New Turns in the Secularization Debate
Michael Mason
Inst. Adv. Research
Australian Catholic University
Melbourne, Australia
Paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the
Society for the Scientific Study of Religion
Salt Lake City UT
October 31 – November 3, 2002
© M. Mason 2002. Not for citation or reproduction without permission.
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Synopsis
The debate on religion and modernization has taken some interesting new turns in the nineties. Peter
Berger, leading former proponent of the “secularization thesis” has reiterated and developed his rejection
of the view that the modernization process inevitably entails secularization, and speaks instead of the
“desecularization of the world”, and the need to explain, not secularization, but the uniqueness of
European secularity.
Besides the converts to the “desecularization” thesis, some who have long opposed theories of
secularization have deployed a new weapon: rational choice theory. Stark, Iannacone, Finke et al. have
applied a “market model” to Christianity both ancient and contemporary, with some persuasive results. In
the opposite camp, Brian Wilson, Frank Lechner and most recently Steve Bruce continue to argue the
intimate link between modernization and the decline of religion.
After some clarifications of the notion of secularization, this paper discusses Berger’s argument against
his former theory. He interprets his former assertion of an “intrinsic” linkage between modernization and
religious decline as implying that the former is a sufficient cause of the latter. It is argued here that
modernization does have an intrinsic tendency to cause religious decline, but is neither a necessary nor a
sufficient cause. Religions decline for other reasons, and may thrive despite modernization, because
other factors counter modernization’s secularizing effects.
Bruce’s recent formulation of secularization theory is assessed, emphasising its robustness against the
usual critiques, and against Berger’s specific rebuttal of Bruce’s argument (in an earlier formulation).
Several weaknesses in secularization theory exposed by the above discussion are identified: the lack of a
systematic theory of the secularising components of modernization, and of the "moderating conditions"
which impede modernization's secularizing tendencies; an inadequate understanding of pluralism, which
in some circumstances promotes secularization, and in others enhances religious participation; lack of an
epistemology of the pre-conceptual, non-discursive knowing involved in religious experience. In the
light of recent developments, a clearer articulation of the relationship of secularization on the cultural,
societal, organizational and individual levels is required. A “thicker” description of religion as
experienced by the participants would enable improved operationalization in empirical research of some
of the concepts involved; this in turn would lead to improved measures. Approaches to solutions are
proposed, and the necessity of a multidisciplinary approach is emphasised.
Australia, particularly the case of the Catholic church, is used throughout as an illustrative “middle-case”
of the secularization thesis, lying on a continuum between England and the USA. Data from the national
Census and several recent large-scale surveys show the rapid growth in the number of those who say they
have “No Religion”, partly because of the movement of large numbers who previously stated a
denominational identification into this category. Also demonstrated are declines in religious belief,
adherence to religious ethical positions, and in church attendance. The development of secularization in
Australia is shown as similar to the process in Holland described by Lechner.
Against Casanova’s view of the continuing role for “public religions in the modern world,” these
developments undermine the credibility, acceptability and political weight of the public advocacy role of
the church, and threaten the demise of church structures supporting major ventures in education, health
and social welfare on which that role had depended.
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In due time, the debate over theories of "secularization" during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
will make a fascinating chapter in the history of ideas. That chapter is not yet ready to be written in
earnest; the debate is still in progress, and no one can yet attain the necessary critical distance. But
perhaps it is not too early, and at any rate it is too tempting to resist, to sketch some of its likely content.
The debate, primarily among sociologists, concerns transformations of "religion", especially during the
period of "modernization", and especially in Western societies. An adequate account of it will eventually
be a difficult task. "Religion", "modernization" and "secularization" all prove to be slippery terms,
whose meanings have themselves changed during the last century of discussion.
Compared with other debates within sociology, that on secularization theory seems to have a peculiar
intensity. It has not been able entirely to free itself entirely from ideological interests -- the zealotry of
the threatened believer, on the one side, and the triumphalism of the Enlightenment reductionist on the
other. Often too, because of the elusiveness of the subject matter and the notorious confusion of the
terminology, controversialists have fired past each other: more accurate in what they affirmed than in
what they denied.
It is a matter for some wonder that anyone was still writing about secularization theory at all by 1990.
By that date some authors considered it quite passé for a (sub-)discipline now grappling with the
postmodern condition of religion. Others had long ago consigned it to the dustbin of disproven and
useless sociological speculations. Peter L. Berger, author of the best-known and most convincingly
argued version of secularization theory, had repudiated it ten years before (Berger, 1980, 1999, 2001),
putting its remaining adherents on the defensive.
Thomas Luckmann, co-author with Berger of The Social Construction of Reality (1967), a treatise in the
sociology of knowledge which underlay Berger's approach to secularization in his The Sacred Canopy
(1969), had from the first, in his own work on religion, The Invisible Religion (1967), eschewed the
notion of secularization altogether, adopting a Durkheimian functional perspective on religion as
basically identical with the culture's worldview, and deploring the tendency in sociology of religion to
identify "church-oriented religiosity" with religion tout court. He saw secularization theory serving as the
"myth" of Enlightenment intellectuals eager to assume the mantle of a new priesthood as unquestioned
definers of reality (1977:17).
British sociologist David Martin, who made a distinguished contribution to mapping the historical and
geographical variants of religious transformation in Europe (1978), nonetheless showed considerable
ambivalence towards the concept of secularization.
Rodney Stark confidently erected its tombstone, entitling an article “Secularization R.I.P.” (1999).
Why does it matter whether secularization theory did indeed expire or even whether some authors should
attempt now to revive it?
It matters because secularization theory undertakes to give an account of the condition of religion in
modern society; because a respectable body of opinion, starting with the founding fathers of the
discipline of sociology, considered religion and its development to be crucial to an understanding of that
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society, and because there is a well-defended view that in 2002 the world is still in a ‘late modern’
period1.
4
After the intense debate over secularization in the sixties and seventies, and sporadically since, some
important components of it have become, if possible, more confused, rather than clearer. It may therefore
be helpful to begin with a preliminary clarification of the concept, by highlighting three important
moments in the history of secularization.
A. Clarification of the concept of secularization
The origins of secularization
In its root sense, still preserved in dictionary definitions, the concept of secularization is completely
distinct from and independent of, that of modernization. It refers simply to a “change in status” of
something previously considered “sacred” or “religious”, whereby it is turned to secular use. ‘Secular’
(Lat. saeculum) means literally ‘of this age’, in contrast to the eternal; hence secular comes to mean: ‘of
this world’. An object can be “reclassified” from the service of the “religious” world, to that of the
mundane, everyday, or secular world. For example, Henry VIII secularized the English monasteries:
turned the buildings, land and revenues over to favoured nobles; from “religious” to secular use. Pews
made for churches are now found in fashionable living rooms. A chalice formerly used for the Eucharist
could come to be used as nothing more than an ornate wine-goblet. These are all examples of
secularization. Nor is there any implication in this process of the decline of religion. On the contrary:
the most significant “secularizing” developments in human history have been inspired by religion itself!
1) The secularization of nature
The religions of archaic societies pictured in their myths a unified cosmos in which the realms of gods,
humans and nature were not distinguished. The universal ‘world-religions’ which succeeded them ‘demythologised’ this archaic vision. In Israel, most of all, the prophetic tradition evolved an understanding
of a transcendent God, in opposition to the immanent fertility deities of the land, and of a world which is
his creation, and so distinct from him. Thus the ‘disenchantment’ of the world--the vision of a secular
realm distinct from an eternal creator God who transcends it, is itself a religious development. All
further ‘secularization’ stems from this foundation.
2) The secularization of society—even of religious institutions
The prophets likewise criticised temple worship, priesthood and kingship in Israel whenever these
institutions sought to endow themselves with sacred absoluteness. Israel herself, although God's chosen
people, was nonetheless frequently pictured as an unfaithful spouse, a whore. Jesus extended this
prophetic critique of the Temple, of sacrifice, of priests, scribes and Pharisees and further radicalised it to
include even the Law itself.
This refinement of religious symbols and structures was mirrored in other realms. In archaic religions,
although cultic activities were often led by priests, the political and religious leadership of the society
were closely merged, with kings often claiming special kinship with the gods. In the emerging historic
religions, political and religious leadership began to be separated, and a specialised religious elite
1
In short, that the social, cultural, economic, political changes that have taken place do not require the
construction of the category ‘postmodern’, but can be accommodated with greater explanatory power in a
within a variant of the category ‘modernity’ viz. ‘late modernity’ which is not so radically out of
harmony with the key components of that construct as to require its nullification and replacement.
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appeared, ‘representing’ the transcendent realm, in tension with the ‘secular’ political leadership (Bellah,
1970: 20-50). In the case of Christianity, after several centuries of persecution, church and state came
into enduring alliance under the emperor Constantine.
Christianity continued to grapple with the problem of God's separateness-from but involvement-with the
world, stressing the former in its doctrines of God, Sin and Redemption, and the latter in the doctrines of
Creation, the Incarnation, Grace and Sacraments. At the time of the Reformation, this issue came to a
head with reference to the church and its role as the mediator of grace and salvation. Catholicism saw
the church as sacrament, as the body of Christ, continuing the incarnation, mediating saving grace by its
sacraments and teaching. For the churches of the Reformation generally, a kind of secularization or
‘disenchantment’ of the church itself was seen as a demand of the Gospel. The ‘Protestant principle’,
emphasising the sovereignty of God, rejected ‘every human claim to finality and absoluteness’. ‘Every
religious institution, every creed, every pattern of worship, shares in the limitations and distortions (i.e.,
sin) of human existence’ (Dillenberger and Welch, 1954: 313). So the church too is subject to corruption
and requires continual reformation. This view denies ‘divinity’ to a human organization and strips away
from the church, its saints and its rituals the aura of power which has given rise at times to elements of
superstition and magic in practices of devotion.
Dorothy Day, doughty modern champion of the poor, captures both Protestant and Catholic emphases in
her famous remark on the church: ‘She may be a whore, but she's our mother.’ For many modern
Christians, this ‘secularization’ of the understanding of the church represents, by biblical and theological
standards, an unqualified advance--a major emancipation of the human spirit from the bondage of
institutional idolatry. And the critical perspective on human institutions and human motivation, shaped
by the prophets and the reformers, has become common coin in modern culture through the work of the
‘masters of suspicion’--theorists such as Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, whose work has tended further to
unmask in all human endeavours the elements of mixed and self-serving motivation.
