Secularisation UK

12 Key excerpts on "Secularisation UK"

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  Presidential Elections in Iran

  Islamic Idealism since the Revolution

  • Mahmoud Pargoo, Shahram Akbarzadeh(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Theoretical Framework Defining Secularisation Secularisation is often conceptualised as a separation of religion from the social sphere. For example, prominent sociologist Brian Wilson describes secularisation as ‘the process whereby religious thinking, practices and institutions lose their social significance’. 1 One theory of secularisation puts special emphasis on the notion of ‘differenti- ation’. According to Niklas Luhmann, the once unitary society bound by religion has gradually disintegrated into separate functional units, each almost autonomous from the other. Religion ‘is one of the many functionally differentiated social systems that make up modern society’. 2 Similarly, David Martin claims that ‘social differentiation refers to the clearly identifiable process whereby social spheres, such as the state, administration, welfare, education and the arts, are freed from ecclesiastical oversight and from theology’. 3 Another conceptual- isation of secularisation sees privatisation of religion as its central element. Martin postulates the benefit of this, claiming that it poten- tially ‘creates a space in which faith can discover its own specific character, free from either the Constantinian constraints of establish- ment or seductive opportunities for political influence’. 4 A further conceptualisation of secularisation characterises it as a decline in reli- gious belief and practice. Scholars point to decreasing statistics for attendance at religious establishments, such as the church and mosque, 1 Bryan Wilson, Religion in secular society: fifty years on (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1. 2 Niklas Luhmann, A systems theory of religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 43. 3 David Martin, The future of Christianity: reflections on violence and democracy, religion and secularization (London: Routledge, 2016), 26. 4 Ibid., 26. 17

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  Religion, Law and Society

  • Russell Sandberg(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  As Rowan Williams has observed, the term secular ‘does not quite capture where we are’. 25 The matter is confused further by the way in which terms like ‘secular’, ‘secularisation’ and ‘secularism’ are used interchangeably. This is misleading because the terms mean different things. 26 The term ‘secular’ refers to a category that can be distinguished from ‘the religious’. 27 The term ‘secularisation’ describes a ‘process of religious change’, usually alleging that there has been a decline over time in religious behaviour. 28 And the worldview of ‘secularism’ refers to an ideology, 29 a theoretical and often political or philosophical pos- ture, which promotes secularity. 30 Yet, the terms ‘secularisation’ and Assent. For the purposes of the Human Rights Act 1998, Measures are classified as a form of primary legislation and Canons are classified as a form of secondary legislation. See, further, Sandberg, Law and Religion, chapter 4 and for detailed analysis of the law pertaining to the established Church see N Doe, The Legal Framework of the Church of England: A Critical Study in a Comparative Context (Clarendon Press, 1996) and Hill, Ecclesiastical Law. 22 Sandberg, Law and Religion, 202. 23 See, generally, D Herman, An Unfortunate Coincidence: Jews, Jewishness and English Law (Oxford University Press, 2011). 24 Education Act 1996, s. 375(3); School Standards and Framework Act 1998, Schedule 20. These provisions apply to maintained schools that do not have a religious character. See fur- ther, Sandberg, Law and Religion, chapter 8. 25 R Williams, Faith in the Public Square (Bloomsbury, 2011) 2. 26 This is not to question that these meanings change over time and are shaped by their usages over time. For instance, it is commonly asserted that the phrase ‘to secularise’ originates from the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s: see D Herbert, Religion and Civil Society (Ashgate, 2003) 29 and Beckford, Social Theory & Religion, 33.

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  Monarchy, religion and the state

  Civil religion in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the Commonwealth

  • Norman Bonney(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  Secularisation, religion and the state

  This chapter introduces a discussion of a fundamental paradox concerning contemporary society and government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) – that while there is strong evidence of continuing trends towards a more secular and less religious society and pattern of social behaviour, at the same time, religious doctrines, rituals and institutions are central to the legitimacy, stability and continuity of key elements of the constitutional and political system. In exploring this paradox, the chapter begins by outlining the thesis of secularisation and the apparently strong evidence in its favour in relation to the personal behaviour of individuals and the culture of society. Then, following a preliminary account of the continuing key features of the religious dimensions of the contemporary UK state, the argument attempts to account for the failure of secularisation theory, which seems convincing in many areas of contemporary social and political life, to explain the continuation in the early twenty-first century of the religious dimensions of the state, by examining the evidence concerning popular attitudes towards religion. The findings suggest that secularisation processes still have a long way to go to eliminate supportive religious ideas from the popular consciousness. So long as there are these substantial reservoirs of support for religious ideas and practices among the population, advocates and proponents of the ‘sacred’ dimensions to the state and the interests embedded in them are thus able to mobilise support for their maintenance, continuation or possible expansion against the counter-availing active forces of secularism and the more autonomous inbuilt social trends of secularisation.

