Secularization in Theory and Fact

Many of the most influential secularization theorists have been Europeans, especially German and French. Since the eighteenth century and up to the present—albeit with fits and starts and many convolutions—it does seem that Western Europe has been on a course of inexorable secularization. In both public and personal life, the institutions, observances, and teachings associated with religion—in this case meaning Christianity—appear to be ever more marginal, giving credibility to the idea that there is a necessary connection between modernity and secularity. The more modern a society, the more secular it will become. In this context, scholars regularly spoke about “American exceptionalism.” Why is it, they asked, that the United States, presumably the most modern of societies, is so vibrantly religious? America was thought to be the exception that had to be explained. In recent years, however, more and more scholars have come to the conclusion that Europe is the anomaly, leading to talk about “European exceptionalism.” (Meaning mainly Western Europe, since Central and Eastern European societies show very different patterns.)

In 1997 Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, advancing an argument that continues to generate lively interest. Contrary to long-entrenched expectations, we witness a world in which different civilizations—defined by different cultures that are typically defined, in turn, by cult or religion—are the deciding factor in collective allegiances and conflicts. Huntington’s proposal flies in the face of the widespread assumption that the world is being homogenized into a “global village” where everybody becomes more and more alike. The economic and technological dynamics of “globalization” are indeed powerful, but they are far from being omnipotent. And some aspects of globalization, such as the explosion of communications technology, can expand and strengthen religio-cultural diversity in a world that is, at the same time, both linked and divided by a near-infinite number of electronic bands, channels, websites, and whatever comes next.

Such is the larger context in which we are invited to think about religion, culture, and secularization. Were the legendary man or woman from Mars to show up and ask what is the single most important thing now happening on Planet Earth, many possible answers might come to mind. Were I put on the spot in that unlikely circumstance, I think I would say that the most important thing now happening on Planet Earth is the desecularization of world history.

Our immediate business, however, is not quite so global in its reach, although it is not always easy to distinguish between what is American and what is global. It is now the case that several generations of Americans have been taught, from grade school through graduate school, that ours is a secular society, or is rapidly becoming such. Whether the subject is sexual mores, family life, the work ethic, or attitudes toward wealth, death, and dying, the textbooks are replete with generic statements such as: “In earlier times, people sought answers to these questions in religion, but in our secular society____.” The student is invited to fill in the blank or, more commonly, to accept the answer provided by the writer of the textbook who simply knows, as everybody supposedly knows, that “traditional” belief and morality are no longer relevant. What we in fact know is something very different, even if there is no agreement on how to explain it: American society is as religious and, in some ways, probably more religious than it ever has been.

More than thirty years ago, in 1967, my longtime colleague and friend Peter Berger published The Sacred Canopy. Berger has subsequently and substantively changed his thinking about religion and secularization, but the theory set forth in that book continues to have enormous influence on the discussion of these questions. Once upon a time, according to this theory, people lived in societies that were covered by a sacred canopy of religious meaning; there were traditional and taken-for-granted truths that explained the world and their part in it. Then came along modernity with its scientific, specializing, and fragmenting explanations of reality that challenged and shattered what had been a “sacred cosmos.” With modernity, said Max Weber, an earlier social theorist, the world became “disenchanted.” In the middle of the last century, the German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann opined that people who had learned to use an electric light switch could no longer believe that God makes things happen. For “modern man” the world had been “demythologized,” and Bultmann set out to demythologize the Christian gospel as well, stripping it of its miraculous and supernatural elements and making it once again believable to a world of educated grownups.

A Choice of Theories

Berger was never a Bultmannian in theology, but the early Berger offered a similar account of the corrosive effect of modernity on religious faith. The crisis for religion, he said in The Sacred Canopy and other writings, is how to maintain the “plausibility structure” of traditional religion in a world that does not think religious truth claims are plausible. One answer is for religious groups to create a “sheltered enclave” in which believers huddle together and reinforce one another in their conviction that the old stories with their old truths still define the really real “real world.” The problem, of course, is that most people cannot live full time in the sheltered enclave; they also participate in the real world of modernity with its conflicting explanations of how the world works. The result is that people experience “cognitive dissonance,” which can be painfully disorienting. What I “know” about reality when, for instance, participating in the enclave’s ritual enactment of the sacred story is very different from what I “know” when going about my everyday business in the modern world.

Some people can apparently live quite contentedly with the most severe cognitive dissonance simply by not thinking about it. They don’t pay much attention to the clashing dissonance between what they think inside and what they think outside the enclave. More thoughtful people, however, have to negotiate some kind of truce between these conflicting worlds, and this results in “cognitive bargaining,” which typically means trimming religious truth claims to fit the “real world” of relentlessly secular modernity. The theory of early Berger and those who followed him is similar in important ways to current ideas associated with “postmodernism.” In fact, with Thomas Luckmann, Berger wrote in 1966 The Social Construction of Reality, a book that anticipated postmodernists who contend that all meaning systems, including modern rationality, are “socially constructed.” What we call reality is no more than the stories—whether we choose to call them religious or secular—that we make up as we go along. While Berger has greatly revised his earlier thinking and regrets the uses to which others have put it, the “sheltered enclave” theory continues to be an influential explanation of why religion flourishes in an otherwise modern and secular society such as the United States.

