Abstract
In recent years, sociologists of religion have questioned the subdiscipline’s historic focus on religious belief, especially as captured by survey instruments. Ammerman (2020), for example, calls for a “practice approach” to the study of religion that analyzes religious practice, taking into account its embodied, material nature. In Practicing Christians, Practical Atheists: How Cultural Liturgies and Everyday Social Practices Shape the Christian Life, sociologist Phil Davignon brings to bear a practice approach on the issue of secularization.
In this slim volume of just over 100 pages, Davignon argues to a non-academic Christian audience (Catholic and Protestant alike) that secularization is not merely about declines in the number of people who report attending church on Sunday, nor about overt anti-Christian or anti-religious messaging. More fundamentally, secularization is about the logics of practices we participate in daily at school, work, the economy, and leisure, which subtly form habits and desires in a way that hinders love of God and neighbor. In other words, even self-identified Christians who profess the faith, pray, and go to church might otherwise in every other sphere of their life live as though God does not exist—as practical atheists. Pope John Paul II’s theological critique of modern culture as a “culture of death” provides the normative grounding for Davignon’s analysis, and philosopher of religion James K.A. Smith’s work on practices and cultural liturgies, along with research by sociologists of religion and cultural sociologists, serve as analytical tools.
The first half of the book lays out the theoretical grounding, defines and explains the relationship between religion, culture, and secularization, and then shows how the practices of various secularized spheres and institutions—education, work, consumption, and leisure and rest—are not neutral and impede Christian discipleship, especially in the way that they make instrumental ends their goal. Davignon’s critique calls to mind the philosopher Charles De Koninck’s observation that in modernity, the primacy of speculative truth—the highest, objective truths that apply to all times and all places—has been overthrown by the primacy of the practical—that which is only contingently true and based on subjective experience. Thus, education and work in modern America are organized around practical and instrumental ends, like making money, rather than discovering truth and contributing to the common good. Consumption becomes the basis for identity, and commodification obscures one’s connection to the fruits of the earth. In lieu of engaging in true leisure, which entails setting aside instrumental activity for activities done for their own sake, people flit from one entertainment source to another, which results in the vice of acedia, or aversion to spiritual things.
What to do about this? In the latter half of the book, Davignon expresses pessimism that religious individuals can simply integrate secularized institutions from within, because they will get sucked into the secularizing logic of the institution. Greater Christian political influence will also be meaningless so long as modern practices continue according to the same logics. More church programming and church planting also won’t solve the problem, especially when it reinforces the logic of consumerism; nor will internet evangelization, even if it is necessary, because “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan famously put it, and the internet rewards clickbait and snark rather than deep engagement and humility. Instead, Davignon writes, “laypeople need to have their minds transformed by adopting social practices that foster sanctification within everyday life” (p. 104). To provide the deep formation necessary for this transformation, the church must embrace its political nature, which for Davignon means not coercive power or influence in national politics, but as “an alternative political community,” as Stanley Hauerwas puts it. For Davignon, the answer is found in institutions that conscientiously embody a Christian logic through their everyday practices. As examples he gives the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, a worker co-op in which workers’ needs and solidarity come before profit maximization; the Diocese of Wichita, Kansas, which offers free Catholic education via a radical funding model; and intentional communities where residents prioritize close ties over geographic mobility and career advancement, such as the Bruderhof communities. The book largely aims to open readers’ eyes to how institutional logics operate implicitly in everyday practices, and that these are not neutral, so the positive examples are only briefly discussed; readers will be challenged to think creatively about how to overcome secularizing practices.
Davignon skillfully weaves together sociological and theological thinking in a way that practitioner audiences should find accessible, though they might benefit from even more explicit and systematic connections between sociological understandings of practice and theological virtues and goals. Academic readers will likewise appreciate the clear distillation of scholarly work in these areas, but might find the theoretical framework a bit uneven; Smith’s work on practices drops out after the introduction, and John Paul II’s “culture of death” concept pops in and out and sometimes feels a bit shoehorned. Still, for those who see dechristianization and secularization as a social problem, this book serves as an important conversation starter for how secularization goes well beyond anti-religious messaging and is implicated in the practices of everyday life.