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  Secularisation in the Christian World

  • Michael Snape, Callum G. Brown(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 13Secularisation in the UK and the USA

  Steve Bruce

  Introduction

  The proposition that modernisation weakens religion has a long sociological pedigree. Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim all foresaw a major decline. Religion’s ability to provide a single, integrated and generally-held conception of meaning was being fatally eroded by three things: the emergence of a range of life-experiences deriving from widely differing relationships to a rapidly changing social order; the increasingly rationalistic organisation of an industrialised mass market economy; and more universalistic conceptions of citizenship.

  Bryan Wilson’s 1966 Religion in Secular Society was for many British sociologists the key text. After examining detailed evidence for the decline in church adherence, declining status of the clergy and the like, he concluded that modernisation had brought two different forms of secularisation. In Britain, people abandoned churches. In America, churches remained popular by subordinating themselves to secular values. Pre-empting what was to become a common criticism, Wilson argued:

  the concept of secularization is not employed in any ideological sense, neither to applaud its occurrence, nor to deplore it. It is taken simply as a fact that religion – seen as a way of thinking, as the performance of particular practices, and as the institutionalization and organization of these patterns of thought and action – has lost influence.1

  Wilson was careful to specify that what modernisation brought was the declining social significance of religion and not the decline of religion per se. Although the British evidence suggested that significance and popularity were closely related, Wilson’s reading of America allowed that churches might remain popular social institutions despite becoming less religious and more marginal.

  In 1966 there was little dissent from this argument. It was largely accepted by church leaders, who were aware of the decline of Christianity, and by the social science community at large, which could see that the salience of religion in the fields which they studied had declined. In the USA, secularisation in the Wilsonian sense fitted easily with the then-dominant structural-functionalism of Talcott Parsons. The key Parsonian idea was that as societies become richer they became more differentiated. Spheres such as the economy and the polity became increasingly specialised and autonomous, driven by their own value-systems, and religion became privatised and marginalised. Given that the most radical rejection of the secularisation paradigm later came from the USA, it is worth adding that it was American social scientists, driven by the belief that the United States was the model for the evolution of the rest of the world, who were most likely to present the secularisation paradigm as a template for the developing world.2

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  The Sectarian Myth in Scotland

  Of Bitter Memory and Bigotry

  • M. Rosie(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  A range of statistics usefully illustrates Secularisation and ‘Sectarianism’ 33 the trends in popular Church connection, with the overall picture in the United Kingdom since c. 1950 one of sharp decline. 11 One-third of UK adults in 1900 were ‘members’ of a Christian Church. By 1950 this had declined to one-quarter, by 1975 to less than one-fifth, and by 2002 to under one-tenth. Since the early 1960s the number of UK Church members has fallen by over four million despite general population increase. Between 1960 and 2000 the number of active Church of England communicants halved, and Catholic Mass attendance across the UK fell by 39 per cent. In 1900 over half of Britain’s children were enrolled in Sunday Schools; the proportion for 2000 was just four per cent. 12 In 1900, 85 per cent of marriages in England and Wales were solemnised in a consecrated religious building; by 1950 this had fallen to 69 per cent; by 1975, 52 per cent; and by 1999 stood at 39 per cent in England and 44 per cent in Wales. 13 This mirrors an international phenomenon across most parts of the ‘First’ World. Although the velocity and extent of change may differ between societies ‘the direction of change in all indices of involvement in institutional religion is the same: downwards’. 14 Secularisation is, of course, a contested concept. Critics, while accepting institutional decline, point out that religious beliefs remain widespread. For Grace Davie, people are ‘believing without belonging’, the key issue a ‘drifting of belief . . . nominalism remains a more prevalent phenomenon than secularism’. 15 However, whilst belief in God remains high throughout Western Europe, it too is falling and disbelief rising. 16 Secularisation has impacted upon the culture of religious institutions themselves, many reducing ‘the specifically supernatural in their product’ and downplaying major aspects of traditional Christian orthodoxy.

