MAPPING THE TERRITORY
By Eileen Barker
There have always been freethinkers, dissenters and atheists—these were certainly to be
found in ancient Greece, but following Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, admission to
any doubts about the existence of God could, for several centuries, be to risk one’s life, and
certainly it would have been to risk exclusion from many aspects of social life right into the
twentieth century. Indeed, although there is no official law against it, it would currently be
well-nigh impossible for a professed atheist to be elected to the most powerful office in the
world: the U.S. Presidency.
Nonetheless, since (and to some extent before) the Enlightenment, there have been those
expecting human society would come to its senses and realize there is no God and, thus,
that religion is superfluous in the modern world. The views of various leading thinkers have
added impetus to this opinion, including Voltaire, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and, of
course, Charles Darwin. Within the sociological tradition, the secularist figure who led the
way was Auguste Comte, whose evolutionary theory postulated that religious ways of
understanding natural processes were inevitably yielding to a scientific world view.
Interestingly, he was responsible for the founding of the Positivist Church, which still has a
following in Brazil.
From the second half of the nineteenth century through to the 1960s, the sociology of religion
was predominantly concerned with charting the progress of secularization. The general
assumption was that processes such as industrialization, urbanization, rationalization,
bureaucratization, and modernization were responsible for a gradual erosion of religious beliefs
and practices. Then, in Eastern Europe, China, and other communist states, there was the
introduction of state-imposed secularism. One way or another, an apparently irreversible
process of secularization seemed to be removing religion from the structure and culture of
society.
One of the best-known and most influential of contemporary sociologists advocating the
secularization thesis was Bryan Wilson, who, in his seminal study, Religion and the Secular
State (1966), defined secularization as “a process whereby religious thinking, practice and
institutions lose social significance.”
In politics, education, welfare, health, and the economy, rational and/or profit-making
motives, rather than religious values, were increasingly employed; the state or private
enterprise, rather than the Church, determined how the basic functions of society would be
fulfilled. But this, Wilson stressed, did not mean that religion would disappear altogether. It
could still be practiced at the individual level as a private, leisure pursuit.
Towards the end of the 1960s, the “secularization debate”
started to heat up as a growing number of sociologists and
other scholars began to question the theory—with one (David
Martin) going so far as to recommend that the concept should
be eliminated altogether. Many of these critics, though not all,
came from the United States, where the obvious indices of
religiosity (church membership and attendance or public
rhetoric) provided less support for inevitable secularization than
in Europe.
But from any perspective it was becoming increasingly obvious
the concept of secularization was an all-too-blunt instrument for
analyzing the processes that had been occurring in the West, let
alone when looking at the religious scene from a global
perspective. Differences between the North and South Americas
and the Western and Eastern Europes were undoubtedly
considerable, but these paled into insignificance when compared
to the vastly differing situations in India, Africa, Asia, or the
Middle East.
American sociologists such as Charles Glock and Rodney Stark
separated religion into different dimensions (belief, ritual,
experience, and knowledge), while Belgian Karel Dobbelaere
pointed out that secularization may refer to relatively independent
dimensions (societal systems; religious organizations; individual
religious involvement). Today it is clear that the messiness of
actual relationships between religiosity and secularity demands
much more detailed empirical analysis and the development of
much more sophisticated conceptual tools.
Taking official state policy along a somewhat wobbly continuum
between the extremes of state-imposed secularism at one end and
theocracy at the other, we find the laïcité adopted by France in
1905, the secularism avowed by countries such as Turkey
(although it provides strong governmental support for Islam), the
separation of Church and State found in the United States, the established churches found in
England, Scotland, and some Scandinavian countries, and the dictatorship of religious
authority in Iran. But official policy does not necessarily tell us how a society actually treats
either the religious or the secular. Ostensibly, secular societies can protect specific (powerful)
religions, and societies with an established church can be remarkably secular.
There has been globalization from the time of the silk trade and before, but the extent to
which it affects our daily lives today is unparalleled in history. Just as industrialization and
modernization changed the social and cultural situation within which religious life had
been experienced in the 19th century, so the social environment has radically changed
with contemporary globalization. Increasing geographical and social mobility and the
expansion of the mass media have challenged old ways and offered an unprecedented
variety of new ways of looking at the world.
So it is not altogether surprising the changes taking place on the religious front have led
some to insist that religion is not dying but undergoing a radical transition. There i s,
however, a twist to the fact that the supermarket of religious options is so well stocked
and widely accessible. The sociologist Peter Berger, once a strong believer in
secularization theory, has suggested that the challenge to religion today is no longer
secularization, but pluralism.
Religious pluralism also has existed since time immemorial, but until relatively recently it
tended to exist along ethnic or cultural lines. It was a group thing. Today it is increasingly
the result of individual decisions. The very fact that so many different ideas can be
encountered—in the school or in the workplace as a result of immigration, in the sittingroom by way of satellite television, or through the worldwide web—means truths once
unquestioningly taken for granted now have to be justified.
