How Secularization Happens

Way back in the day, when Elon Musk stalked the halls of the federal bureaucracy swinging his giant, if metaphorical, chainsaw, we learned a lot about the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), created in 1961 to promote development projects, technological innovations, and investment in poor countries that might be vulnerable to Soviet demagoguery. USAID thus served America’s mission to shepherd the Third World into the Free World. Musk exposed a pipeline from USAID to progressive NGOs—a million for DEI in Serbia, a couple million to fund sex-change operations in Guatemala, 25 million a year for LGBTQ programs, millions more for “family planning” (aka, abortion), a few million to put Sesame Street on Iraqi television. You could hardly throw an egg anywhere in the world without hitting a gay rights or abortion advocacy group funded by American taxpayers.

For progressives, all this is perfectly defensible. If you think democracy means abortion rights, same-sex marriage, gender fluidity, and forced diversity, then of course you want to devote federal funds to these righteous causes. After all, though the USSR has collapsed, the world still teems with illiberal Neanderthals, who have to be held at bay until natural selection gobbles them up once and for all. For non-progressives, the whole scheme was outrageous.

My interest here is theoretical: USAID provides a useful window into the reality behind theories of secularization. For a very long time, sociologists have been telling us that economic and social modernization—consisting of technological advancement, a shift from subsistence farming to wage labor in factories, internal migration to gigantic cities, the intellectual dominance of science—more or less inevitably unleashes cultural forces that undermine traditional ways of living, thinking, and feeling. Religion slows, stumbles, then collapses in exhaustion. No one who has made pins on an assembly line can believe the world is enchanted. No one who flicks the switch on an electric lamp can sincerely believe in demons and angels, incarnate gods or miracles of healing. Why are modern societies secular? Simple: because they’re modern. 

DOGE and USAID tell a different story, not of impersonal social forces, but of decisions made, money spent, and power exerted to nudge and club recalcitrant traditionalists into submission. The point holds more broadly: Insofar as our societies are actually secular, it’s the result of deliberate, well-funded efforts to secularize. Inevitable it is not. 

As Kevin N. Flatt documents in his recent Secularization, Social Order, and World History, states have been lead actors in the drama of secularization. Atatürk deliberately detached the Ottoman Empire from its Islamic moorings and promoted Western-leaning imams and mosques, all in pursuit of what Flatt calls “defensive” secularization, designed to parry expanding Western powers. The grand modern -isms have all of them been self-consciously implemented by governments. Not too long ago, communism was a juggernaut of atheism, secularization, and mass murder, organized and funded by Moscow. Nationalist movements secularize by detaching social norms and passions from the gods and binding them to the nation (not unlike tethering a boat by tying it to itself). Over the centuries, states have shoved national language and identity down the throats of unnumbered minorities. As the USAID debacle shows, progressive liberalism doesn’t just happen. People with power make it happen. 

Western higher education, often state-funded, is another conduit of secularization. Today’s elites in Africa and Asia promote secularization because the secular Western universities where they studied convinced them that “secular” is just another word for “sophisticated.” Peter Berger once quipped that the U.S. is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. Many countries have a similar structure, because the Swedes-in-charge studied at secular Western universities (some of them actually Swedish).

Secularization isn’t a force of nature, but a Western export. Which makes secularization look less like a social-scientific theory than the ideology of the West’s postcolonial soft imperialism. We no longer bear the White Man’s Burden; we’re embarrassed to defend Western superiority on overtly racial grounds. Sociologists come to the rescue, assuring us that Our Way is the most advanced way, the inevitable way, the way everyone must go if they want to reach the summit. The ideology works at home too. Secularization theory demoralizes traditionalists who strive to preserve sacred order in small pockets within secular order: “Give it up,” the sociologists say. “It’s only a matter of time before you get swallowed up.”

It’s not only a matter of time. As USAID shows, it’s a matter of money, power, and steely determination. And if money, power, and steely determination form secular order, it only takes money, power, and steelier determination to overcome it.