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  A Church Drawing Near

  Spirituality and Mission in a Post-Christian Culture

  • Paul Avis(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  Clearly, the Britain of the Celtic missionary-saints, the Britain of the medieval wandering Friars or the Britain of John Wesley are not the Britain of the twenty-first century. Modern Britain is frequently said to be a secular society, in the sense that faith 50 is diminishing, the influence of the churches is declining, and religious practice is on the wane. This familiar comment is extremely simplistic. Clarifying ‘secularization’ The issue of secularization is a minefield, not only for theologians, who are not on their home ground when they try to grapple with it, but even for sociologists of religion, who are far from agreed about the meaning of the term or the helpfulness of the theory. The glib assumption is frequently made in the media that western society has become secular (in a way that is not clearly defined, but often approximates to non-religious, unconcerned with spiritual matters, this-worldly and materialistic) and is becoming more so and that this process is inevitable. There is much careless talk, about the supposedly ‘secular society’ in which we live in the West. This language is often adopted uncritically by religious pundits, such as bishops and other church leaders. Sometimes they are simply taking their cue from theologians. The American theologian Harvey Cox revelled in the jargon of secularization with uncritical abandon in The Secular City . ‘Secularization is the liberation of man from religious and metaphysical tutelage,’ he trumpeted. Secularization, claimed Cox, implied a historical process that was ‘almost certainly irreversible’ (Cox, 1968, pp. 31, 34). Now the pendulum has swung and some theologically aware social analysts point to the re-sacralization of life, the persistence of religion and the resurgence of theological issues in public debate (see Casanova, 1994; Berger, 1999). Talk about secularization would benefit from a shot of semantic precision.

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  Psychology and Religion

  An Introduction

  • Michael Argyle(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In addition the American culture seems to support religious values, which are endorsed by presidents and other politicians, and play a part in ceremonials, so that there has been said to be a ‘civil religion’. As the churches have become secularised and adapted to society’s values, the gap between church and society is small. Reimer (1995), who compared the USA and Canada, found that there was less difference between church attenders and others in the USA, and concluded that the non-religious had much the same outlook as the religious, which must be rather low in conviction for both.

  This theory has been used to explain the decline in church membership since the 1960s. The decline was particularly strong among those who were then under 30. It was this group which had been influenced by the counter-culture, and experienced a major change of attitudes and values in the direction of greater tolerance and freedom, in relation to sex, drugs and civil liberties. These were attitudes and behaviours to which the churches were opposed, and the result was that those so affected moved away from the churches (Hoge, 1979).

  Secularisation

  The great sociologists of the past, Durkheim, Weber and Marx, all predicted that industrialisation, urbanisation and prosperity would lead to the decline, perhaps the disappearance, of religion. This was described as ‘secularisation’, though this term has been used to mean different things. The simplest meaning is that there will be less religious activity in terms of church membership and attendance. Another meaning is that religion will have less influence on people’s behaviour. Another is that society will become ‘desacralised’, that is, supernatural forces will no longer be thought to be important. I shall consider how far secularisation in each of these three senses has in fact taken place.

  Is there less religious activity?

  We have seen that in Britain there was an increase in religious activity during the nineteenth century, a period when there was a great increase in industrialisation and urbanisation and other aspects of modernity, so evidently modernity did not produce secularisation then. In the present century membership of the main Protestant Churches has fallen, though the numbers of Catholics continued to rise for most of the century, partly because of their higher birth rate, and the numbers of Baptists and members of Protestant sects have increased. The main decline has been in church attendance, but there is no evidence that the level of beliefs has fallen, and 45–50 per cent still endorse the main Christian beliefs and say that they feel close to God. The condition of religion in Britain has been described as ‘believing without belonging’.

