Secularisation in the Christian World

Michael Snape, Callum G. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317058298
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The power of modernity to secularise has been a foundational idea of the western world. Both social science and church history understood that the Christian religion from 1750 was deeply vulnerable to industrial urbanisation and the Enlightenment. But as evidence mounts that countries of the European world experienced secularising forces in different ways at different periods, the timing and causes of de-Christianisation are now widely seen as far from straightforward. Secularisation in the Christian World brings together leading scholars in the social history of religion and the sociology of religion to explore what we know about the decline of organised Christianity in Britain, Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia. The chapters tackle different strands, themes, comparisons and territories to demonstrate the diversity of approach, thinking and evidence that has emerged in the last 30 years of scholarship into the religious past and present. The volume includes both new research and essays of theoretical reflection by the most eminent academics. It highlights historians and sociologists in both agreement and dispute. With contributors from eight countries, the volume also brings together many nations for the first consolidated international consideration of recent themes in de-Christianisation. With church historians and cultural historians, and religious sociologists and sociologists of the godless society, this book provides a state-of-the-art guide to secularisation studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Conceptualising Secularisation 1974–2010: the Influence of Hugh McLeod

Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape

Secularisation is a promiscuous concept. It crops up in all sorts of disciplines, bandied about by scholars of diverse interests. It is studied using varied methods of inquiry, and is portrayed in no single language of expression. For generations it has been the subject of publications and conferences, and it has had few competitors in its capacity for spawning almost endless international debate. Though widely seen as a subordinate offshoot of the wider sociological concept of modernisation, secularisation has outshone its ‘parent’; some regard modernity as time-barred, an historical period, overhauled by late modernity, post-modernity or late capitalism. Meanwhile, secularisation seems timeless. Surviving the linguistic turn has led in recent years to fresh branches of the academy taking secularisation to their work; literary studies have engaged with it in ways virtually unknown a few decades ago. So, its longevity may in part be a product of its licentiousness. The absence of agreement on its definition, characteristics, timing, causes, or applicability to particular places or cultures, makes secularisation handy in argument through widespread application (and not a little flagrant abuse). It has survived because of its weaknesses, and it still snuggles in the intellectual backpack of the social scientist, historian, anthropologist and artist.

Since the mid 1970s, one historian has stood out as the intellectual and research leader in the field of secularisation studies. Hugh McLeod, Professor of Church History at the University of Birmingham, has developed a breadth of knowledge on secularisation in the Christian world since the eighteenth century unsurpassed by any other scholar, developing extensive first-hand archival knowledge of the changing social significance of religion in England, Germany and the United States, and further extensive research knowledge through both primary and secondary sources of the rest of Britain, Europe, Australasia and Canada. His comparative perspective is quite unsurpassed. No other historian has attempted to bring the modern Christian world to such a state of consolidated comprehension in its social aspect. Along the way, he has nurtured scores of students and new scholars from his base in the departments of Theology and History at the University of Birmingham; approached by the young and eager researcher for advice, he has always endeared himself by being more eager than his acolytes that he should learn from them. After each presentation to a conference or seminar, Hugh has captured names and contacts in his little notebook. His self-effacing and unpretentious manner has made him the ideal leader of an international network of scholars whom he has brought together in many conference projects and edited collections. His command of the subject has been such that, though he supervised thirteen doctoral students at Birmingham, he was external examiner for a further 27 in 17 universities across four countries. With visiting lectureships and professorships at five overseas universities plus numerous consultancies and much committee work, his stature in the profession was shown by his appointment as deputy chair to the UK RAE2008 Panel for Theology, Divinity and Religious Studies, in his election as Fellow of the British Academy in the same year and in his elections in 2002–2003 as President of the Ecclesiastical History Society, and in 2005–10 as President of the Commission Internationale d’Histoire et d’Étude du Christianisme. In this way, Hugh McLeod is universally recognised as the father of the social history of religion in the late modern period.