This second major symbolic secularization also had its social consequences. The Reformation critique
had weakened the political status of the church and legitimated the independence of secular political and
economic institutions. Although Christian churches remained ‘established’ in European societies (even,
in diluted form, up to the present in some countries), their capacity to infuse the whole of society with
sacred meaning was greatly diminished.
Accelerating developments from the middle of the eighteenth century brought social secularization
almost to its logical conclusion. The American and French revolutions gave rise to states in which the
churches were deprived of the legal privilege of establishment. Increasingly, even where there were
religiously-based political parties, the State itself was considered to be ‘secular’--neutral as between the
claims of various religious groups. Craft was no longer organised by religious guilds, commerce was
freed from theological prohibitions on the earning of interest. Major social functions like education,
health care and social welfare, which in the past have been conducted largely under the auspices of
religious bodies, are now entrusted mainly to secular agencies (especially the State).
3) The secularization of culture
If one major strand in the process of secularization is the religious emphasis on the distinctness of a
transcendent God from the world of nature, and a second, the sovereign independence of the same God
from all human social institutions, religious as well as political, then a third, of no less importance, is the
secularization of culture through the vindication of the autonomy of reason. Christianity's origins in the
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Hellenistic world meant that from the first it attempted to interpret its Judaic heritage in the light of
Greek philosophy. The secularization of nature and society already carried the implication that these
realities had their own intelligibility. Christianity took the further awesome step of assuming that God
also was, at least to some degree, rationally intelligible. For the next thousand years, Christian theology
expounded its scriptural base in terms of Platonist-Augustinian, and later Aristotelian, models. In the
Aristotelian system developed by Aquinas, it is precisely because they depend on the nature of God
(rather than on the divine will) that created realities share the intelligibility common to Being. The
dignity and role of reason thus received religious legitimation, and in the centuries after the Reformation
had both strengthened the this-worldly focus of the Christian calling, and weakened the church's
dominance of intellectual life, reason found a voice independent of theology and gave birth to modern
philosophy and science.
4) The impact of secularization
What has been the cumulative impact of these major movements of secularization? So far we have
stressed their religious inspiration and what many see as their ‘refining’ consequences for religion.
Religion can be seen as strengthened by these changes; many believers would prefer, on religious
grounds, to live in the religious and moral environment of a secular era rather than hark back to an earlier
epoch. But we should not be blind to the fact that secularization also entails a contraction in the cultural
and social reach and influence of religion. (It does not seem appropriate to refer to this as a ‘decline’ on
the part of religion since it is at least partly caused by religious traditions redefining themselves and
limiting their own scope – i.e. it is a case of religious self-restraint -- even if, as seems likely, the actors
involved did not fully anticipate the consequences of their actions.) The societal process of
secularization as we have defined it leaves religious institutions and levels of individual involvement
much more open to variation than before. It opens the gates to further decline on institutional and
individual levels, but these outcomes are subject to many other influences and so are neither certain nor
irreversible.
What Luckmann calls the ‘privatization’ of religion--its loss of dominion over the major social
institutions of the public sphere, can come to mean that only in the individual's ‘private’ life, in the
sphere of leisure and voluntary activities, is religion seen to have a place. Obviously, people nowadays
make less use than formerly of religious beliefs and values in making sense of their lives, since these
‘other-worldly’ principles of interpretation have largely been replaced, in the secular institutions of the
‘public’ sphere, by ‘rational’ frameworks whose horizon is ‘this-worldly’. Detached from the political,
economic and social functions which mobilise communities into being, religion can come to focus more
and more on the solitary individual, or at best to involve only family and friends. In place of the great
‘ultimate’ questions of the meaning of life and death with which religion has been traditionally
concerned, its primary themes are now often restricted to those on which alienated moderns confer a kind
of ultimacy or sacredness: the autonomy of the individual and his ‘self-expression’ and ‘self-realization’.2
A host of therapies and ‘spiritualities’ compete in a kind of religious ‘supermarket’ to assuage the
modern sense of rootlessness and loss of identity. They include some traditional religious themes, now
detached from their theological and institutional base, but also Eastern syncretism, occultism, and ‘New
Age’ nostrums.
The secularization of knowledge in time went far beyond its religious origins (see Chadwick 1975,
McLeod 2000). One influential modern worldview denies religion any relevance at all in the political,
2
This understanding of secularization was first formulated by Thomas Luckmann (1967). A later statement
of his position is found in Luckmann (1990).
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economic and social spheres, and goes further to deny the existence of God and the validity of all
subjective conceptions of religious transcendence in the private sphere. ‘Secularism’, as it is generally
called, constitutes a profound challenge to religion in its entirety. Often in recent years the word
‘secularization’ has been used to imply the inevitable, and desirable, demise of religion. It should be
obvious that in this use, the word has taken on an ideological edge derived from what we have called
secularism. In other words, it is a myth (Luckmann 1977: 17), which embodies the ‘interests’ of groups
(especially intellectuals) who aspire to succeed to the position of cultural authority once held by religious
functionaries. Secularization makes secularism possible, but its full realization is by no means
determined.
In summary, three major movements of secularization in human history stem from religious roots, and
occurred prior to the modern era. Secularization, then, has no intrinsic relationship to modernization (as
effect to cause).
Secularization theory posits that the reverse is not true: that modernization does have an intrinsic
tendency to promote secularization. This once-broadly-supported view has come under increasing
criticism in the last twenty years, and is now on the defensive. Insight into the controversy can be
furnished by examining the repudiation of secularization theory by Peter Berger, one of its principal
modern architects, and the contrary efforts of able spokesmen, Frank Lechner and Steve Bruce, to
maintain it.
B. Berger’s argument against secularization theory, and specifically that of Steve Bruce
Berger’s early definition of the modern process of secularization remains the simplest and clearest of all
those that have been proposed: “the removal of sectors of society and culture from the domination of
religious institutions and symbols” (1969). Bruce’s definition is somewhat more concrete:
Secularization [is] a social condition manifest in a) the declining
importance of religion for the operation of non-religious roles and
institutions such as those of the state and the economy; b) a decline in
the social standing of religious roles and institutions and c) a decline in
the extent to which people engage in religious practices, display beliefs
of a religious kind and conduct other aspects of their lives in a manner
informed by such beliefs (Bruce 2002: 3).3
Both definitions tend to imply a link between the secularization of institutions and the secularization of
consciousness; a link that Berger is now at pains to reject (Berger 1999: p. 3), and which Bruce wishes to
argue is inherent.
Earlier forms of secularization theory focussed almost exclusively on these developments in Western
societies, and concluded that religion faced a continuing diminution of its role, functions and influence in
modern society, culture and individual consciousness. They also assumed that the same pattern would be
followed in modernizing societies in the developing countries of Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
But then the vigorous emergence of religiously-inspired, anti-Western variants of modernity in these
same countries appears to have inspired some former secularization theorists to reconsider their position.
Among them was Peter Berger, who made a point of publicly renouncing some aspects of his former
3
This definition is similar to that of Brian Wilson (1982: 149).
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theory (Berger 1980). Significantly, the title of that article is “From secularity to world religions”.
Although Berger’s ‘recantation’ is now very old news, it is still the subject of debate, stimulated by a
collection he edited (1999), by a symposium on his former secularization theory (Woodhead 2001), and
no doubt by the fact that it remains a ‘burr under the saddle’ of subsequent secularization theorists like
Bruce, who wish to embrace much of what Berger has repudiated, and therefore must deal with his
reasons for rejecting it.
In stark contrast to the titles of his earlier works, a collection of articles Berger edited in 1999 was called
“The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics”. It serves to dramatise the
response to modernization of societies outside the narrow confines of the West. Defying the predictions
of religion’s decline in earlier secularization theories, a ‘resurgence’ of religion was observed as these
societies discovered resources in both traditional4 and newer5 religions for imposing a variety of new
shapes on the process of modernization as it evolved locally.
Does this amount to a ‘desecularization of the world’? Perhaps not quite. It would be difficult to point
to examples of societies where secularization has taken firm hold, which have subsequently been
“desecularized” -- returned to something like their pre-secular religious condition. Some writers point to
the replacement of ‘conventional’ religious forms by ‘New Age’ movements, and the increased growth of
superstitious practices such as astrology, but as we shall show in the case of Australia, (and as others
have already argued in other cases) these developments have little influence, and do not return a society
to anything remotely like the pre-pluralist religious homogeneity and vigour of earlier stages.
As the key reason for his repudiation of his former position, Berger cites the loss of his conviction that
modernization necessarily causes secularization:
Although the term ‘secularization theory’ refers to works from the 1950s
and 1960s, the key idea of the theory can indeed be traced to the
Enlightenment. That idea is simple: modernization necessarily leads to a
decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals. And
it is precisely this key idea that has turned out to be wrong (Berger,
1999).
Responding to Bruce, he phrases his argument a little differently:
If modernization and secularization are intrinsically linked, one would
have to argue that the United States is less modern than, say, the United
Kingdom . . . As to the rest of the world, full of massive religious
explosions, it won’t do to explain this in terms of a lesser degree of
modernization. . . . There does indeed exist the phenomenon of
secularization, and more specifically the version of it that one may call
Eurosecularity. But one cannot assume that this is the normal
concomitant of modernity (Berger, 2001).
“Intrinsically linked” is taken to imply that the degree of secularization should correspond to the extent
of modernization. Logical enough, if secularization necessarily, inevitably, follows from modernization.
And we must of course agree with Berger that it has become clear that there is no strict and immediately
effective link producing secularization as the inevitable consequence of modernization.
4
5
One example: a newly militant Islam.
See for example, Martin, (1990 and 2002) on Pentecostalism.
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But outside the realm of the physical sciences (where, for example, a rise in the temperature of a gas
follows with law-like inevitability from an application of increased pressure) where do we ever find this
kind of ‘necessary link’? Is it possible in history or social science ever to conclude from cause to effect;
to say that B follows A with strict necessity? We submit that it is not, for the following reasons: unless
we posit a completely mechanistic and deterministic model of human behaviour, influences on human
action do not operate with the constraining force of physical causes; even if they did, we do not possess
the comprehensive knowledge of complex human situations which would permit strict prediction. An
influence in one direction may be countered by an unforseen, opposed influence; given all known
influences, human agents may find reasons for actions in still other directions. In other words,
“necessarily, inevitably” was always an overstatement of the theory’s rigour, and its removal merely
introduces a modesty more becoming for a social science, but otherwise takes away nothing from the
theory.
