Chapter Twenty-One
Secularization
FACTS AND FANTASIES
I
N 1710, THE
E
NGLISH FREETHINKER
Thomas Woolston (1670–1731) expressed his confidence that religion would vanish by 1900.
1
Voltaire (1695–1778) thought this much too pessimistic and predicted that religion would be gone from the Western world within the next fifty years—by about 1810.
2
Similar predictions of the end of religion have continued ever since, eventually coming to be known as the
secularization thesis:
that in response to modernization, and especially to modern science, religion must lose its plausibility and wither away. The term
secularization
was coined by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who defined it as the “disenchantment of the world”—the “emancipation” of the modern mind from supernaturalism. For, as the distinguished anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace informed thousands of undergraduates in 1966, the “future of religion is extinction... belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out all over the world as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge.... [T]he process is inevitable.”
3
In full agreement, sociologist Peter Berger informed readers of the
New York Times
in 1968 that the end was near, that by “the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.... [T]he predicament of the believer is increasingly like that of a Tibetan astrologer on a prolonged visit to an American university.”
4
In support of the secularization thesis, social scientists cited the extremely low levels of church attendance in much of Europe—as low as 4 percent a week in the Scandinavian nations. It was taken for granted that these figures represented a massive decline from premodern times when medieval Europeans had flocked to church on every occasion. Of course, that “evidence” vanishes in light of the fact that European church attendance was always very low. But, what has most vexed proponents of the modernization-causes-secularization thesis is that the most industrialized and scientific nation of earth remains so very religious: the great majority of Americans continue to be active church members. Not only that, Americans show no signs of losing their belief in supernatural beings.
This is hardly a new discovery. The perceptive French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville noted during the 1830s, vis-à-vis the secularization theorists: “Unfortunately, the facts by no means accord with their theory. There are certain populations in Europe whose unbelief is only equaled by their ignorance and debasement; while in America, one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world, the people fulfill with fervor all the outward duties of religion.”
5
Thus it has been imperative for believers in secularization to dismiss or discredit the American “exception.”
The American “Exception”
T
HE FIRST LINE OF
attack has been to dismiss American piety as an illusion. After his three-month tour of America in 1905, Max Weber claimed to have discovered the real situation behind the American religious facade: “Closer scrutiny revealed the steady progress of the characteristic process of secularization, to which in modern times all phenomena that originated in religious conceptions succumb.” Fifty years later Weber’s views were strongly reiterated by the British sociologist Bryan Wilson: “Appearances to the contrary the quality of religious life may be no higher in America than in Britain.... [T]he secular meaning of such [religious] affiliation in America together with the long recognized lack of depth in many religious manifestations in the United States suggest that religion is in decline in both countries.”
6
A few years later, Wilson claimed that “few observers doubt that the actual contents of what goes on in the major churches in Britain is very much more ‘religious’ than what occurs in American churches.”
7
But Wilson failed to identify or cite any such “observers.”
Unlike Weber and Wilson, many committed to the secularization thesis were fully aware that Americans really are more religious than Europeans and recognized the need to explain this away. A favorite tactic has been to dismiss the United States as intellectually backward. The celebrated British scholar David Martin (who rejects this claim) summed up the snobbery of many of his colleagues thus: “the United States is a case of arrested development, whose evolution has been delayed.... [T]he American system of education is... superficial... [and] one may confidently anticipate that once education has made sufficient progress in America or once dormant class consciousness has been awakened, then the anodyne of bogus religion will cease to exercise any influence.”
8
Martin suggested that these views are “confused.” They also are nonsense.
Another frequent line is that what appears to be religiousness in America is really ethnicity.
9
People remain loyal Lutherans in order to associate with fellow Scandinavians or Germans; Presbyterians are clinging to their Scottish heritage; and Southern Baptists are unrepentant Scots-Irish, confederate racists. This “explanation” ignores that as the importance of ethnicity has faded among Americans, their religious participation has not declined and that the most successful and rapidly growing faiths have no ethnic ties at all. Indeed, one of the most vigorous sectors of American religion even lacks denominational ties—the independent evangelical churches.
Most recently, the claim has been widely trumpeted in the media that, finally, American religion is ebbing away and America is soon to become secularized. In a press release issued early in March 2009, the director of the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) reported that 15 percent of Americans responding to a brief telephone interview selected the “no religion” response when asked their religious preference. This was almost double the 8 percent who gave that response to a similar poll in 1990. The press release revealing these results also stressed that the “mainline” Christian denominations had suffered substantial declines over the same period.
This announcement produced ecstatic reactions on the atheist websites as well as a huge response in the national media.
USA Today
headlined “Most Religious Groups in USA Have Lost Ground, Survey Finds.”
10
Jon Meacham, then-editor of
Newsweek,
wrote a lead story entitled “The End of Christian America.”
11
(No, there was no question mark.) But anyone without an axe to grind and with minimal knowledge of poll data on American religion knew that these conclusions were absurd; that the real meaning of the “no religion” response had been carefully omitted from the press release; and that the decline of the “mainline” denominations has been going on for generations (see chapter 20).