Still, there is much more to Hugh McLeod than his distinction as a leading researcher, considerable though that is. Although less obvious to the outside world, throughout his many years at the University of Birmingham he has distinguished himself as much in his teaching and administrative roles as he has in his research, continuing to teach first-year undergraduates with the same care and enthusiasm that he brings to his research students and serving successively as head of department, dean of faculty and sitting on the university senate. Whatever its future, the corporate life of the University of Birmingham will be much the poorer for his impending retirement. However, Hugh’s non-academic interests and commitments also say much about the man; a committed Quaker, Hugh’s social activism is well known to his family and to his friends and colleagues. Passionately and publicly opposed to capital punishment (which he chose as the subject of his presidential address to the Ecclesiastical History Society conference in 2002),¹ to war and to racial injustice, Hugh’s practical Christianity has also found expression in his work for prisoners and for refugees and also in his services as Quaker chaplain to the students and staff of the University of Birmingham.

This book is a festschrift to Hugh’s remarkable career. Scholars from around the world, ranging across church history, social history and sociology of religion, have come together to acknowledge his friendship as much as his intellectual leadership. Here we create a guide to the state of knowledge in the study of secularisation in the western Christian world, concentrating on Hugh’s well-worn intellectual stamping grounds on both sides of the Atlantic and in Australasia. A central difficulty has been that of leaving out Hugh McLeod as a contributor, but the authors here provide both overviews and new research that leads, in many cases, where Hugh has pointed over the last three decades.

The Development of Secularisation as an Historical Concept

Secularisation is a concept that has not only survived, but has increasingly brought scholars from different countries together in the burgeoning international debates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries concerning religious change. Where once it was a predominantly Anglophone idea, generating interest in the north Atlantic and Australasian world, it has since the 1970s spread into academic study in Europe and into inter-continental debate about the changing patterns of the social significance of religion across the globe. In this process, the methods of inquiry and suppositions as to what secularisation is or has been have not suffered compression into a single definition, but, much to the unalloyed irritation of graduate students and young researchers almost everywhere, definitions and conceptualisations have mushroomed, generating a field of study with such complexity in theory and concept as to make agreement seem almost impossible. And yet, study and international interchange thrive. Lack of agreement as to what we are all talking about has not stopped the talking. We are still keen to debate the interminable debate.

The scholarship that led to this present state of affairs arose especially from debates between the late 1950s and the mid 1970s about the place of Christianity in British and American society. Part of the discussion was generated in sociology, where the concern was with the religious state of society in the present time – the middle decades of the century. British-based sociologists of religion like Bryan Wilson, David Martin and more recently Steve Bruce joined scholars like Peter Berger and Rodney Stark from the USA in conceptualising the changing nature of religion in contemporary society. But the other part of the debate was generated by historians, both social historians and ecclesiastical historians. Leading figures here included those from a left-wing social-history background such as Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, and John Foster.² Amongst historical sociologists and anthropologists were figures such as Robert Currie, Robert Moore, Allan MacLaren and David Clark.³ Amongst those working within church history, Owen Chadwick was especially important in developing an intellectual approach to the study of secularisation.⁴

The framework of understanding amongst sociologists and historians developed during the 1950s and 1960s was partly shared but partly diverging. What was shared was an acceptance that Britain and the United States were already ‘secular’ countries, where the place of religion was jeopardised by large scale indifference to religion, significant hostility to the churches, and the declining institutional strength of religion in state and civil affairs. Behind this resumé rested an intellectual agreement on the impact of what sociologists called modernisation and what historians, suspicious of the undifferentiated concept, labelled as a mixture of urbanisation, industrialism and the impact of the Enlightenment. There was general acceptance that religious decline was something to be measured more holistically than merely church decline, and there was agreement with Bryan Wilson’s 1966 definition of secularisation as ‘the declining social significance of religion’.⁵ Moreover, historians and sociologists agreed that this was a long-term process, one that had certainly got under way in the eighteenth century and accelerated so far in the nineteenth century as to constitute a major century of secularisation. But the longevity of the process was accepted by many as older than that. Sociologists and Weberian social historians attributed the sixteenth-century Reformation with instituting an economic and intellectual secularisation triggered by the built-in secularising materialism within ‘this worldly asceticism’ of Protestant entrepreneurship and individualism; capitalism itself, Protestant and North European in its centre, lay at the heart of an historical-materialist vision of religious change which in the 1960s chimed with the Marxist times of the new social history. And that new social history had an early-modern branch that was developing a ‘golden age’ vision of The World We Have Lost which contrasted with our own age: as Peter Laslett wrote, ‘All of our ancestors were literal Christian believers, all of the time.’⁶ The aggregate effect was to see secularisation as a gradualist phenomenon lasting at least half a millennium (and even longer).⁷ Late-modern historians asked not too many questions about the empirical basis of the ‘golden age’; we should have been more alert to the importance of many early-modern historians not being especially interested in the question of when secularisation started, as this might have triggered more close examination of the empirical weaknesses of this argument.⁸