Social science proceeds inductively by observing patterned regularities in human action; from these it
forms, first, empirical generalizations which associate events with regularly concomitant circumstances.:
“A and B are ‘associated’ phenomena: they ‘vary together’”. In some cases, it can hypothesise, test and
tentatively posit a cause-and-effect relationship; but never with the deductive certainty of physical law.
Students of modernization in Europe observed that it was often accompanied or followed by
secularization, and proposed hypotheses accounting for some kinds of secularization by means of the
causal influence of modernization. These hypotheses appeared to be verified in some countries, but their
applicability to the United States was controversial. Over the following fifty years, the pace of
modernization increased in various non-Western countries, and there it was observed that secularization
did not appear to be following as expected.
Berger’s conclusion seems justified: “it [secularization] is not the normal concomitant of modernization”.
But does it follow that modernization is never a cause of secularization -- that there is no “intrinsic link”
between them – that their apparent association is ‘spurious’, purely extrinsic or accidental?
It seems possible to disagree with him concerning what is required for the link to be intrinsic. We submit
that an ‘intrinsic link’ exists if the modernization process, or some specific form of it, has an inherent
tendency or potency to secularize a society, a culture, an individual’s consciousness. Whether it
succeeds in doing so may depend on other factors.
If we are to understand Berger’s argument, we need to be conceptually precise in understanding terms
such as ‘necessary’, ‘follows necessarily’, ‘intrinsic’. A cause is that which, of itself, considered
according to what is proper to it, tends to produce a particular effect. It is not part of the definition of a
cause that the effect always follows. A cause is said to be sufficient if given that cause, and without any
other requirement, the effect does always follow. If A, then (always) B. This does not involve asserting
that A is required for B to occur: it could simultaneously be true that if C, then always B.
A cause is said to be necessary if the effect never occurs without it. If, and only if A, then B (but perhaps
not always). In the absence of A, B never occurs. Given A, B may or may not occur. Just as a sufficient
cause may not be necessary, so a necessary cause may not be sufficient: it may be the case that: if and
only if A, and given also condition X, B may follow. Condition X is a condition sine qua non. It is not
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itself a cause, but it “opens the gate” to the operation of a cause; without it, even given A, B will not
follow. Given both A and the condition X, B may follow, but then again, it may not.
A moment taken to apply these distinctions to the issue under discussion is sufficient to convince that
modernization is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of secularization.
Not a necessary cause, because secularization evidently has other causes: the instances we cited earlier of
the great movements of secularization of nature, society and culture which occurred (under directly
religious impulses) in pre-modern times show that modernization is not at all required for secularization
to take place.
Not a sufficient cause because secularization has not occurred to any significant degree in some societies
where modernization is quite advanced.
If then, modernization is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of secularization, are we forced to
concede Berger’s point that there is no ‘intrinsic’ linkage between the two processes?
No – and this is the nub of our argument against Berger’s rejection of secularization theory –
modernization can even under these circumstances be properly considered a cause of secularization
provided that it inherently, of itself, tends to bring about secularizing effects. The effects may not
follow; it need not be either a sufficient or necessary cause, and may depend for its effect on a whole
series of conditions, yet so long as, all other things being equal, modernization contains within itself
components that tend to secularize a society, the “intrinsic link” between the two remains in force.
The case that modernity, under certain conditions, tends to secularize, hardly has to be argued anew;
Berger’s earlier work delineates those tendencies in great detail, and in fact, he still concedes that
modernity has such a tendency – not “normally”, but at least sometimes:
To be sure, modernization has had some secularizing effects, more in
some places than in others. But it has also provoked powerful
movements of counter-secularization (1999: 3).
Berger’s second sentence here cannot be read to indicate that modernization can serve equally well to
promote either secularization or its contrary (the actual effect depending entirely on some other
condition), since this would contradict what the first sentence asserts: that (in some cases ) secularization
is the effect of modernization. Obviously, it is through its tendency to secularize that it provokes the
contrary reaction. So he retains the notion of modernization as a cause of secularization – i.e. tending to
bring it about, regardless of whether the effect actually follows. This would seem to qualify
modernization as having an “intrinsic link” with secularization, in terms of the clarification proposed
above; Berger evidently takes the phrase “intrinsic link” to mean that modernization is a sufficient cause
of secularization, so he rejects it.
In cases where Berger concedes that secularization has occurred in modern times – e.g., to an advanced
degree in contemporary Europe, while not denying that modernization may play a causal role, Berger
does not see this as an adequate explanation. Europe is a deviant case, in contrast to the worldwide norm
of the flourishing of religion, and the task of explaining it is “The most interesting topic for the sociology
of religion today”(Berger, 2001: 194) .
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It seems appropriate, then, to join him in his rejection of a rigid link of causal sufficiency between
modernization and secularization, if not in his jettisoning of the whole of “secularization theory” along
with it.
His counter-arguments can be taken instead to indicate an incompleteness in secularization theory which
requires a remedy. What conditions tend to bring about secularization as an outcome of modernization
(e.g. in the European case) , and what other conditions delay, impede, or neutralise the secularizing
tendencies inherent in modernization? We will return to this question below as an example of a lacuna
in secularization theory.
The version of secularization theory formerly espoused by Berger was moderate and highly nuanced; he
did not predict as inevitable either the imminent or eventual demise of religion, (nor does Bruce).
All of his former arguments linking modernization with secularization, (with the qualification that the
“link” is flexible, rather than rigid) retain their validity, and their acuity in uncovering the tendencies
inherent in the modernization process, to secularize not only societies, cultures and institutions, but the
religious consciousness of individuals. Moreover, this explanation, with the clarifications we have
suggested, still provides the best understanding of those cases where the loss of influence of religion in
both social and personal life occurs, and where components of the modernization process can be shown
to be at work. This is the position now championed by Steve Bruce.
Berger stresses that he wants to retain one other component of his former theory: the effect of pluralism
in undermining the taken-for-granted certainty of religious (and other) beliefs. But he no longer sees this
effect as necessarily secularizing, even in the longer term:
. . . it is possible to hold beliefs, and to live by them, even if they no
longer hold the status of taken-for-granted certainties (in Woodhead,
2001:194).
Berger does less than justice here to the full power of his former argument for the secularizing effect of
pluralism. Its effect of removing a “taken-for-granted certainty” from religious beliefs could scarcely
have occurred often in recent centuries, since such certainty was lost in most societies when they
emerged from their primitive stage. Even the great-grandparents of present generations in Western
countries did not exist in an era when religious certainties were completely taken-for-granted. The full
phenomenological sense of this phrase implies that alternatives never arise in consciousness, are not even
conceivable. But in some religiously pluralistic countries, people have lived for centuries cheek by jowl
with members of other denominations, and thus fallen under Berger’s “heretical imperative”: religion
was for them, at least to some extent, a matter of choice. That is implied in the very notion of
‘denomination’ as it is usually defined sociologically. Taken-for-granted certainty is not a feature of
even the pre-modern religious paradigm – indeed, it probably should be confined to the milieu of
“primitive” religions which seem to have originally inspired it. Pluralism however, as Berger himself has
argued in the past, particularly in The Heretical Imperative (1975), has other secularizing effects not so
easily set aside.
So a second requirement for an adequate theory of secularization is the (re)gaining of an understanding
of pluralism, particularly the kind of pluralism associated with modernization, and of the conditions
under which it can be shown (against “new paradigm” rational choice theory) to promote secularization.
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This brief review has shown that Berger has not completely abandoned secularization theory; rather his
critique of it points to two aspects in which the theory requires further development. Before reflecting
further on that task, it will be helpful to survey the contribution of Steve Bruce, who leaped fearlessly on
to the wagon of secularization after so many others had abandoned it as obsolete, and drove off at speed,
casting off the funereal drapes in which the “new paradigm” fraternity had swathed it.
C. Bruce’s version of secularization theory
Steve Bruce’s distinction is to have retained the best of past secularization theories, and to have done
more than other sociologists since David Martin’s marvellous A General Theory of Secularization
(1978), to tease out the mixture of causal influences and moderating or impeding conditions under which
modernization sometimes brings about the secularizing social effects towards which it naturally tends,
and is at other times impeded or delayed in bringing about such effects.6 It is to an assessment of his
version of secularization theory in its most recent expression (2002) that we now turn.
It is beyond our scope here to describe, even in outline, Bruce’s entire theory. It is not, in any case, too
different from that of Brian Wilson or the earlier Berger. However, some salient aspects are worth
noting: its robustness against the criticisms which led others to consign secularization theory to the
sociological graveyard, and specifically against Berger’s rejoinder to it.7
Bruce has developed his theory in a number of recent works (1990, 1996, 1999, 2001,2002), one of
which (1999) was entirely devoted to a rebuttal of the “supply-side” thesis of Stark, Fink, Iannacone and
others. Here we focus on the latest presentation and fullest development of his theory in God is Dead:
Secularization in the West (2002).
Bruce defends his position against the usual criticisms of secularization theory by emphasising the
following features of it (2002: 37):
-secularization is not presented as either universal or inevitable; it is not comparable to a law of nature of
the kind discovered in physics or biology; he describes the historically and geographically specific
circumstances in which secularization occurs (or does not occur). The scope of the theory is confined to
the situation of religion in Western Europe since the Reformation, and in North America and Australia.
He goes slightly beyond Brian Wilson’s position on the point of inevitability, pointing out that some
historically contingent changes, once made, are extremely unlikely to be reversed: they were not
inevitable, but they did occur, and having occurred, became firmly established. Egalitarianism and an
expectation of a high level of individual freedom in private life are two examples, both of which tend to
promote further religious diversity. It is impossible to imagine these societies submitting to the authority
required to return a religiously diverse society to homogeneity.
-the theory does not rest on the assumption of “progress”, nor is it part of a “secularist” agenda; Bruce
quotes sympathetically Weber’s view of the disenchanted, rational, bureaucratised world as an “the iron
cage” and Wilson’s prognosis of the breakdowns likely in civil order in the absence of the controlling
power of religiously-based morality.