As a result, such truths may be abandoned, or they may be adhered to with a far stronger
tenacity than was necessary when there were no alternatives on offer. And, indeed, there
is a movement from traditional religious beliefs and practices to a variety of both secular
and religious alternatives.
Britain provides an interesting example of the apparent contradictions and paradoxes.
Although both England and Scotland have their own established churches, it is arguable
that religion plays a considerably less obtrusive role in public life than in the United States.
In the 2001 national census, 72 percent of the UK population said they were Christians; 5
per cent belonged to non-Christian religions (including 390,000 ‘Jedi’); 16 percent said
they had no religion; 7 percent declined to respond. According to this, one might assume
four out of five Britons were “religious.”
However, 40 per cent never attend a place of worship, and only one in 10 does so weekly.
Even more curiously, in a national survey I conducted in 1999, only 26 percent of Britons said
they were members of a religion, yet there were 29 percent who said they felt they belonged.
When asked if, whether or not they attended church, they considered themselves religious, a
third answered positively, two fifths negatively, a fifth were uncertain, but 13 percent, while
not considering themselves religious, did consider they had some sort of a spiritual life.
Although it is unclear precisely what they meant by spiritual, it would be a mistake to assume
such people were unambiguously secular.
Age has long been recognized as one of the most significant variables associated with the
decline in traditional religion, but an examination of longitudinal studies by the English
demographer David Voas reveals that most British adults do not change their religious
beliefs or practices once they reach 20. According to Voas, it is the social environment in
which children are raised that has changed, resulting in each generation being less
religious than the one before.
While two non-religious parents successfully transmit their lack of religion to their children,
two religious parents have only a 50/50 chance of passing on their faith, and if just one
parent is religious there is only a one in four chance of children following in that parent’s faith.
In all cases, however, eight percent of the children will take up a religion that differs from that
of both parents. The ‘new’ religion may be one of the weakening traditional religions, or it
may be one of the new, immigrant or revivalist forms of religiosity and spirituality that are to
be found spreading across the world—including an assortment of fundamentalist groups.
Religious fundamentalism as a concept has been extended far beyond its initial reference to
conservative American Protestants. Now it frequently entails considerable political baggage as
a direct or indirect reaction to secularism. In their major University of Chicago study of the
early 1990s, Martin Marty and Scott Appleby identify fundamentalism with both orthodoxy
and orthopraxis (correct religious behavior) as “a process of selective retrieval,
embellishment,
and
construction
of
‘essentials’
or
‘fundamentals’
of
a
religious tradition for the purpose of halting the erosion of traditional society and fighting back
against the encroachment of secular modernity.”
Several of the thousands of tiny new religions that have mushroomed around the globe over
the past half-century embrace some fundamentalist claims, but many do not. Indeed, it is
impossible to overstate the enormous variety of ways in which the movements address the
questions of ultimate concern traditionally answered by the mainstream faiths.
Some, like the Raelians, deny they are religious, while others, like Scientologists, have
fought in the courts for Scientology to be classified as a religion. Clearly distanced from
traditional religious institutions (and sometimes dismissed as secular by those who employ
traditional indices of religiosity) are Paganism, Wicca, New Age, and Human Potential
movements, and what has been termed “the new spirituality.”
In some ways reflecting the span of new types of religiosity, the secularisms of contemporary
society show a comparable diversity. Most stridently, there are what might be termed the
fundamentalist “religious atheists,” who may be humanists or hard-line communists but
adamantly insist there is no God. Then there are the agnostics who take the position that, as
there is no way of knowing whether or not there is a God, there is no point in spending time
worrying about religious issues.
Perhaps most secular of all are those who just do not bother to think about religion or
religious questions in their everyday lives. Religion is totally irrelevant to their interests,
be these their work, their family, or the Manchester United soccer team. But there are
also “apathetic secularists,” who might equally be called apathetic religionists. For them
there may or may not be a God, but they expect religious institutions to be there to
perform certain regular functions, such as rites of passage, or to turn to at times of
national or personal crisis.
Of course, none of these “types” is more than a caricature. Few human beings are
consistent in their beliefs. The most devout can have moments of doubt—as, perhaps, can
all but the most faithful of secularists. It is clear, however, that an increasing number of
options are available for generations who find their parents’ religious faith an d practice
inadequate for or irrelevant to their own lives.
It is also clear that those who would chart the fate of religiosity and secularity need to keenly
hone the tools of their research. For there are more things than we had dreamed of in our
academies, and there is plenty of work waiting for the further study of secularism in society
and culture.
Eileen Barker is professor emeritus of sociology with special reference to the study of
religion at the London School of Economics. A former president of the Society for the
Scientific Study of Religion, she is the author of New Religious Movements: A Practical
Introduction and many other scholarly works.