Where historians and sociologists could differ substantially was over causes. The driver of secularising in the sociology of religion developed as a self-evident process. For most sociologists, secularisation was the handmaiden of the much larger process of modernisation, in which the decline of a rural-based harmonious and largely unified society, headed by a powerful feudal or neo-feudal aristocracy, fomented the breakdown of a single world view. Religion was strong when it held the community together in a single vision of the world, expressed through joint worship in a universal church (usually an established state church) which interpreted ‘this world’ for the people and offered harmonious social relations based on an harmonious religious monopoly. Secularisation lay in the breakdown of the coherent world view; pluralism of religion through the rise of dissent invoked the gradual collapse of the other-worldly monopoly as visions first multiplied then let in the unbelieving option. Social discipline was no longer hitched to religious discipline, and the western Christian world careered towards an inevitable decline of the social significance of religion.⁹

This view was heard by social historians of religion, but rarely was it fully engaged by them. There was a quiet cynicism, not overtly pronounced, that led historians to search for a much greater degree of specificity over the timing and cause of secularisation. This had given rise to a growing interest in the social mechanics of economic change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an interest sparked in 1957 by E.R. Wickham’s study of Sheffield and in 1963 by Inglis’ study of the churches’ poor relations with the Victorian working classes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was translated by a new generation of historians into a full-bodied focus on class formation in the industrial revolution as the propellant of secularisation. This started in particular with E.P. Thompson’s study of Methodism in his The Making of the English Working Class, which pointed to the double-edged qualities of evangelical Protestantism as both a source of middle-class social control in forming a compliant and industrious factory proletariat, and as the internal ‘slave-driver’ that diverted the working man from considering revolution in favour of gradualist improvement within the capitalist system. This was followed by a highly influential study by Harold Perkin which pointed to how religion may have been what he termed ‘the midwife of class’ in Britain between 1780 and 1880.¹⁰ With other works, the net effect in the early 1970s was to push historians to recognise not the weakness of religion in the early industrial revolution but its strength in the transition years, and the battling of the churches to redeem their early neglect and reclaim the workers for Christ and the church. Historians layered more and more detail in local case studies to show the significance of religion in the society of the world’s first industrial revolution and first rapidly urbanising people.

There were obvious weaknesses in the state of affairs in the 1960s and 1970s. The first and the foremost was the way in which the issue of the history of secularisation was centred on the British and American experience. The comparative experience across the rest of Europe, in other Christian countries, and beyond the Christian tradition, were matters which were not central to the ways in which scholars in history reflected on their work. Second, the conceptualisation of secularisation was occurring in two mism...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Conceptualising Secularisation 1974–2010: the Influence of Hugh McLeod
• 2 Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation: A Progress Report
• 3 Implicit Understandings of Religion in Sociological Study and in the Work of Hugh McLeod
• 4 Protestant Migrations: Narratives of the Rise and Decline of Religion in the North Atlantic World c. 1650–1950
• 5 Protestantism, Monarchy and the Defence of Christian Britain 1837–2005
• 6 Australia: Towards Secularisation and One Step Back
• 7 Secularisation or Resacralisation? The Canadian Case, 1760–2000
• 8 A Classic Case of De-Christianisation? Religious Change in Scandinavia c. 1750–2000
• 9 War, Religion and Revival: the United States, British and Canadian Armies during the Second World War
• 10 Women and Religion in Britain: the Autobiographical View of the Fifties and Sixties
• 11 The Strange Death of Dutch Christendom
• 12 Europe in the Age of Secularisation
• 13 Secularisation in the UK and the USA
• 14 Thinking Broadly and Thinking Deeply: Two Examples of the Study of Religion in the Modern World
• Index