Secularisation, Pentecostalism and Violence

Receptions, Rediscoveries and Rebuttals in the Sociology of Religion

David Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351846066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia delle religioni

In this book David Martin brings together a coherent summary of his many years of ground-breaking academic work on the sociology of religion. Covering key and contentious areas from the last half-century such as secularisation, religion and violence, and the global rise of Pentecostalism, it presents a critical recuperation of these themes, some of them first initiated by the author, and a review of their reception history. It then reviews that reception history in a way that discusses not only the subjects themselves, but also the academic practices that have surrounded them.

As such, this collection is vital reading for all academics with an interest in David Martin's work, as well as those involved with the sociology of religion and the study of secularisation more generally.

Part I
The travels and travails of the concept of secularisation

1 Overview of the problem

How the world of learning operates

I was specifically asked¹ to reflect on a lifetime’s learning and writing, meaning my intellectual work over the last half-century or so, but for reasons that will become apparent I extend my reflections, rather unwillingly, to include what I have learnt about the way the world of learning operates in its everyday scholarly practice. More specifically, I do this with regard to key issues that have preoccupied me, notably in the first instance the issue of secularisation, but then, in due course, the global eruption of Pentecostalism and the problems of religious violence and religious pacifism. I can only make clear the patterns that characterise the field through at least some reference to the reception of my own work. That is how I found out how my sub-discipline carries on its intellectual and professional business. Being asked to reflect on my work over some five decades has taught me a great deal about the social processes governing academic work, including aspects I might have preferred not to know. Apart from tracing the reception of my own work over half a century or so, I have undertaken the more important task of selecting stepping stones in the ebb and flow of debate. I hope these may provide keys to the major issues at stake, though these are bound to reflect what I regard as important. One of my rather disconcerting discoveries in the course of this retrospect concerns the sheer range of different accounts of the debate offered in my intellectual lifetime. I hope that the focus provided by a personal lens may provide some cumulative access to one of the most difficult problems in the social sciences.

Of course, there are many things I cannot do. I cannot include all the main contributors such as Bryan Turner,² James Beckford, Roland Robertson, Peter Beyer, Richard Fenn, Wade Clark Roof, Christian Smith and Ronald Inglehart. I cannot provide a survey of the crucial contribution of the historian Hugh McLeod or cover the foundational work of Thomas Luckmann or trace the continuing contributions of José Casanova. I cannot give anything like a proper account of such a key figure for the subject as Charles Taylor, even though I have been a regular participant in the group he has brought together over several years in Vienna. As for people who have influenced my broad intellectual orientation, such as Pitirim Sorokin and Edward Tyriakian, I can do no more than acknowledge here their presence in the background.

I take off from observations I made in a celebratory article on Peter Berger (Martin 2012a) that had to do with his intellectual trajectory and his reception. In this instance the focus was on a colleague and friend, not on myself. I was interested in ‘our’ mental maps of the field in which ‘we’ operated. I suggested we all knew how easily that field fragments into discrete research communities with their own preoccupations and we all knew that these were bound up with who knows whom, not (I may say) on account of corruption but on account of the easements provided by proximity and placement. Where you are matters as much as who you are. Corruption can be taken as a given, whereas our mode of operation depends on how you project an intellectual presence from a particular vantage point or strategic location and on how much others are aware of you as needing to be taken into account. Visibility matters as a motive for reciprocity, especially in a world where people take citation indices seriously. In any case, as I know from my own very imperfect practice, people read carelessly and forget easily. Failures of memory, no doubt often subconsciously strategic, can be taken for granted as much as corruption can be taken for granted.

It is important that ‘our’ map of the field was dotted with unknown territories and with major discontinuities. The key American figures, Peter Berger, Rodney Stark, Robert Bellah and Robert Wuthnow, just to take four examples, had very distinct intellectual personae and inhabited quite different parts of the field.³ Of course, Peter Berger has engaged in major collaborations with some of the most distinguished people in the sociology of religion, including Europeans such as Thomas Luckmann and Hansfried Kellner. But once you think further about these collaborations they were with people of like mind and shared preoccupations, not ventures across the kind of divide that separates Peter Berger from Rodney Stark. I may have been remiss in my reading, but I am not aware of an extended critique by Berger of what Stark argues about the effects of pluralism, even though it provides a very pointed contrast with his own views. What distinguishes everything Peter Berger writes is a phenomenological grounding which enables him to persuade us with artful narratives and invitations to thought experiments. He deploys a graceful style informed by a distinctive humour (in every sense of the word) without all that much recourse to empirical evidence, beyond illustration. Apart from Peter Berger’s major collaborations, notably with Luckmann, Kellner and Brigitte Berger, there are others of us who were not so much cooperating with him as people who provided supportive data and helpful illustrations. My own research on Pentecostalism offered further evidence of what Berger called the ‘furious religiosity’ of the contemporary world (Berger 1999). Berger’s co-authored book with Grace Davie and Effie Fokas (Berger et al. 2008) on the key issue of whether America or Europe is the odd one out in global historical terms, is maybe midway between a collaboration and the feeder role. There is nothing odd or reprehensible about such a role. It is normal and honourable and in my own case I owed Peter Berger this modest service.

