Secularization

Charles Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317625384
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Secularization' sounds simple, a decline in the power of religion. Yet, the history of the term is controversial and multi-faceted; it has been useful to both religious believers and non-believers and has been deployed by scholars to make sense of a variety of aspects of cultural and social change. This book will introduce the reader to this variety and show how secularization bears on the contemporary politics of religion.

Secularization addresses the sociological classics' ambivalent accounts of the future of religion, later and more robust sociological claims about religious decline, and the most influential philosophical secularization thesis, which says that the dominant ideas of modern thought are in fact religious ones in a secularized form. The book outlines some shortcomings of these accounts in the light of historical inquiry and comparative sociology; examines claims that some religions are 'resistant to secularization'; and analyzes controversies in the politics of religion, in particular over the relationship between Christianity and Islam and over the implicitly religious character of some modern political movements.

By giving equal attention to both sociological and philosophical accounts of secularization, and equal weight to ideas, institutions, and practices, this book introduces complicated ideas in a digestible format. It will appeal to students and scholars interested in making unusual connections within sociology, anthropology, philosophy, theology, and political theory.

1

THE CAREER OF A CONCEPT

In 1956 the philosopher W. B. Gallie introduced the idea of essentially contested concepts. These were concepts over whose definition scholars were unable to agree, not because they lacked the intellectual equipment but because the concepts themselves defied efforts to pin them down (Gallie, 1956). Two years later, Peter Winch said that all of the important problems of social science were really conceptual ones, and that it was the job of philosophy to resolve them (Winch, 1958). By and large social science has not followed Winch up that garden path, since he was calling into question the very idea of a social science. There have of course been notable long-running discussions about the meaning of concepts in the social sciences – power is the most obvious example – and these discussions have often helped us think better about social and political reality (Poggi, 2001). But conceptual analysis is a minor sport: most social theorists either try to construct conceptually pure systems (not what Winch had in mind) or use arbitrarily selected collections of concepts to help them say something they think important. In empirical social research, meanwhile, arguments over definitions do not hamper inquiry very much: disputes about the meaning of ‘class,’ for instance, don’t get in the way of accounts of class experience or of class structure any more than the handful of definitions of ‘nationalism’ or ‘gender’ stop people studying them. One reason for this is that the concepts of class, nation and gender all define an area of inquiry the existence of whose object it would be foolish to dispute.

The concept of secularization is different from these in that it refers to a process rather than a field of inquiry and thus has an empirical claim about the nature of historical change built into it. In the natural sciences that would make little difference but in social science it is bound to make it more contested. At first glance this may seem odd, as the idea that modern societies are pervaded by secular ideas, that modern science, art, work, and politics obey logics of action and follow basic values that owe little or nothing to religion, and that religion’s social, cultural, and political significance has declined in industrial and post-industrial societies over the last century and a half, can sound so obvious that arguing about it seems not worth the candle:

the thesis of religion’s demise…was a premise both of more progressive and of more conservative social theories…and thus not really an object of controversy…Today the concept is hardly used anymore in serious scientific writing…It brings together too many heterogeneous traditions in a single term.

(Luhmann, 2013: 201)

If Luhmann is right, the discussion should probably stop here. But many say he is not, although for a variety of reasons. For some the resurgence and renewed political significance of religion in many parts of the world in the last four decades has called into question most of the claims made by sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s about its demise. Others, by contrast, say that Luhmann is wrong because secularization can indeed be the object of ‘serious scientific writing.’ According to this view there is a ‘secularization paradigm’ and ‘a research program with, at its core, an explanatory model’ (Wallis and Bruce, 1992: 8). It has even been said that ‘the theory of secularization may be the only theory which was able to attain a truly paradigmatic status within the modern social sciences’ (Casanova, 1994: 17), a decidedly ambivalent statement since a paradigm is supposed to be abandoned when a critical mass of anomalies builds up. That is not quite what has happened with secularization, and in any case, sociology’s home contains several mansions and types of occupant, among others those who continue to hold on to the secularization paradigm (Bruce, 2011), those who never believed in secularization in the first place (Stark and Bainbridge, 1985; Luckmann, 1986; Anderson, 1995; Stark, 1999; Joas, 2011; Clark, 2012), those who did but now talk of ‘de-secularization’ (Berger, 2001), and those who are riding the bandwagon called ‘post-secularism’ (Beckford, 2012).

We will visit sociology’s home quite a bit but also call on philosophers and theologians who have also used the term ‘secularization’ to help them think about ideational and cultural change. We might conclude that disciplinary boundaries exist for good reasons, and that in one respect Luhmann was more right than he knew: the word does have a bewildering variety of meanings.