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  An Introduction to Religion and Politics

  Theory and Practice

  • Jonathan Fox(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is, rather, a revision of the theory. In this vein, some sociologists have redefined secularization to mean “differentiation”—a process where religion was once a dominant influence on all aspects of society but now constitutes one social institution which competes with others (Achterberg et al. 2009; Bruce, 2009; Dobbleare, 1985, 1999; Kaspersen and Lindvall, 2008; Lambert, 1999: 319–320). This redefinition, allows religion to remain a potent part of society and politics while still claiming it is in decline. Others simply continue to make the same arguments as classic secularization theorists but are careful to note that these processes lead to religion’s decline rather than leading to its irrelevance (Beyer, 1999; Bruce, 2009; Chaves, 1994; Davie, 2000; Hallward, 2008; Lambert, 1999; Lechner, 1991; Presser and Chaves, 2007; Tamadonfar and Jelen, 2014: 243; van der Brug et al., 2009; Voye, 1999; Yamane, 1997). Another version has it that the core claim of secularization theory is not SECULARIZATION AND FUNCTIONALISM 17 the deterministic inevitable decline of religion in modern societies but, rather, a high probability of this happening (Pollack, 2015: 62–63). Many within this trend focus on religion as an individual choice rather than a public choice. The removal of religion’s overarching authority unbinds individuals from a major form of social control and allows individuals more free choice. This includes the ability to choose the nature and extent of one’s own religious beliefs (Bruce, 2009: 147–148; Dobbelaere, 1999: 236–241; Lambert, 1999: 315, 322; Pollack and Pickel, 2007). “Individual religiosity has emancipated itself from the custody of the large religious institutions; religious preferences are increasingly subject to the individual’s autonomous choices. Churches no longer define comprehensive belief parameters; individuals instead decide on their own worldviews and spiritual orientations” (Pollack, 2008: 171).

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  Science and Christianity

  An Introduction to the Issues

  • J. B. Stump(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  2. Broadening the definition Perhaps Numbers’ definition was too narrow to show that secularization has occurred. Indeed, a significant problem presents itself when we try to pin down exactly what is meant by “secularization.” Historian Peter Burke notes that the term could refer to a number of possible trends in society, some of which are mutually contradictory. Some use it to refer to the decline in wealth and status of the Church, or relatedly to the increasing autonomy of the laity and the shrink- age or dilution of the sacred; but others think secularization is best described as the replacement of spiritual values by more material ones—a usage which would ironically see the increase in wealth and status of the Church as secularization (Burke 1979, 294). The difficulty in defining secularization is that it is dependent upon the defi- nition of religion, which has itself been notoriously difficult to define. Our con- cern here is primarily with the cognitive content of religion rather than its social forms, and so the version of secularization we consider should similarly empha- size the cognitive dimension. Specifically as it relates to science, we might try to conceive of secularization as a replacement of supernatural interpretations of reality with natural explanations. This is in the neighborhood of what German social theorist Max Weber (1864–1920) famously called the “disenchantment of the world,” and he believed that modern science was singularly responsible for bringing it about. But just as Brooke “complexified” any simple understandings of the general relationship between science and religion, he also argued that the process of secularization is more complex than a straightforward effect of scien- tific thinking on Christian belief (Brooke 2010). Secularization 35 First, despite the claims of disenchantment, science has not replaced theol- ogy.

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  Religion and Power

  No Logos without Mythos

  • David Martin(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Certainly I was interested in identifying when one might properly speak of a society entering modernity, which was very early in England and very late in Albania, though I remained distinctly wary of modernisation theory. My colleague Bryan Wilson accepted the marginality of our subject and wondered why people were interested in it unless they were working out a personal problem. That was one reason why he concentrated on small sects regarded as relics of traditional religious community which had persisted into the rationalised present. The sociology of religion was a sideshow given what he regarded as the declining social significance of religion. However, that observation introduces another complication because declining social significance is entirely compatible with increased critical activity in the public sphere.

  Secularism Then and Now

  This brief exercise in intellectual history introduces my discussion of secularisation, secularism and the post-secular. I did not regard secularism as a quasi-universal process leading to the privatisation of religion. I saw it as an ideology that prescribed privatisation and actively excluded religion from the public sphere, notably in France, Russia and Turkey. In my critique of secularisation I identified secularism as one of the crucial ideological loadings and normative prescriptions built into the master concept of secularisation. Ideological prescription easily masquerades as sociological description, especially when you recollect that much of sociology itself was part of the modernisation project. Of course we could have a descriptive ‘middle range’ theory of secularisation such as I attempted to devise, but one needed at the same time to identify the grand prescriptive project in which it was too often embedded. Secularism was that grand prescriptive project. Moreover, the sheer militancy of modernisation, secularisation and privatisation in the course of the French, Russian, Turkish and Chinese revolutions indicated the importance of religion, not its enfeebled irrelevance. What is departing from the stage of history in the course of a natural development does not need to be violently pushed by ideologues who consider ideology and violence uniquely associated with religion.