The ARIS is conducted by Barry Kosmin, a British sociologist who now directs the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College, a small liberal arts school in Hartford, Connecticut. Kosmin is a dedicated proponent of the secularization thesis, as is reflected in the name of his institute. Although he is not well informed about American religion, Kosmin cannot help but be aware of the extensive research literature showing that the great majority of Americans who respond that they have “no religion” are not atheists (as his press release implied) but are quite religious! It is true that “no religion” is the answer that the 3 or 4 percent of Americans who profess atheism give to pollsters, but most people who give this response seem to mean only that they do not belong to a church. Thus, recent studies
12
have found that more than 90 percent of them pray and 39 percent pray weekly or more often. Only 14 percent do not believe in God and half of them believe in angels. As might be expected of people who seldom attend any church, some of their beliefs are not very orthodox—18 percent define their God as some sort of higher power or cosmic force. Forty-five percent believe astrology is true and another 8 percent think it could be true. Half of those who said “no religion” frequent New Age bookstores, and they are especially prone to believe in ghosts, Bigfoot, and Atlantis.
13
There may be some basis for disputing whether or not such people are Christians, but it is beyond question that they are religious. Keep in mind that the secularization thesis is about the end of religion, not about the end of any specific faith. Were Canada to turn Muslim overnight, that would be an immense religious change, but it would not be an instance of secularization.
The ARIS press release also failed to note that the percentage of Americans who actually belong to a local church congregation has continued to rise over this same period, from 64 percent in 1990 to about 70 percent in 2007.
14
Finally, although the press release suggested otherwise, the percentage of Americans who are atheists hasn’t changed in the past sixty years—4 percent told the Gallup Poll in 1944 that they did not believe in God, exactly the same percentage as in the Baylor National Survey of Religion in 2007.
Thus have years of efforts to dismiss the American “exception” ended in failure. More recently it has been recognized that when the perspective is expanded to the world at large, America is not an exception at all.
World Religiousness
I
N 1997
P
ETER
B
ERGER
was interviewed by
Christian Century
.
15
Among the questions he was asked was: “What is your sense of whether and how secularization is taking place?” Keep in mind that Berger had long been a militant, if eloquent, proponent of the secularization theory. He answered: “I think that what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. It wasn’t a crazy theory. There was some evidence for it. But I think it’s basically wrong. Most of the world today is certainly not secular. It’s very religious.” And so it is.
The Gallup World Poll is based on national opinion surveys conducted in 160 nations, including 97 percent of the world’s population. Thus far Gallup has not been permitted to ask any questions about religion in China, but respondents in all the other nations were asked whether they had “attended a religious place of worship or religious service within the last seven days?” Worldwide, 53 percent replied that they had. And, except in China, everyone was asked, “Is religion an important part of your daily life?” Around the globe, 76 percent said yes.
Moreover, few of those who did not regard religion as important in their lives were atheists. Although no belief questions have been included yet in the Gallup World Poll, an item on belief in God was included in the World Values Surveys conducted in many nations in 2001–2002. In very few nations were there more atheists than the 4 percent found in the United States: Canada and India also have 4 percent, but atheists make up only 1 percent of Poles and 2 percent of Mexicans. France has the most atheists, but even there they amount to only 14 percent.
16
Perhaps the most striking finding is that the percentage of atheists in Russia has fallen to 4 percent.
The massive survival of religion in Russia has stunned many sociologists. It would be unnecessarily vindictive now to quote the litany of claims by my colleagues in times past about how the “enlightened” soviet educators were freeing the masses from the grip of “superstition” and launching a new era of completed secularization. But it seems fair to quote from a paper I presented at a conference in 1979 while the rulers of the Kremlin still seemed fully in control: “Secular states cannot root out religion.... Lenin’s body may be displayed under glass, but no one supposes that he has ascended to sit on the right hand, or even the left hand, of Marx.... [D]ams along the Volga do not light up the meaning of the universe.... In making faith more costly, [repressive states] also make it more necessary and valuable. Perhaps religion is never so robust as when it is an underground church.”
17
And so it seems. There may or may not be any atheists in fox holes, but there are precious few in Russia today despite generations of antireligious education.
18
A similar pattern seems to be emerging in China. After decades of brutal repression of religion, suddenly there are millions of Chinese Christians, there has been a huge revival of Buddhism, and the percentage of Chinese who say they have no religion has rapidly been falling.
19
Understanding the European “Exception”
I
N THE SAME INTERVIEW
in which he retracted his support for secularization theory, and having noted that most of the world is very religious, Peter Berger made this additional point: “The one exception to this is Western Europe. One of the most interesting questions in the sociology of religion today is not, How do you explain fundamentalism is Iran? but, Why is Western Europe different?” Why, indeed?
Christianization?
Characteristically coming directly to the point, Andrew Greeley once wrote: “There could be no de-Christianization of Europe... because there never was any Christianization in the first place. Christian Europe never existed.”
20
What Greeley had in mind was the slow and careless effort of the church following the conversion of Constantine to spread north into most of Europe. That is, the Christianity that triumphed over Rome was a dedicated, energetic social movement in a very competitive environment. Subsequent to the conversion of Constantine, Christianity left most of the rest of Europe only nominally converted, at best, being a lazy monopoly church that sought to extend itself not by missionizing the masses, but by baptizing kings. Hence, what slowly arose in Europe was, long before the Reformation, a patchwork of state churches that settled for the allegiance of the elite, with little or no regard for the populace. Thus, for example, the “Christianization” of a Scandinavian kingdom often involved little more than the baptism of the nobility and legal recognition of the ecclesiastical sovereignty of the church. This left the task of missionizing the people to a “kept” clergy whose welfare was almost entirely independent of mass assent or support, with a predictable lack of results.
21
This is the legacy that accounted for the remarkable lack of religious participation and Christian piety in medieval times—a lack that has continued to this day.