasing membership of churches and religious communities, declining participation in religious rituals, or a decreasing number of people who approve of certain religious beliefs. A general decrease in one area does not necessarily go hand in hand with a decrease in another: you can be a...