6
Historians, on the other hand, have always emphasised this variability, and expressed scepticism about
the possibility of adequately accounting for it by sociological generalizations.
7
An amicable exchange of views between Bruce and Berger occurs in Woodhead (2001) – Bruce wrote a
chapter, and Berger a brief rejoinder.
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-to those who criticise secularization theory as poor or very limited theory, Bruce concedes the point; but
systematic and universal theories have tended to become so abstract as to have no practical usefulness.
He cites Stark’s rational-choice “religious market economy” as an example.
-despite the rapid and in some respects quite uniform advances in modernization, the trajectory of
secularization is uneven or “lumpy”, because institutions caught up in the process have their own
histories, which may lead them to resist consequences of modernization successfully. There are also
causes of secularization which are independent of the modernization process: Bruce cites the example of
the support of the Spanish Church for Franco, which probably alienated it from the masses. A century
and more before, the French Church’s support for the ancien regime seems to have had the same effect of
deeply and irreversibly alienating the populace.
There are good reasons to suggest that some Catholics and members of other denominations will be
alienated from their churches, and perhaps eventually from their faith, by the recent rash of revelations of
sexual abuse of minors by clergy. The indications in our Australian findings8 are that it is the failure of
Church authorities to exercise care for victims, and act to prevent future abuse, that is the focus of
outrage and alienation among adherents, rather than a loss of confidence in clergy in general as if all
were potential abusers of children. The institutions and their leaders seem to have been motivated much
more by concern to maintain their good name, than by a sense of outrage, a thirst for justice, and
compassion, together with an imperative towards active care, for those who had suffered serious harm.
In ordinary, and even more in Christian, ethical terms, this is a serious and indefensible dereliction of
duty, more to be expected of a ruthlessly self-interested corporation than a religious body.
But the relevant point for the present discussion is that any effects of loss of influence of religion that
follow in this case should not immediately be attributed to “modernization”. Scandal and disillusionment
are sufficient explanation. On the other hand, the actions of governments and police in prosecuting, and
of the media in reporting, abuses on the part of clergy, are a distinctively recent development in Englishspeaking countries, and have become possible as a result of an acceleration of secularization since the
1970s, which can be traced to typically “modern” changes in the relationship between religious bodies,
governments and media, and society at large.
Against those who criticise secularization theory on the grounds that it presupposes as a terminus a quo
or starting point a “Golden Age” of total religious dominance which never empirically existed, Bruce
argues convincingly that such critics make two mistakes: they expect to find the equivalent of modern
Protestant ‘true believers’ in the past (we could add that though there were such enthusiasts, they were
usually part of some sect-like movement of reform, and prefigured some Protestant characteristics – but
of course this style of religiosity is essentially ‘oppositional,’ and was not the mediaeval norm). Second,
such critics misread the abundant historical evidence of the powerlessness of the church to quell the
perennial old magic and superstition, concluding falsely that Christianity never had much of a hold on the
population. Bruce points out that such a conclusion seems to ignore the obvious: that such people lived
in a ‘thoroughly supernaturalistic’ world (2002: 58). And we might add in support that from the
perspective of the disciplines of anthropology and history of religions, the confident distinctions made by
some sociologists between religion and magic seem likely to contain a hidden theological defensive
component, and do not survive close examination; a more neutral view is likely to reclassify what
Christianity has stigmatised as ‘superstitions’ as religious (in a more neutral sense), although perhaps
8
Appendix, Table 2.
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belonging to a less religiously differentiated period.
The only question, Bruce insists, is whether there is
. . . an identifiable difference in the popularity and salience of beliefs,
actions and institutions that assume the existence of supernatural entities
with powers of action, or impersonal powers and processes possessed of
moral purpose (58)9
In the following four chapters, Bruce engages the empirical evidence on religion and several major
variants which some scholars nominate as successors of the older traditions, in their argument against the
secularization thesis. So first he takes up the case of the condition of the former mainstream religion in
Britain, and afterwards discusses the slightness of New Age religiosity, the influence of science in the
process of secularization, and the vogue enjoyed by Westernised Eastern religious forms. We will shortly
refer to Australian evidence on these themes.
Three chapters on methodological flaws in commonly advanced arguments against secularization are
particularly interesting and enjoyable. Here Bruce is in his element, he answers his critics in argument
laced with sarcastic wit. Yet, unlike some less principled writers on the topic, he shows no real malice
and does not engage in unfair distortions of the arguments of his opponents.
Bruce is not an especially systematic thinker (one easily gets lost in his “paradigm”, and his explanation
of it is laboured and unclear). More seriously, he appears to lose focus on part of his argumentative task:
undertaking to vindicate the secularization paradigm includes showing not merely that there is evidence
of a significant degree of secularization in the West, but that it is a result of modernization rather than
adequately explicable as the result of other causes.
One of the methodological chapters discusses the danger of so emphasising exceptions that their
capacity to “prove the rule” is blurred; a second deals in brief compass with refuting the Stark et al
“supply side” approach, while allowing its usefulness in some circumstances; and a third deals with
methodological mistakes leading some writers to claims that they discern more ‘non-organised religion’
than Bruce finds warranted.
An oddly-placed chapter discusses the claim that the charismatic movement constitutes an exception to
the general thesis; then Bruce confronts what is always the most formidable counter-example: religion in
the contemporary USA. While he does so convincingly on the whole, his repetition of Berger’s (early)
strictures on the self-focussed religion of Norman Vincent Peale, and later, Robert Schuller, does not
address the much more typical religious style of dominant groups like the Southern Baptist Convention.
Bruce next presents the case for secularization in Britain in a very workmanlike way, showing a thorough
mastery of data, with which he is obviously intimately familiar.
In this paper, we will utilise Australian findings to furnish this part of the argument.
Since this passage also contains Bruce’s preferred definition of religion, it is worth noting, that like
Berger before him (1969, Appendix 2 “On substantive versus functional definitions of religion”), and for
exactly the same reasons, Bruce argues for a substantive definition.
9
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Finally there is a very pertinent chapter on the claim that the advent of ‘postmodernism’ has inaugurated
an era of potentially unlimited resurgence of religion – not in its past institutionally-based shape, but in
the universalization of ‘spirituality’ and in the emergence of multitudinous new forms that are arising
under the stimulus of the condition of new freedom for the individual in a post-Enlightenment, postrational society. This is one of the most clearly written chapters in the book, and at last deals explicitly
with the secularizing components of modernization, and how they operate in practice to achieve their
effects. While he does not directly cite the work of Alain Touraine, his refutation counters a good
proportion of the arguments in favour of a new spiritual vitality giving rise to New Religious Movements,
and a wave of uninstitutionalised ‘spirituality’ supposedly emerging in the unstructured postmodern
situation.
Bruce de-emphasises the role of science and philosophy as influences towards secularization. Michael
Paul Gallagher (1990)10 takes the same approach, arguing that it is neither science nor philosophical
atheism per se which convinces non-intellectuals to abandon their religious beliefs, but they “pick up the
drift second-hand” that the experts in particular forms of rationality have (in the words of the famous
reply given to Napoleon by La Mettrie, author of Man the Machine) ‘no need for the hypothesis’ (of the
existence of God). To the “masters of suspicion”: Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, add Durkheim, Darwin
and his successors down to Dawkins.
We could summarise the positions of Berger and Bruce by saying that in the light of the interpretation we
have offered above, there is little real conflict between them, despite the contradictory rhetoric. The
difference between the former and later positions of Berger is a refinement, rather than a total
repudiation, and Bruce’s position is largely compatible with Berger’s later one, despite Berger’s rejection
of Bruce’s arguments. If by “the uniqueness of European secularity” Berger means that nowadays he
does not recognise any secularizing trend elsewhere, we would have a real contradiction to deal with, but
it is far more likely that he does not consider that the American evidence supports the conclusion that the
US should be included with Europe as a secularized society. Where one draws the line in such cases
raises complex problems involving the proper boundary between sociology and history; but Bruce, one
suspects, would have to agree, which would do no real damage to his paradigm.
While, in this assessment, Bruce makes an original contribution, and achieves the most comprehensive
and defensible statement of secularization theory so far, nonetheless, a number of weaknesses in
secularization theory constitute obstacles to further progress, and make it likely that secularization theory
will remain in contestation for the foreseeable future.
D. Secularization theory: some weaknesses and proposed refinements
(This section is undergoing revision)
The following are proposed as aspects of secularization theory which need strengthening:
1) Inadequate specification of the conditions which moderate the secularizing effects of modernization,
for example, the intimate entwining of religion and ethnic or national identity; a pillarized structure on
the part of one or more religious groups; and of other factors which seem, by contrast, to promote
secularization, such as the “cultural revolution” of the early 1970s, whose impact on the Catholic Church
in Holland is discussed by Lechner (1996).
2) Lack of a fully systematic theory of the secularizing components of modernization, and particularly of
An Irish theologian and expert on ‘unbelief’, formerly Secretary of the Vatican’s Secretariat for NonBelief.
10
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the multiple dimensions of pluralism, its different effects in different circumstances, and on different
types of groups; also of rationalization and privatization.
3) The relationship between the various “levels” of secularization: cultural, societal, organizational and
individual, needs to be re-articulated in the light of recent theory, research and critique.
4) Some empirical research on religion, pluralism and secularization (for instance, some of the “new
paradigm” studies), can be criticised as resting on a conception of the experience of the believer which is
so phenomenologically “thin” that it tends to parody religion; a “thicker” description, to use Geertz’s
metaphor, could lead to improved operationalization of the complex concepts of secularization theory
and hence to better measures.
a) Lack of a systematic theory of the moderating conditions of secularization.
One component of a fully satisfactory sociological theory still lacking in both Berger’s and Bruce’s work
is a systematic account of (at least the principal) factors which modify the effects of the secularizing
tendencies of modernization – blocking them entirely, delaying them for long periods, and/or moderating
their effects. This account should also indicate the conditions under which secularization at the societal
or organizational level corresponds to secularization at the level of individual consciousness, and the
factors which sometimes act to maintain a divergence between levels.
To what extent is such an account possible? No doubt a considerable proportion of the variation in the
course of secularization in different countries is shaped by irreducibly contingent historical factors, but
the resources of sociological explanation do not seem yet to have been exhausted in the search for
systematic factors.