We can get a sense of this variety by considering two lists. The first contains some of the empirical referents that appear in discussions of secularization, while the second is a list of the historical periods different secularization theses treat as important. To be sure, all historical inquiry that operates on a grand scale has to deal with tensions between the substantive and historical sense of key terms, that is, between the idea that we are dealing with something that can happen at any time in history, and the idea that there was a decisive period over which it happened. Nevertheless, secularization presents us with an especially wide variety of referents and periods.

‘Secularization’ has been taken to mean: an institutional separation of church and state; a differentiation of the ‘spheres’ of religion and politics or economics or law or art or science; the transfer of property from ecclesiastical to non-ecclesiastical ownership; the transfer of authority from ecclesiastical to non-ecclesiastical institutions; a process in which monks (‘regular clergy’) left a monastery and became priests (‘secular clergy’); the ‘privatization’ of belief in God or the sacred; a decline in the membership of religious associations and participation in their activities; a decline in the importance of domains of cognitive and emotional attachment once considered sacred; a shift away from religious and towards secular justifications for political authority; a decline in the role played by religious organizations in education and welfare; the disappearance of religious needs; in the adoption by religious leaders of secular language in their public statements; a shift in the character of religious collectivities from ’communities of belief’ to ‘communities of interest’ ready to take their place in civil society alongside other interest groups; the transformation of an original religious idea into a different, secular form; a blurring of the distinction between the sacred and the profane; a sharpening of that distinction.

This variety of meanings has been accompanied by, or given rise to, a variety of claims about historical periods in which secularization happened: the last decade in the United States as the number of Americans declaring they have no religious affiliation rises dramatically (Beinart, 2017); the 1960s which saw a cultural loosening, a dramatic decline in religious participation, and the sexual liberation of women (Brown, 2001); the 1920s, which saw the deliberate establishment in post-Ottoman Turkey of a secular republic, the sustained attacks on the Orthodox Church in post-revolutionary Russia, and for that matter the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses; the 19^th century and the reshaping of nature through industry and science and the advent of philosophies of progress; the 18^th century, which in France saw the enlightenment, the subjection of ecclesiastical institutions to vigorous taxation, and the de-Christianization campaign of 1793–1794; the 17^th century and the scientific revolution in Europe; the period between the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 and the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the shift from ‘confessional’ to ‘secular’ conceptions of civil governance; the 11^th to 13^th centuries during which authority in England was ‘laicized’ (Sommerville, 1992); the 1^st to the 4^th century AD when the early church adopted Greek ‘scientific’ modes of reasoning, and Christianity became an instrument of Roman imperial rule; the crucifixion, when an act of ‘enlightenment’ revolutionized the meaning of sacrifice by declaring the sacrificial victim to be innocent (Girard, 2011); the period around 1000 BC that saw the advent of monotheism itself and a decline of polytheism, in which a world that was full of gods gave way to a dualistic universe in which a world now empty of gods is confronted by an external and supreme God; the period around 3000 BC when polities emerge and human priorities shift away from the heavens towards the construction and maintenance of social hierarchies (Gauchet, 1997); the expulsion from the garden of Eden, in which God, bored by the perfection of the world he has created, turns it into an arena of human striving and failure.

One or two of these sound a little fanciful, but they do appear in some of the more speculative meditations on human history.

Polemical and technical

Nietzsche says:

a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases – which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.

(Nietzsche, 2006: 117)

He meant that we would be wary of using any concepts at all, but while many concepts in the social sciences have begun life as words used by social actors in a fuzzy or polemical way, they have developed into something more technical and useful; by the same token some – notably in psychology – have begun life as technical terms and gone fuzzy as they have been popularized (Bloom, 1987: 147). ‘Secularization’ appeared as early as 14^th century France, where there was a difference between ‘regular’ clergy in a monastery and ‘secular’ clergy outside, so that those who left a monastery were described as having been ‘secularized.’ Later, secularization came to mean a change in the status and ownership of a piece of ecclesiastical property. One of the first polemical uses of the term in this sense is generally attributed to Henri d’Orleans, Duc de Longueville, head of the French delegation to the negotiations at Münster that eventually led to the Peace of Westphalia and the end of the Thirty Years War. One bone of contention was what to do with ecclesiastical property that had changed hands in central Europe since 1552, three years before the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 that had ended central Europe’s previous war between Catholics and Protestants. Much of it was in the hands of Lutheran or Calvinist princes and the organizations which had taken over the running of churches and monasteries under the terms of what was called the jus reformandi. On May 8^th 1646, when it became clear that what were basically facts on the ground were to be declared legal, the Duc remarked that this amounted to its ‘secularization’: for him at least, the transfer of property from the Catholic Church to another religious organization was no different from Henry VIII’s transfer of monastic land to secular lords.