  Today secularism has changed its meaning. Secularism now refers to several different things simultaneously: a secular attitude indifferent to religion; the process of disentangling religion from state power; and the ideology that promotes this disentanglement. To make matters even more complicated, the ideology seeking to promote the disentanglement of state and religion can be religiously motivated, as it was in early modern Baptist movements and nineteenth-century English Nonconformity.6 Secularism understood as disentanglement can be a Christian project. In part the recent change of meaning reflects lay usages in the media. It also reflects debates in philosophy that extrapolate from the emancipation of philosophy from theology to the emancipation of politics from religion in what Jürgen Habermas calls a ‘post-metaphysical age’.7 Once again the normative project of freeing politics from the incursions of the irrational and atavistic was presented as a quasi-universal empirical

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  The New Visibility of Religion

  Studies in Religion and Cultural Hermeneutics

  • Graham Ward, Michael Hoelzl(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Part I Secularization This page intentionally left blank 1 Revising Secularization Theory James Sweeney, C. P. It could be that the sociologist of religion is an academic deviant tracing the evanescence of an epiphenomenon, or the one who enquires into the phenomenology and precipitating circumstances of our most fundamental transformations. (David Martin) 1 I Secularization has been the subject of ongoing dispute in sociology since the 1960s. One wonders why the controversy refuses to die down. The judicious ‘settlement’ proposed by José Casanova in his 1994 work, Public Religions in the Modern World , 2 would seem to accommodate all parties. It is not that the facts are in dispute. Religious practice across the Western world (even in the United States) is in decline, but at the same time religious allegiances in much of the rest of the world are strong, even resurgent. Religion continues to be an evident factor in international affairs, politics, public debates about morality, the provision of social services, civic life, etc. Some secularization process, or some change in religious fortunes – no doubt a deep and far-reaching change – is certainly taking place, but the wholesale secularization of society, such that religion no longer retains social significance, looks increasingly improbable. However, such a modified version of the theory fails to command universal acceptance. The deep roots of the disagreement lie, I suggest, in sociology’s ‘unconscious’! Sociology is modernity’s child, and a great deal is invested in the secularization paradigm. Modernity and secularization go together as two sides of the same theo-retical coin. The emergence of modernity – its what, how and why – is what sociology was conjured up to explain; and, as far as religion was concerned, it was assumed that secularization was the concomitant process.

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  Beyond Tradition and Modernity

  Changing Religions in a Changing World

  • R. J. Werblowsky(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  There are a great many insufficiently explored assumptions behind these usages, e.g., the notion that earlier cultures were not only dominated in some sense (in which sense exactly?) by ecclesiastical institutions and authorities, but that they were also, in some other and not always clearly defined sense, more inte-grated and in their totality pervaded by 'religion'. Very often there is lurking in the background the oversimplified picture of an idealtypische total religious civilization—whether the Christian High Middle Ages in the West, or the age of the four rightly guided caliphs in Muslim traditional myihistoire or the Ashokan age for Buddhists. Even more important is the fact that whenever you say 'secular' you also, almost by definition, conjure up religion. Durkheim remarked that the only way to define the sacred was to say that it was the opposite of profane. Without going in for binary oppositions, we may nevertheless state that the use of terms such as secular, secularist, secularization of necessity implies a reference to religion. 12 SECULARIZATION AND SECULARISM These awkward and question-begging ambiguities have made some scholars wish to drop the term 'secular' altogether. Whilst sympathizing with their mood, I doubt the value of such drastic surgery as is proposed by, e.g., David Martin (1969): 'The word secularization should be erased from the sociological dictionary.' It would seem to me that precisely these ambiguities render the terminology so useful, in addition to presenting a challenge to our critical, analytical and methodological faculties. It is precisely the ambiguous position of the concept as both a watchword in the ideological struggles of Western civilization, and a scientific descriptive term which makes it so interesting and valuable.

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