Observing the process of modernization in non-Western societies, scholars have become aware that the
secularizing consequences which earlier theory led them to expect did not seem to be occurring. But
why should we expect the process of modernization itself to be independent of the cultural matrix within
which it is replicating?11 Eisenstadt proposes that there are “multiple modernizations” and “multiple
modernities”:
The classical theories of modernization . .conflated these different
dimensions of modernity [structural, institutional and cultural], . . . and
assumed that historically they do come together . . . that the basic
institutional constellations which came together in European modernity
and the cultural program of modernity as it developed in the West will
“naturally” ultimately be taken over in all modernizing societies. . . . But
the reality that emerged proved radically different (2000:39).
Eisenstadt goes on to show how the Western paradigm of modernity is continually contested and
redefined; and especially how strongly religious societies can give rise to “fundamentalist” responses
which utilise some of the components of modernity (for example, by appropriating technologies resulting
from globalization of communications) to campaign against other (especially Western) components.
Luckmann (1990) argues that “fundamentalist responses” may be expected in non-Western societies,
which have not shared the long and gradual cultural evolution of the West into its modern form: “The –
relatively – sudden loss of religious legitimations for everyday life seems to lead to anti-modernist
11
David Martin (1978) developed a set of quite systematic explanations covering many of the major
patterns of historical variation in the process of secularization.
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reactions among substantial segments of the population of “modernizing” countries” (Luckmann, 1990:
137).
However, there is still something in the notion that it is modernization that tends to accelerate and carry
further the process of secularization (which arises quite independently from pre-modern and religious
sources) that should give us pause. There are of course currently ‘modernizing’ societies; but in the
West, the key characteristics of social ‘modernity’, such as advanced social differentiation, pluralism,
bureaucratization and technological development, date back at least to the Industrial Revolution, and in
the case of religious pluralism, to the Reformation. But although later manifestations of secularization
may be seen to have their roots in these developments, the supposed secularizing impact of
modernization was, to say the least, long delayed, and the delay varies greatly from one society to
another. Clearly there are retarding factors at work.
In Europe, secularization has a history peculiar to each nation, and severe declines in popular
participation stretch back to the Revolutions of 1789 and 1848, and were deepened by each of the 20th
century’s two World Wars; but in the English-speaking countries, after something of a religious boom in
the fifties and sixties, it is particularly when we come to the nineteen seventies that accelerated social and
cultural changes impacting negatively on religious belief and behaviour begin to be cited as empirical
evidence of secularization. Yet neither in continental Europe nor in England and its former colonies, is
secularization contemporaneous with modernization. No one denies these obvious facts, but they should
surely give rise to a modification of theories that tie modernization and secularization together: if the
former is a driving influence towards the latter, then there are obviously unnamed, but very powerful
braking forces at work, impeding, or at least retarding for very long periods, the secularizing impact of
modernization. Or are we compelled to admit that modernization is not at all the motor of secularization;
it is some other influence, or at the very least, some later-developing component of modernization not
present or effective in its earliest phases?
A good deal of attention has been given to one moderating factor: the entwining of religion with national
identity. Where the two are closely related, and especially when one nation is under hegemonic control
by another, secularizing tendencies seem to be completely nullified. Poland in the Cold War era is an
excellent example -- all the better because after the historic collapse of the Soviet Union, the formerly
packed Catholic seminaries in Poland saw a considerable exodus, and religious fervour and practice have
begun to decline significantly.
Clearly there are other such factors, and the theory would be greatly improved by carrying forward David
Martin’s work in this direction, begun in A General Theory of Secularization (1978). Eisenstadt’s recent
work on ‘multiple modernizations’ (2000) is a valuable contribution.
Australia makes an interesting case of the entwining of religion and ethnic (rather than national) identity.
A high proportion of the convicts in the original settlements were Irish and Catholic. Although the
Church of England was not formally established in the colony, it was de facto the religion of the hated
establishment, symbolised to perfection in the figure of Rev. Samuel Marsden – “the flogging parson” –
both a clergyman and a magistrate, notorious for the brutality of his sentences.
Although secondary industry was slow to develop, the country was from its foundation culturally modern
and secular in the post-Enlightenment sense. Its nascent institutions were strongly shaped by developing
in the very heyday of English secularist thought. The State education system shaped in the 1850s was to
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be “free, compulsory and secular” and its secularity was expressly and militantly anti-religious
(particularly anti-Catholic). The position of religion in the colony was slighted from the very beginning.
Yet, for all that, as the Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian churches took their place amongst freedmen
and free settlers, the course of the denominations until the middle of the twentieth century was one of
steady growth.
During the nineteenth century, and up to the end of World War I in the 20th, Catholics were the object of
explicit prejudice and both social and economic repression, and led by combative Irish bishops,12
continued to enjoy the solidarity of an oppressed group with a visible common enemy, united by their
religion and the massive alternative school system built largely without Government subsidies. 13
By the end of the Second World War, the Catholic education system had succeeded in its task of raising
the social status of succeeding generations of Catholics, and they had been gradually admitted to the
ranks of the public service, the professions (especially law and medicine), and all but the higher levels of
business. Religio-ethnic solidarity began to matter somewhat less from this time, and in the wave of
immigration, especially from Southern and Central Europe, during the nineteen-fifties, the church was
transformed from an Irish ethnic enclave into the most “multi-cultural” of all religious groups.
A structure had been built analogous to what European sociologists14 describe as “pillarization” – a layercake of institutions in different religious communities catering for their own members – neatly defined by
Lechner (1996: 258) as “institutions that had secular functions and religious identities”. To the now
enormous Catholic school system,15 and the network of diocesan newspapers, were added the “Jocist”
youth movements, catering for secondary students (YCS), young workers (YCW) and tertiary students.
They provided a wide variety of sporting and social activities, as well as a unique Christian formation
system aimed at applying the teachings of the New Testament to the world of work.16 The movement is
now virtually extinct, but sorely missed by the Church.
One extraordinary development in this line was the formation of the “Democratic Labour Party”, a
political party which had its roots in a movement of “Industrial Groups” designed to counter the
influence of Communists in the trade unions and the Labor party. It received strong support from the
Catholic hierarchy and laity, especially in the state of Victoria, and was successful in keeping the Labor
Party out of federal government from 1954 until 1972 (Duncan 2001).17
12
Nobody personified the type better than Daniel Mannix of Melbourne; untypical in his learning and
wit, he was nonetheless regarded by both the British and Australian governments as a dangerous radical
because of his oratorical powers and his outspoken stand on the “Irish Question”.
13
After an early period of support for denominational schools, government aid was withdrawn over the
twenty years after 1850, and partially subsidies were restored only in the nineteen fifties and sixties.
“State Aid” now pays the salaries of the teaching workforce (formerly made up of religious order
members, but now virtually entirely lay) but capital works are still funded by the sponsoring bodies.
14
See Lijphart (1975).
15
According to the to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2000 Catholic schools catered for 19% of
the Australian population of primary school age, and 21% of the corresponding secondary school agegroup. (ABS 2001).
16
The movement originated in Europe under the charismatic leadership of Josef (later Cardinal) Cardijn.
17
In Australia’s preferential voting system, votes of losing candidates are transferred to the voter’s next
choice; the DLP urged its voters to give their second preference to the conservative “Liberal Party”.
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This “pillarized” Catholic environment (to a much smaller extent, there existed also Anglican and
Protestant counterparts, less necessary because Australian society was predominantly Protestant) formed
a protective barrier impermeable to secularizing influences until right up to the Second Vatican Council,
which coincided roughly with what Lechner, discussing secularization in the Dutch Catholic Church,
calls the “cultural revolution” (1996: 259). The word ‘ghetto’ has sometimes been used of this Catholic
subculture -- inappropriately, in our judgment, since it did not extend strongly to the world of daily work.
In the economic sphere, Catholics “mixed in” – they were, after all, a quarter or more of the population,
and by the nineteen forties, were fairly evenly distributed across social and occupational strata in
proportion to their numbers, except at the top.
The “pillarization” of the Dutch Catholic and Reformed churches Lechner (1989, 1996) describes was
mirrored in Australia, more clearly in the Catholic case, until the early seventies. Since the religious
situation was “closed” -- not “pluralistic” in the sense used by the “new paradigm” authors, “supply-side”
theory would predict a low level of religious mobilization. On the contrary, the level of church
attendance and other forms of participation was at an unprecendented high. And although the Australian
Catholic Church was almost the opposite of the Dutch Church (far from being a center of Catholic
intellectual life prior to the Vatican Council, it was an anti-intellectual backwater, and the Council took
its bishops entirely by surprise), when the pillars collapsed in the mid-seventies, exposing Catholics to
the religious “market” for the first time, attendance, as in Holland, began to decline and continued to do
so until the present – an estimated 75% decline over forty years.18 Again, what occurred was the exact
opposite of what “new paradigm” theory would lead us to expect.
The similarity of the process in both countries underlines Lechner’s point (1996: 259) that: “the Church
was dealing with forces beyond its control”. All the more clearly, in that while the Dutch Church became
a world leader in attempting to adapt to the changes taking place in its environment, Lechner’s phrase
“stuck in a pre-pluralistic rut” fits the Australian church quite well. It certainly could not be accused of
voluntarily abandoning its former “strictness”. But the outcome was the same in both cases. Since
“strictness” is on both sides of the equation, it drops out as a relevant explanatory factor.
The case made by Bruce and Lechner for the inadequacy of supply-side theory is reinforced by this
example. They emphasise the “embeddedness” of “markets” in cultures; the impact of “demand-side”
factors on the assumed “relatively stable (potential) demand”; and the need for an acute verstehende
appreciation of the perceptions of actors which shape demand – in other words, a fairly standard “oldparadigm” social-structural approach. As Lechner writes: “The critical question, of course, is how such
perceptions are formed and changed. On this score, we have precious little formal theory of the kind
Stark and Iannacone advocate.”(1996: 261). Continuing our discussion of how secularization theory
should be supplemented, we will attempt to gather a few more theoretical components by considering
next the dimensions of pluralism.
b) The multiple dimensions of pluralism
In attributing secularization to “modernization”, secularization theory has often failed to specify with
sufficient precision which components of the complex and many-faceted process of modernization tend
to have secularizing effects, and how they operate. One approach (Berger 1979: chapter 1) shows how
new technologies of industrial production introduce a new complexity into the division of labour,
18
More detailed statistics on the changes are provided in the final section of the paper.