Other scholars have preferred the “status discontent” theory. According to this explanation, religious groups, especially those of a conservative or fundamentalist hue, mobilize themselves in reaction to perceived threats to their social standing or security. In the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and others employed this theory to explain the emergence of a political right wing in American public life. Echoes of the status discontent theory are still routine in the mainline media’s treatment of what is called “the religious right.” As a story in the Washington Post put it a few years ago (the editors later apologized), these people are “poor, uneducated, and easily led.” And they are easily led because they are easily frightened by changes favored by the rich and educated which they do not understand and which they see as threatening to their way of life.

Another explanation of why religion can flourish in an otherwise secular society might be called the “strictness” theory. This gained currency with the late Dean Kelley’s 1972 book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. Kelley produced massive evidence on the decline of liberal or “mainline” churches, in contrast to conservative churches that were enjoying a bull market. In some ways Kelley’s thesis was similar to early Berger, but he did not place so much emphasis upon the “cognitive.” Doctrines, ideas, and what Kelley called “notions” are less important than the actual demands that a religious group imposes. The more demanding a religion, the more likely it is to succeed. “We want something more,” Kelley wrote,

than a smooth, articulate verbal interpretation of what life is all about. Words are cheap; we want explanations that are validated by the commitment of other persons . . . . What costs nothing accomplishes nothing. If it costs nothing to belong to a community, it can’t be worth much. So the quality that enables religious meanings to take hold is not their rationality, their logic, their surface credibility, but rather the demand they make upon their adherents and the degree to which that demand is met by commitment.

Some students of American religion have taken part of Kelley’s strictness theory and given it a turn along the lines of the “rational choice” theory that so fascinates many contemporary economists. In this view, which is notably associated with Laurence Iannaccone, strict religions are successful not so much because they provide more intact communities of meaning but because they tend to exclude “free riders.” Free riders are, quite simply, people who are just along for the ride; they take what they want from a group but give little or nothing in return. Liberal groups are full of free riders; indeed, such groups typically make it one of their selling points that they place no demands on those to whom they appeal. This has the attraction of being “accepting” and “open.” Since, however, free riders make little contribution to what people are looking for in religion—in terms of inspiration, fellowship, strong conviction, and communal security—liberal groups tend to spawn apathy and a lack of direction, which is a sure formula for institutional decline.

Also stealing a card from the economists are the proponents of “religious marketing” theory. In this theory, social pluralism, which is commonly thought to be hostile to religion, is in fact the best friend of religious flourishing. The claim is that, in societies where religion appears to be strong and even to enjoy a monopoly in providing the “sacred canopy,” it is in fact weak and fragile. It is no accident, according to market theorists, that secularization is so far advanced in countries such as England, France, and Germany that have culturally (and, in different ways, legally) established churches, or that religious indifference is so widespread in Latin American countries that have a taken for granted “Catholic culture.”

In the United States it has been very different. In their much discussed 1992 book, The Churching of America 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark argued that competition has been the very lifeblood of American religion. They produce impressive evidence to show that, contrary to commonly held assumptions, religion does better in pluralistic cities than in small towns and rural areas. Moreover, they contend, church attendance has steadily increased during the course of American history as we have become, all in all, a more religious, not a less religious, nation.

The economic factors of competition and marketing are not, it must be admitted, the most edifying way of thinking about religion, but they are useful in understanding what I mean by the incorrigibility of Christian America. These are approaches to religion employed by “social scientists” who presumably refrain from making what are called value judgments. “Just the facts, ma’am,” as Sergeant Joe Friday put it. Remember, too, that economic dynamics are part of being human, and nothing that is human is alien to Christianity, the most humanistic of religions. What else could Christianity be, since its central teaching is that God became a human being in Jesus Christ in order that everything human might be redeemed through him? This theological reminder is a caution against dismissing the analyses under discussion as “merely economic” or “merely sociological.” In the biblical understanding of things, there is nothing mere about any dimension of the human condition.

That having been said, however, social scientists who understand both the usefulness and limitations of their craft know that the religious phenomenon, at its heart and in its totality, escapes the nets of social theory and analysis. Not only in its elevated forms of literary expression but also in the popular piety of revival meetings, Bible study groups, and the millions of people at daily Mass, religion engages the supernatural, metaphysical, and mystical. In ways unarticulated and perhaps beyond articulation, people are encountered by God, by the ineffable. Or so in various ways they say they believe, and believe with varying degrees of certitude. The theories and statistics of sociology are to religion as sexology is to the act of love. They are not to be confused with the thing itself. Yet it is unavoidable that we employ instruments such as statistics even as we are skeptical about them. As one wag put it, “It has been statistically demonstrated that most statistics are wrong.” In any event, those who during most of the twentieth century were weaving statistics and theories into a grand and confidently told story of the secularization of the world are now having to cope with a quite different story that seems to be writing itself.