It was through my scrutiny of the reception of Peter Berger that I observed the intellectual autonomy and ‘splendid isolation’ of some of the most influential contributors to the sociology of religion, and the very individual character of their different approaches. Their contributions might be internally cumulative but they were less obviously cumulative in terms of the sociology of religion understood, or rather misunderstood, as a shared project. Our traces, and here, of course, I include my own, are strikingly characteristic and distinctive. They may overlap each other from time to time, and they may even occasionally converge, but sometimes they peter out and disappear off the supposed map of the discipline. Each one of us contributing to the debate arrives at different conclusions and different ways of articulating them. Partly that is because the evidence to which we appeal spans cultural space and time on variable scales, some of them very large, but it is also because we start from different cultural hinterlands, different premises, different methodologies and variable vocabularies. We attend differently. We expand and contract the boundaries of our conceptual apparatus, whether we talk about secularisation or alternatively talk in terms of transformation and re-sacralising to fit the thrust of our arguments. Sometimes we even exaggerate elements in the arguments of others to create more room for our own originality. For example, one of the strategies adopted in the attack on the ‘standard model’ of secularisation theory has been to imply that its proponents went so far as to predict the demise of religion as distinct from a change in its status as a consequence of functional differentiation. We rhetorically manipulate our conceptual space at the same time as we adduce evidence.

To say that we occupy different cultural hinterlands, deploy variable vocabularies and manipulate conceptual space does not mean we do not share enough common ground to debate according to agreed rules. I disagreed radically with my Oxford colleague and ‘significant other’ Bryan Wilson about the framework within which his arguments were conducted and about the nature of the ‘socio-logic’ to which we were both committed. But within the ‘middle range’ of discussion we could and did agree on a great deal. The social world ‘out there’ is not chaotic or even all that malleable under the pressure of different hermeneutic strategies and it imposes itself on us rather than the other way around. We are dealing with mutually understandable and checkable order, not chaos. In the British context Grace Davie can be seen as following more along lines consonant with mine whereas Steve Bruce sees himself as the conscious successor to Bryan Wilson. But when they debate they deploy shared criteria about what is to count as persuasive evidence. Grace Davie does not deny major secularising tendencies in Britain. Neither do I. Indeed, I think that within the scope of the discussion as Steve Bruce understands and practises it, Britain can be regarded, with the Netherlands, as one of the most secular countries in the world, and increasingly so with each generation. The account given by David Voas of what he calls ‘the secular transition’ from generation to generation seems to me persuasive. I have no problem with it.

The problem does not arise in this middle range. It is more likely to arise when the conceptual frame shifts from the secularisation of religious consciousness to (say) its transformation in a way that illustrates the rise of ‘me’ religions and the turn to the self, as well as religion promoted as therapy, or perhaps more aptly, therapy categorised as religion. This is roughly the position taken by Linda Woodhead and Christopher Partridge, though it will become clear that I am not entirely convinced by it. The same point is likely to arise, for example, in a discussion of whether we encounter the secularisation of the religious field in the contemporary Netherlands or its transformation. I cite these issues simply to underline the key role played by the conceptual frame even within hitherto Christian countries like England and the Netherlands. The issues become much more acute once the scale of discussion is increased to include other world religions (it works quite differently in Islam, for example) and when extended to what it means to be secular or worldly in the fundamental sense of the word. It is, after all, the Christian vocabulary, and specifically the Latin Christian vocabulary, that generated the notion of ‘the secular’ in the first place.

This is just one of the areas where covert evaluations operate. How you frame a debate turns in part on how you estimate the phenomena in question, both empirically and morally. You place and locate them in your universe of evaluations, as well as ordering them positively and negatively. You may, for example, discount an interest in the paranormal empirically because you regard it as intellectually and morally trivial. This is where a close reading of the vocabularies employed and of tonality tells you where an analyst is coming from.