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pluralizing institutions, leading to social differentiation and institutional specialization. Religious
institutions are not exempt; religion becomes one specialised domain among others; the relevance of its
conceptions and the power of its functionaries are now confined to one institutional sphere.
Corresponding to the pluralization of institutions, there occurs a pluralization of plausibility structures;
on the level of individual consciousness, a plurality of worldviews becomes available.
The modernizing process favours the development of democratic societies with a free market for goods,
but also for ideas as well. The Enlightenment Deists who framed the constitutions of modern states
(including particularly those of the USA and Australia) enshrined in them the disestablishment of
religion and legal support for tolerance of the ‘free exercise’ of religion.
Carlin (1997)19 shows how the status of being one denomination among others exerts a range of pressures
towards “indifferentism”, which extends tolerance to the theological level, militating against
‘exclusivism’ – the claim that one’s own religion is uniquely true and salvific – (or, in modified form,
that although other denominations, even other religions, have their meed of truth, one’s own is superior
to the others – alone possessing the fullness of revealed truth and the means of salvation).20 Adherence
to a specific tradition is pressed towards reshaping itself into allegiance to a kind of “Christianity in
general”.
These pressures operate particularly within former ‘church-type’ religious bodies, whose institutions
have been shaped by long periods of virtual religious monopoly or establishment. Orthodoxy and
Catholicism are perhaps the best examples. Although the ‘sect-type’ groups in their environment are
both openly exclusivist and proselytise aggressively, the sectarian stance vis-à-vis the world or their own
society is for these large and diverse groups against their deepest instincts and their centuries of
experience.
Confronted with a virtual (though never official) Protestant and hostile establishment, these former
churches may take on for a time some sectarian characteristics, strongly maintain their exclusivist selfunderstanding and their boundaries; but their world-embracing tendencies are re-asserted as overt
opposition to them fades. Then they face a new series of dilemmas.
There can be no denying pluralism as a fact: other Christian denominations and other religions exist, are
close at hand, and have their own following. The option is open for the believer to “alternate” to one of
these, to seek to combine elements from several, or to abandon them all by adopting a stance of
scepticism and religious indifference. How to respond?
There is often no prospect that these former ‘churches’ will ever be able to resume the status of religious
monopolies; but the opposite, sectarian path, is also blocked to them. Those whose poverty condemns
them to social marginality make readier sectarians. They are less concerned with social acceptability or
the niceties of intellectual and social ‘good manners’, less embarrassed by a faith that views other faiths
as deficient, inferior, or perhaps even as demonic.
Much of the following page is a restructured, rephrased version of Carlin’s argument.
This remains the official Catholic position as formulated at the Second Vatican Council and reiterated
since then in numerous papal documents.
19
20
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21
But the former ‘church-type’ groups, because the breadth of their membership encompasses not only the
less affluent, but also many who are well-educated and well-positioned in society, are drawn to extend
tolerance beyond what is legally required, towards, first, “intellectual tolerance”.
Perhaps there is no trait so characteristic of the Enlightenment ideal of Reason as this “openmindedness”. The demand for it is absolute (especially in academic life), infractions invite strong moral
condemnation, and the only ideas to which it need not, indeed must not, be extended are those considered
conservative and thus, of course, intolerant.
A religiously pluralistic social environment grounds the impulse for intellectual tolerance to be extended
into “social tolerance,” a requirement as fundamental as good manners (in Australia, one often hears the
adage “No religion or politics!” stated as a ground-rule for a pleasant gathering).
And from here, it is a surprisingly short step to pressures arising from within the group for “theological
tolerance” – the renunciation of the group’s uniqueness / exclusivism. The claim of exclusive or
privileged access to religious truth for one’s own denomination appears hubristic and embarrassing to a
significant proportion of the membership, especially to the more cosmopolitan, the liberal intellectuals,
the socially and economically upwardly-mobile. These usually include at least a proportion of the clergy,
bishops etc. Often, such a stance is theologically legitimated as ‘ecumenical’ -- a demand of faith itself,
showing respect for common origins and shared basic beliefs.
But what presented itself so benignly as the abandonment of excessive claims now begins to show its
teeth. “Christianity in general” is not a living faith with its own tradition and body of adherents, but a set
of vague generalizations unviable as a religion.
The traditions that engage a response of religious faith are irreducibly particular. On each cardinal issue
of belief, each tradition has its own approach. But these approaches are often quite different, even
contradictory; once one abandons the minimum of exclusivism implied in every particular tradition, there
is no universally valid “reason” supporting the maintenance of a belief or moral standard.
“Unanswerable questions” emerge as the denomination’s belief and moral system, its internal coherence
lost, begins to unravel and disintegrate. I recall a loyal Catholic, long divorced, musing, with reference to
remarriage: “If it’s all right for him [a non-Catholic colleague], why isn’t it all right for me?”. There is
no longer any clear reason for imposing on oneself any moral demands more stringent than those of the
most liberal tradition.
It is insufficiently realised that two kinds of knowledge are in conflict here: the ‘synthetic’, ‘heartknowledge’, possessed in embracing a religious faith, pre-rational but holistic; and the partial,
discursively rational ‘knowledge-about’ one’s faith. The tension between the two makes for the most
agonising personal dilemmas.
The more tolerantly one appreciates the religious views of others, the more out of place comes to seem a
partisan enthusiasm for those of one’s own group; tolerance is extended naturally from the contrary
doctrines of other faiths (provided they are not conservative) to expressions of unorthodox versions of
one’s own faith, and eventually also to outright secularist and anti-religious thought: the liberal comes to
feel that all are allies in the good fight – the crusade -- against the hateful bigotry and narrowness
characteristic of the ‘fundamentalist’ – the sectarian ‘true believer’. This category is now broadened to
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include less-liberal members of one’s own denomination, especially those who wish to maintain its
exclusive claims.
22
Since religious zeal, and with it, all forms of proselytism now appear at best vulgar, or at worst seriously
offensive as invasions of the other’s privacy, or oppression of the other in an attempt to impose one’s
view of the world (with what right? with what proof of its superiority? how breath-takingly arrogant!),
groups which have reached this stage do not strongly socialise even the children of their own members.
The sectarians, on the other hand, are restrained by no such scruples, and do all they can to recruit the
younger generation of liberal-religious families. They have a measure of success, especially among those
who for some reason experience a sense of religious deprivation, but in today’s Australia, greater success
seems to go to the ‘Enlightenment fundamentalists’ whose tactics are often as anti-intellectual as those of
their enemies, and who have only to reinforce the apathy and scepticism already endemic among youth.
In summary, clarifying the components of modernization which tend to secularize, we can distinguish a
number of dimensions of “pluralism”:
-the “pluralism” of the “backslider”: no matter what post-primitive society or era one chooses as the
benchmark of religiosity, it is extremely unlikely that it lacked a sprinkling of “dissenters”, “sceptics”
and less-enthusiastic participants or “backsliders”.21 The possibility already constitutes at least a
minimal pluralism – an alternative to consuming the one product available;
-a much stronger variant emerges when religions encounter each other at close hand – the prophets of
ancient Israel were acutely aware of the appeal of the hilltop shrines, home to the cults of the local
fertility deities;
-even when post-Reformation Europe was ruled by the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, believers of
whatever stripe could not but be aware that the claims of their own churches were challenged by sharply
alternative paths within Christianity itself; one’s religious convictions required a defense;
-the classic denominational “free market” found its fullest expression in nineteenth and early twentieth
century America, but existed, from the very foundation of the USA, under the shadow of the more radical
alternatives generated by the Enlightenment: deism, scepticism, secularism;
-in the second half of the twentieth century it was these “religious options” which came to predominate in
England and on the Continent. This is increasingly the case in Australia; others have suggested that
Canada and even the U.S. have not been immune to these influences.
In today’s Australia, to confess and practice “no religion” is an open choice free from social stigma, and
seems to be increasingly the option taken by youth.
Pluralism of this latter variety goes beyond the assumptions of supply-side theory; but secularization
theory needs to incorporate all these dimensions of pluralism.
There is, however, one dimension of the Australian religious situation to which supply-side theory could
be argued to apply: the steady growth of the Pentecostal and Mormon groups over the last fifteen to
twenty years, during which time mainstream Protestant groups have declined. As is well known, both
show numerous traits of “strictness” in contrast with mainline Protestants; both have thrived in the more
open market brought about by the collapse of the Catholic and Anglican pillars; they are competing
successfully with other denominations to gain a share of the remaining demand (although rather than
21
Ladurie (1978) has documented this memorably for fourteenth-century France.
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23
stable, this is limited and diminishing). According to the Church Life Surveys, although they recruit
some unchurched people, most of those who join have formerly been members of other denominations –
mostly Protestant. Together, the two groups account for 1.3% of the population. On the other hand, they
do not significantly restrain the drift away from the denominations to “No Religion”. This road carries
the heaviest traffic, and is virtually one-way.
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24
c) A less biased understanding of Rationality
Perhaps the most decisive of all the weaknesses of sociological theories of religion and of secularization
is their lack of a way of dealing with religious “insights” which are not discursively rational, yet are
taken seriously as knowledge, rather than mere affect.22
It does not lie within the purview of any empirical discipline to establish its own first principles. All
such disciplines depend for this grounding upon mathematics and philosophy. But, at least in areas
where the interpretation of findings raises questions which go beyond the empirical realm, it is
incumbent on the social scientist to make his or her philosophical presuppositions explicit. 23 Empirical
research on religion raises a fundamental issue of epistemology: does religious faith involve a mode of
knowing other than discursive rational “knowledge-about”? A negative answer may not be simply
assumed, even if that is the Enlightenment consensus. It requires a convincing refutation of the contrary
arguments, which have developed considerably in recent centuries, that a non-discursive mode of
knowledge is at the heart of religious commitment. Sociological studies of religion are not justified in
assuming an unreflectively positivist stance which does not even make explicit their epistemological
presuppositions, let alone state or cite the philosophical arguments supporting them. Notable exceptions,
in their work on religion, are William James ([1902], 1973), Clifford Geertz (1973), Robert Bellah
(1970), and particularly Andrew Greeley (1974, 1981, 1986).24
The lack, in secularization theory, of a way of dealing with non-discursive religious “insights”, as a
genuine form of knowledge is primarily a philosophical problem, located in the realm of epistemology;
hence its solution is not within the scope of the empirical social science of sociology; however it may not
for that reason be passed over. It is commonplace for the requirements of explanation in social science to
depend on philosophy, and even to provoke developments in that discipline by discovery of a social
scientific problem which at the same time implies a philosophical problem.