One view says that the Duc put it like this because he was speaking at the close of a century and a half of post-reformation upheaval in central Europe, during which an arrangement in which a more or less unified Catholic Church provided a cultural roof on top of a patchwork of polities – principalities, city-states, and kingdoms – had given way to a series of more autonomous and solid centers of political rule and more continuous modes of rulership. One step along that road had been the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which put a provisional end to the religious wars in Germany and resolved problems of property and taxation that had arisen as a result of the Reformation; it established that the Lutheran Church could keep anything it had acquired before 1552, and that territorial rulers were the secular guardians of religion within their own lands (Wilson, 2009: 42). The famous expression Cuius regio eius religio – whose realm his religion – didn’t come into legal force until 1586. After the Thirty Years War, The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 added Calvinism to the list of approved official confessions, by which time consolidated polities of a recognizably modern sort were emerging, in which matters of supervision and control that had once been the exclusive business of the church – from public penance to confession – came to be administered by a combination of secular and lay officialdom. Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic countries came to differ not so much in the extent to which they were able to discipline and control populations, but in the particular combinations of religious and lay officials, magistrates and consistories that were responsible for poor relief or (rudimentary) education. Luther had, notoriously, argued that the prince should now be able to supervise the clergy too (Skinner, 1978), which meant the abolition of bishops, the vetting of new priests by bodies known as consistories, and the transmission of God’s word by means of sermons that could be used to communicate a secular ruler’s decrees.¹ The ‘disciplinary revolution’ (Gorski, 2000, 2003) that the Reformation unleashed extended across the whole of what had been Catholic Europe, not least because The Council of Trent of 1545–1563, called in reaction to the reformation, reasserted religious values, revived neglected practices such as Corpus Christi processions, rationalized the organization of the priesthood – bishops had to live in their cathedral cities, the Holy See’s diplomatic corps was improved – and replace older acts of public penance with new practices such as private confession in a designated enclosed space. The Catholic Church had, however, lost its monopoly on supervisory techniques.

Ideas about toleration were also developed during this period. The Peace of Augsburg gave those who wished to practice another religion the choice of leaving the territory for one where it was practiced, but that was as far as it went. In France, meanwhile, after the Concordat of Bologna in 1516, bishops were appointed by the King not the Pope, after which a deep sense of Christian belief was by no means a requirement for the job: ‘the king had made the upper ranks of the church into a vast system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy’ (Beales, 2003: 104). In return the coronation oath, which would be unaltered until 1789, had a new clause stating that the monarch’s first duty was to pursue and expel heretics.² After the rise of Calvinism had resulted in civil wars between 1562 and 1598, Henri IV, himself a convert, proclaimed the Edict of Nantes, which was not an act of toleration but an effort to bring all Huguenots back into the Catholic fold. When Louis XIV revoked it in 1685 this was continuous with the purpose of maintaining the Catholic identity of the French kingdom. Meanwhile, the Protestant identity of the English Kingdom was established via Henry VIII’s act of supremacy, the Act of Uniformity of 1559, the religious conflicts of the 17^th century, and the so-called glorious revolution of 1688–1689.

The term often used for these developments is ‘confessionalization,’ the differentiation of Western Christianity into three main confessions, but within each confession a ‘dedifferentiation’ between secular and religious disciplinary techniques (Gorski, 2000). Of 1648 by contrast it has been said that, ‘it promoted secularization in the long run’ (Wilson, 2009: 758), in the long run because at the time all it did was add Calvinists to the list of accepted confessions, while leaving out Jews and Muslims and in any case extending toleration on the basis of corporate or group rights, not the individual rights we associate today with ideas about freedom of conscience. Still, so it is said, recognizably modern states were beginning to emerge and justifications for political authority begin to be articulated in more overtly secular terms (Böckenforde, 1991). Hobbes and Pufendorf both suggested public expressions of a belief in God would make people more likely to obey laws made by human beings, but that is already a very functionalist way of thinking. More broadly, since at least the beginning of the 19^th century the spectrum of attitudes towards what can be done with religion ‘excludes any thorough attempt to sacralize the political domain’ (Poggi, 2001: 79). Accordingly, most discussions of religion and politics in the West are about how much religious organizations can demand of the state and how much they can influence it, but no more than that.

Some of our current thinking about religion and politics echoes debates that took place in the early modern period. The relationship between the intensity and scope of religious belief, the veracity of claims about what people actually believe, techniques for the supervision and control of the laity, commitment of individuals to one confession or anothe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1. The career of a concept
• 2. Secularization and ambivalence
• 3. Four sociological secularization gospels
• 4. Secularization and philosophy
• 5. The revenge of history and sociology
• 6. Fundamentalism, zombie religion, secular religion
• 7. An inconclusive conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index