The obvious differences in the way we attend do not cast fundamental doubt on the scientific character of what we do. Rather they show us to be properly conscious of conceptual problems, and in a way that positively enhances scientific credibility. We are alert to the dangers. Science works by conceptual criticism and by winnowing, and there are many twists and turns on the way to better understanding. But as the whole history of the secularisation debate illustrates, there is considerably more to it than that. According to Thomas Kuhn’s classic analysis, so-called ‘normal science’ works by following paradigms and eliciting the underlying assumptions. That means that the notion of steady accumulation and winnowing does not entirely represent what happens. Rather, reigning paradigms accommodate seeming anomalies for as long as they plausibly can, until the cracks and strains become all too obvious, and they are overturned. In the case of the reigning paradigm of secularisation it was substantially reversed and even stood on its head. It is worth recalling that the philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, harboured a radical scepticism about all our supposed rules of scientific procedure. He considered our practices more political than collegial. For him critical rhetoric and ridicule played a major role in facilitating intellectual change. This would make scientific debate approximate the cut and thrust of politics more than is comfortable to contemplate. It would suggest that Isaac Newton’s self-serving management of his career is far from unusual. Maybe donning the white coat of disinterested science disguises fundamental rivalries and masks self-interested claims to priority and recognition.

However that may be, at least some of our differences are inherent in the hybrid and hermeneutic character of sociology. Our subject is a humanistic enterprise that deploys a mode of knowing appropriate to its human ‘subject’ matter. Yet it also appeals to agreed tests, including statistical reasoning, of what passes intellectual muster.⁴ That is precisely what being hybrid means. Our differences are also inherent in the way some of the most influential theories of secularisation, such as the very different theories proposed by Marxists and Durkheimians, emanate from closed systems and ideologies. In the case of Durkheim the theory may be very suggestive but to say that the sacred equates with ‘the social’ is a philosophical claim, not an empirical observation. The distinction is very important. If a sociologist claims that in this or that instance religion is dependent on some other more real or active factor, for example, that resistance to secularisation in Poland is really nationalism and cultural defence, you want to know whether this claim is philosophically based or empirically derived. When the claim is made by Steve Bruce it is derived by empirical comparisons with countries exhibiting similar characteristics. It helps that Steve Bruce is rather averse to theory. If sustained, his empirical argument makes a major difference to the debate over secularisation.

One of the oddities of the sociology of religion is that it may appear to be a minor sub-discipline of sociology, however central it was to sociology’s founding fathers. Nevertheless it requires its practitioners to be ‘universal swordsmen’, cognisant of an amazing and daunting range of disciplines dealing with religion. In this scholarly area it is virtually impossible to keep topics within confined and defensible boundaries. We simply cannot avoid raising much wider considerations, which derive from and impinge upon historical and other kinds of scholarship. For example, we may in classic sociological style make comparisons with historical processes as a basis for speculation about the future, given that the future is prefigured in the past, at least once that future has actually arrived. We can refer back comparatively to the shift from ‘fortress Catholicism’ of the right in the nineteenth century to the Catholic Church’s support of the democratic centre in the twentieth. And we can then use that shift to speculate about where Islam may currently be heading. Maybe the Islam that intrudes on our immediate foreground obscures a very different future. But we also know all the while that Catholicism and Islam are very different and that such comparisons are inexact and may be thrown completely off course by unforeseen contingencies. As a British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, once complained, the problem is ‘events, dear boy, events’.

The question concerning the real character of a given religion, like the question concerning what is really religious, is not at all marginal to the issues at play in the secularisation debate. The issue, half hidden within speculations of the kind just mentioned, is of singular importance. Our ideas about what is essential and what is contingent about any religion and about how far it is bound to context are embedded in the kind of arguments we want to make as part of our stance towards our world, as well as being susceptible to evidence. I return to this issue later. Whatever the topic under consideration we are spreadeagled by the scope of what we might need to take into account and we are often taken aback by novel approaches coming from angles we barely knew existed.

As these chapters illustrate it is peculiarly difficult to know what is not relevant when the topic of secularisation revolves around something as fundamental as our orientation to the protean (and distinctively Christian) category of ‘the world’. If we turn from secularisation, understood as the ebbing fortunes of institutions, to secularisation understood as the decline of any reference to the pressure still exercised today by the transcendent, or by eschatology in all its varied forms, or by the template of ethnic consciousness laid down in the Bible, then we find ourselves telling very different stories, including ideas, images, icons and pictograms that lodge far from their institutional base. These include some of the most powerful and anti-religious movements of the twentieth century as well as contemporary nationalism. Politics, religion and a variety of cultural forms draw on the same symbolic and mythic resource...