A highly sophisticated solution to the problem was developed in the High Mediaeval period – in the work
of Aquinas and his commentator, John of St. Thomas. This sphere of learning is a closed book to most
post-Enlightenment scholars, and one deemed not worth the considerable trouble of scanning – difficult
because the originals are in Latin, and couched within a framework so intellectually elaborate that years
of study are required even to access it. The mediaeval approach is retrieved in the work of French
philosopher Jacques Maritain, and utilised by Andrew Greeley (1981).
22
See below.
It is to the credit of Berger and Luckmann that they lay out the presuppositions underlying their
sociology in The Social Construction of Reality (1967), showing how their work is founded on Alfred
Schutz’s social phenomenology.
24
We repeat with approval maxims such as ‘religion is caught, not taught’; we have abundant evidence,
from research interviews, of outcomes of religious experience that combine insight and ineffability; we
have to hand at least minimal philosophical tools such as Husserl’s account of ‘appresentation’ and
Schutz’s theory of symbols, yet so intimidating is the dominance, especially in English-speaking
academia, of primitive Enlightenment theories of knowledge such as the Cartesian formula of ‘clear and
distinct ideas’, or the even thinner rationality of later positivism, that very few seem able even to follow
William James or Schleiermacher in accepting the notion of a religious mode of ‘knowing’ which does
not fit within these parameters.
23
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25
Schleiermacher makes cognitive claims for the experience of the gefühl of ultimate dependence; but
many later commentators have persistently misdefined it as cognitively content-less “feeling”.
A more recent philosopher (incidentally one not much interested in religion, but fascinated by the
philosophy of science), Michael Polanyi, independently arrived, in the course of dealing with problems in
scientific understanding, at virtually the same crucial insight as Aquinas and Schleiermacher into prediscursive, non-conceptual knowledge, and has laid out the conceptual tools for dealing with a closely
similar type of knowledge in religion. The potential remains largely unexploited to this day, partly
because Polanyi stands alone also as a philosopher with no obvious major successor(s).25 A successful
application of his concept of “tacit knowledge” to religion would have the advantage of correcting the
“cognitive bias” in most scholarly accounts of religion and of secularization26.
The Enlightenment model of rationality, of which modernization is the carrier, seems the best candidate
for the most potent of the secularizing components within the process – all the more so since right up
until the present time, there is no well-understood epistemological legitimation for what the believer
“knows” but cannot articulate discursively.
Michael Paul Gallagher (1990) argues persuasively that the “trickle-down” effect into popular
consciousness of the theories of the “masters of suspicion” (especially Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin and
Freud) is a powerful influence in the erosion of faith. Enlightenment rationality assumes that only
discursive reason gives rise to valid knowledge. Since religious “knowledge” is not verifiable by
discursive reason, it is rejected as “myth”, falsehood.
Although philosophers debate the topic explicitly, the impact on the popular mind seems to stem more
from the social and physical sciences. Whatever their personal views, few scientists follow Richard
Dawkins in propounding a full-blown “scientism” – the claim that scientific knowledge comprehensively
disproves religion, and provides an adequate worldview. Yet, despite spectacular failures, science
“works” in a limited fashion, most impressively, perhaps, to generate technologies accessible to
consumers; and in doing so, confers enormous prestige on its form of knowledge. The popular
perception seems to be that the ‘success’ of science vindicates the claims made in its name against
religion.
Enlightenment rationality is inherently secularizing when thus embodied in scientism: short of
maintaining one’s faith and one’s understanding of science in separate watertight compartments (which is
no doubt a common strategy), it is impossible for those not equipped with a contemporary epistemology
to avoid severe cognitive dissonance when the religious perspective and this “popular scientism” are
brought into confrontation. There is no middle point between two directly contradictory propositions.
To choose one is to reject the other.
“Rationality” as understood within rational choice theory is even more limited in scope than its parent. It
is presented as a “cost-effectiveness” calculation of benefits to the self. This owes more to economics
than to anything one would associate with the “choice” of faith.
25
An attempt to utilise elements of his thought to deal with the problem of religious knowing is the
theme of an article in preparation.
26
A recent study by Moleski (2002) compares Polanyi’s “personal knowledge” with Newman’s “illative
sense”.
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26
Weber’s discussion of rationality, although often criticised as confused and confusing, has been
influential on subsequent theorists. He defines Zweckrationalität, or “purposive rationality” as a meansends calculation: the ordering of action adapted to the achievement of a goal, or desired state of affairs.
Even this ideal type of rational action is a good deal broader than the self-oriented calculation supposed
to underlie “rational choice”. Somewhat awkwardly, Weber introduces Wertrationalität as a contrasting
type of action, oriented to the realization of an end which is ultimate and unconditioned: an “absolute
value”. Lacking a place in his system for the “non-rational” which is not irrational, (or what Pareto
called the “non-logical” as opposed to the illogical), Weber is soon forced into describing the ultimacy
component as irrational (whatever has the character of ultimacy transcends purposive rationality since,
without a processus ad infinitum it is not possible to continue indefinitely the rational ordering of means
to ever more superordinate ends).27 Yet it does not seem too far-fetched to see in this concept of Weber’s
an attempt to combine both the knowledge characteristic of rationality and the pre-rational intuitive
insight most characteristic of the experience of one who embraces a religious faith.
d) Other limitations of secularization theory
Weber confessed that he himself was “religiously unmusical”. He may have been too modest. Some of
the participants in the debate over secularization certainly appear to be religio-musically challenged. One
need not agree with Joachim Wach that a scholar whose field of interest is religion must be a religious
believer. An adjudicator at a choral eisteddfod need not herself be a singer; but to be tone-deaf, or cursed
with a visceral dislike of music, would surely constitute a significant impediment to the fulfilment of her
professional task. The work of a few participants in the secularization debate still evinces old-fashioned
secularist bias, while lack of theological or historical knowledge betrays others into parodies of the
objects of their study.28
For an adequate theory of religion and secularization, a multidisciplinary approach is indispensable. It
would find its most natural home in the “field” of History of Religions / Scientific Study of Religion /
Religionswissenschaft, and should include: sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy (of religion,
epistemology, philosophy of symbols, aesthetics), theology, history and phenomenology of religion.
Obviously, to master all of these disciplines would require a polymath of Weberian proportions. But to
be able at least to work across some part of the range seems required by the nature of the task of
understanding religion, and hence also, of the task of an adequate theory of secularization.
From this perspective, each of the present participants in the secularization debate could be likened to
one who has assembled into a symmetrical pattern numerous pieces of a jigsaw of unknown total shape
and size, and feels convinced that he has the whole puzzle assembled -- only to find, to his or her chagrin
-- that although some others have some apparently identical pieces, each also has parts which do not fit
into the patterns assembled by any of the others. Worse: the complete jigsaw is glimpsed to be several
Parsons’s critique of Weber’s concept of rationality in his Introduction to Weber (1947).
Bruce knows something of Protestant theology, but his slapdash summary of mediaeval Christianity
(2000: 6) falls little short of a stock Protestant parody. Impeccably scholarly historical research has been
done by Duffy (1992) on this period in England, and Bruce should have taken account of it. Similarly,
the research of Ladurie (1978) provides a rich and nuanced account of religious dissent in fourteenth
century Europe which should have informed Bruce’s discussion of religion’s alleged “Golden Age”.
27
28
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times larger than the aggregate of all the pieces at present in the players’ possession. 29
27
The difficulties listed above can be distinguished into those that imply significant gaps in the theory
which must be filled before it can perform its explanatory task, and those which are merely hindrances to
the debate.
The first three items identify deficits in the theory as it stands at present, which must be remedied if it is
to develop further, and eventually serve its explanatory and hypothesis-generating functions. The fourth
is merely a hindrance, yet intractable enough, and will only be overcome over a long time period, if at all.
Yamane (1997) has proposed “neo-secularization theory”, as a perspective for unifying the variety of
approaches to secularization which have appeared in recent years, each presented by its proponents as
comprehensive, and in conflict with the others. From the perspective of this review, his proposal makes
sense.
D. Australia as a ‘middle case’ of secularization: indicators
Throughout this paper we have referred to Australia as a case which should be of special interest to
secularization theorists, since it stands between what some consider the extremes of England and the
U.S.A. David Martin (1978) long ago proposed that England and its former colonies could be arranged
on a continuum which showed the level of secularization (indicated by the national level of church
attendance) decreasing in harmony with the decreasing degree of establishment of religion, thus:
England
English-speaking Canada
Australia
USA
In the interim, Australia has moved closer to England in terms of level of active involvement in religion;
or alternatively, it could be argued that the “distance” separating all three has decreased, with the US,
Canada and Australia all moving to decrease the gap separating them from England and similar European
countries. The alternative chosen depends on the conclusion one draws from the contradictory claims
emerging from the last decade of research on the level of regular church attendance and other forms of
active involvement in the US. Political scientist Robert Putnam reviews the extensive research on this
issue in his discussion of social capital in the U.S.A., and concludes that:
First, religion is today, as it has traditionally been, a central fount of
American community life and health. . . . Second, the broad oscillations
in religious participation during the twentieth century mirror trends in
secular civic life -- flowering during the first six decades of the century
and especially in the two decades after World War II, but then fading
over the last three or four decades. . . . For the most part younger
generations (“younger” here includes the boomers) are less involved
both in religious and secular social activities than were their
29
I do not wish to imply that the entire picture could be accommodated only in the divine mind!
Whatever else they may be, religions are human enterprises, and in principle as accessible to human
comprehension as is humanity itself. Yet in practice, our rational understanding of humanity is far from
comprehensive, and some aspects of it may always elude rational inquiry.
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28
predecessors at the same age. . . .In short, as the twenty-first century
opens, Americans are going to church less often than we did three of
four decades ago, and the churches we go to are less involved with the
local community (Putnam, 2000: 79).
The second of Putnam’s conclusions fits the Australian situation admirably. The ‘fading’ of religious
participation in Australia is shown in the following indicators from recent research.
1) Religious identification: The Australian Population Census30
(See Appendix, Table 1, Australia, Religion, Selected Censuses 1961-2001.)
The quinquennial census of population and housing conducted by the Australian Government through the
Australian Bureau of Statistics contains a measure of “religious identification”: “What is this person’s
religion?”. From the 2001 census, it emerges that:
-The population of Australia has increased over the period from 10.5 million in 1961 to 18.7 million in
2001, mainly by immigration, and natural increase among immigrants.31
-Total Christian has declined from 88% of the population in 1961 to 68% in 2001.
-The mainstream Anglican and Protestant groups have declined most –e.g. Anglican from 35% to 21%;
MPRCU32 from 20% to 10% (1961 – 2001).
-The percentage of Catholics has fluctuated around 27% over the period, implying net numerical growth
at the same rate as the population. This stable percentage, however, also serves to mask
considerable decline in each of the recent censuses in the number who identify as Catholic.
Counting the number of individuals in a 5-year age cohort (e.g. 25-29) at one census, and
comparing that number with the size of the cohort 5 years older (30-34) at the next census,
reveals a noticeable decline. The only possible causes of such a reduction in the size of the
cohort between censuses are death, emigration or ceasing to identify as Catholic. Neither of the
first two causes could account for more than a small fraction of the observed decline. These
declines in identification are occurring mainly among those aged between 20 and 45. The fact
that the Catholic percentage of the population remains stable indicates that the growth (by birth
and immigration) in the number of at least nominal Catholics must be large enough to mask the
“dis-identification” of a proportion of those in the age cohort 20-45.
-Protestant sects show high levels of growth, led by Pentecostals and Mormons, both of which have
grown by more than 10% since the 1996 Census; but the numbers remain small (Pentecostals
have just reached 1% of the population), and the rate of “switching” is high.
30
Every five years, most recently 2001, conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The
questionnaire contains an optional, but well-answered question which now reads: “What is this person’s
religion?”. “Tick boxes” are provided for the eight most frequent answers; other responses are written-in
and scanned. In former censuses the question read: “What is this person’s religious denomination?”. The
introduction of the “tick boxes” in 1996 caused a perturbation in the long-term trends in the data;
significantly more people chose to answer the question, especially in the case of the 8 groups named
beside the boxes.
31
The birthrate among the Australian-born has been below replacement level over the whole period.
32
The mainline Protestant denominations are harder to track, because of the formation in 1977 of the
Uniting Church of Australia, comprising all Methodists, nearly all Congregationalists, and about twothirds of Presbyterians. The artificial amalgam MPRCU (Methodist, Presbyterian, Reformed,
Congregational, and Uniting) has been constructed to enable comparisons over time.
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-“Other religions” has increased from .7% in 1961 to 4.9% in 2001, because of increased immigration,
later in the period, from Asia. Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam show very high growth rates.
-But “New Age” groups and movements, elaborately classified by ABS in consultation with local experts
prior to the 1996 Census, show small numbers (less than 100,000). However this probably
underestimates their significance, which may lie more in the formation of syncretistic blends
with traditional faiths, rather than in attracting dedicated “adherents” for whom they constitute an
entire worldview.
-“No religion” has increased from .4% in 1961 to 15.5% in 2001. In 1971, an instruction was placed
beside the question “If no religion, write: ‘None’”, causing a large decline in “Not stated”, and a
large increase in “No Religion”. It seems likely (from surveys in which “Not stated” is not
provided as a response option) that the majority of those who do not state a religion in the
Census (9.8% of the population) would otherwise choose “No religion”, so the 15.5% for this
category in the 2001 Census should probably be augmented to something over 20% in reality,
making this group one of the largest, and the fastest-growing. Surveys show that while there is a
great deal of “switching” among Protestant denominations, there is steady traffic from the
mainstream denominations towards “No Religion”, and that nearly all of it is one-way. It is
uncommon for individuals to move from “No religion” to either a mainstream denomination or a
sect; Pentecostal growth has been shown to consist mainly of former members of other Christian
churches (especially Protestant), rather than coming from the ranks of the “unchurched”.
2) Church attendance
Mol quotes a 1960 Morgan Gallup Poll figure of 30% of Australians attending a church service in the last
7 days (1985: 56). His own survey found the same percentage in 1966 (1985: 58), and an additional 12%
who attended 1-3 times per month. In 1998, 13% of the population attended church services weekly, and
an additional 7% attended 1-3 times per month.33 The decline in weekly attendance over the 40-year
period is 57%, in attendance monthly or more often, 52% .
The 1960 poll mentioned above found Catholic weekly attendance to be 60%. An attendance count of
Catholics was conducted in all dioceses in 2001, resulting in a rate of 15%, showing a 75% decline over
the last 40 years.34 There has been only a small increase in the number who attend 1-3 times per month
instead of weekly. The decline has added significance in the light of the maintenance, in Catholic
teaching, of the obligation to weekly attendance.
3)Decline in religious beliefs and moral attitudes
The first major survey of religion in Australia embracing almost the whole population took place in 1969
(Mol 1971); the most recent was the Australian Community Survey in 1998 (Bellamy et al 2002). A few
questions are directly comparable, and illustrate the changes over the period.
1969
1998
Believe in a personal God
76%
35%
Believe in a force or power35
12%
39%
33
1998 figures from Alan Black, Philip Hughes and Peter Kaldor, Australian Community Survey, cited in
Bellamy et al.2002, p.8.
34
The 1960 percentages should probably be discounted by some fraction to allow for the well-known
finding that replies to church attendance questions in polls or surveys are always higher than the results
of head-counts. It would follow that the percentage declines would also be smaller.
35
Mol 1971, p. 44 and Bellamy et al 2002, p. 48.
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30
(not in a personal God)
Disapprove of premarital sex
63%
17%
Denomination (if any) of marriage ceremony is recorded; in 2000, the number of marriages at which
secular “civil celebrants” officiated was for the first time greater than the number celebrated by ministers
of religion.
Conclusion
Public religions in the modern world
Casanova (1996) argues that “public religions in the modern world” are playing a continuing role through
their advocacy of public policies more consistent with their view of human values. His discussion
appears to discount the impact on this role of decreasing levels of religious belief, and dwindling
numbers of regular attenders. But this would also be consistent with the argument that any credibility the
churches possess in the sphere of public policy, and any hearing they gain in public debates for their
positions in on these issues, is due nowadays not to acceptance of their religious authority, or their role as
moral arbiters, but to the major contributions they have made, over a very long period, in the fields of
education, health and social welfare.
But the secularizing developments we have described in Australia, which appear to be verified elsewhere
as well, although they are slow to impact on the numbers of nominal adherents who, while not
‘practising’, continue to identify with a particular religion, undermine the credibility, acceptability and
political weight of the public advocacy role of the churches, and threaten the demise of church structures
(at least in the health and welfare fields) which in the past enabled the massive church endeavours in
these fields.
The “plausibility structures” (social structures of communal life which support the worldviews and
values of religious organizations) are becoming visibly weaker, the “constituency” for which church
leaders may be presumed to speak is becoming much smaller, and the financial contributions of active
participants are increasingly insufficient to maintain Church charitable works at anything remotely
resembling their former levels.
There seems little reason to believe that the publicly expressed views of the leaders of a church reduced
to an organizational shell would continue to command a hearing in public debates on social policy.
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References
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Bellah, Robert. 1970. “Religious evolution” in Beyond Belief. New York: Harper and Row.
Bellamy, John, Alan Black, Keith Castle, Philip Hughes and Peter Kaldor. 2002. Why People Don’t Go
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Berger, Peter L. 1969. The Sacred Canopy. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
____. 1970. ‘On the obsolescence of the concept of honor’. European Journal of Sociology XI, 339-347.
____. 1979. The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation. New York:
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____. 1980. “From secularity to world religions.” The Christian Century 97, 4-8.
____. (ed.) 1999 The Desecularization of the World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
____. 2001 ‘Postscript’ in Linda Woodhead (ed.) Peter Berger and the Study of Religion. London:
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Table 2: Responses from Catholic laity to questions on clergy sexual abuse
in the Church Life Surveys of 1996 and 2001
Full text of questions:
1996 The cases of sexual abuse by priests and religious have seriously damaged my confidence in the
Church. Strongly agree / Agree / Unsure / Disagree /Strongly disagree
2001 The cases of sexual abuse by priests have seriously damaged my confidence in Church authorities.
Strongly agree / Tend to agree / Tend to disagree / Strongly disagree
1996 The response of church authorities to these incidents has been inadequate and shows a complete
failure of responsibility.
2001 Despite procedures that have been set up, the response of Church authorities to clergy sexual abuse
is still inadequate: reluctant and legalistic in acknowledging claims; over-emphasising ‘damage-control’
and insufficiently concerned for victims; minimising offenses and leaving offenders in their positions.
1996 My respect for priests and religious has greatly declined as a result of these offences.
2001 My confidence in priests in general has not decreased, even though some have committed offenses.
Analysis
There was considerable change in the pattern of responses of over the five year interval,
mainly because the proportion who were formerly undecided now express a view.
Caveat: partly this is because the questions in 2001 did not offer the option “Unsure”; if the
respondent could not choose to agree or disagree, his only option was not to answer.
In the following tables, Strongly agree / Agree and Strongly Disagree / Disagree have been
combined.
Table 1: All respondents Australia-wide
PRIEST SEX ABUSE HAS DAMAGED MY CONFIDENCE IN CHURCH (AUTHORITIES)
Agree
Unsure/No answer
Disagree
1996
37%
27%
36%
2001
48%
17%
35%
THE CHURCH’S RESPONSE TO SEX ABUSE BY CLERGY HAS BEEN INADEQUATE
Agree
Unsure/No answer
Disagree
1996
45%
37%
19%
2001
56%
26%
18%
I HAVE LESS RESPECT FOR PRIESTS IN GENERAL BECAUSE OF ABUSE CASES
Agree
Unsure/No answer
Disagree
1996
17%
32%
52%
2001
14%
22%
64%
Appendix. Table 1. Religion, Australia. Selected censuses 1961-2001