(What is left of) secularization? * Debate on Jörg Stolz’s article on Secularization theories in the 21st century: ideas,evidence,and problems

Abstract

This article is a critical response to Jörg Stolz’s 2019 ISSR presidential address as to the advances made by secularization research over the last 20 years. The article argues that the data presented can be boiled down to confirming what we already knew: the decline of ‘churched’ religion. Sketching a radical epistemological, methodological and empirical critique, it argues that the seven areas of ‘advances’ discussed in the presidential address erode into near insignificance. Because this quantitative research compartmentalizes religion and lacks solid contextualization in the world we live in, it completely overlooks the massive qualitative changes that have been reconfiguring religion on a global scale, and which can be understood as the result of the erosion of the nation-state container at the hands of economic globalization and the massification of neoliberal and consumer dynamics and the consequent substantial changes in global societies, well beyond the West.

In the last two decades, the narrative of secularization has been increasingly critiqued, and its central position in social sciences contested. The current popularity of concepts such as post-secular, return of religion and de-secularization attest to this state of affairs. It is somewhat strange that Stolz chose not to mention these debates and rather ask about the advances made over the last 20 years in the research on secularization. By opposing secularization to Rational Choice, another very contested area of research, as the two dominant poles structuring the sociology of religion, Stolz gave the impression that his address was straight out of the 1990s. In the question period, he insisted on the fact that the data he presented does illustrate something, and he is right. The main question then is: What does this show, and what does it miss?

What we see

It is interesting that the data supporting Stolz’s presentation is quantitative, making it the stronghold of the secularization theory. The categories that have been used in quantitative data collection have been relatively stable for decades, and capture the very conventional indicators of explicit religious affiliation and practice. In other words, they capture the destinies of what Peter Beyer (2012) calls ‘churched religion’, that is, a mainline Christian-type of religiosity made up of exclusive belonging, weekly mass or service attendance, belief in an otherworldly form of deity, otherworldly salvation and so on. It follows from this research design that ‘religion’ has regularly been declining in Western countries for over a century, although with slightly differed starting points and inflections.

In my view, the main acceptable claim is the apparently inexorable decline of churched religion in the West. This is nothing new. It is a well-known and well-reported phenomenon that is also supported by qualitative research. The other claims discussed are less certain, and are greatly fragilized by the way quantitative research openly seeks direct correlations which it interprets as causal. These premises can be challenged, as they suggest a neatly compartmentalized social reality that puts historical and sociological determinations and contextualization in parentheses.

The section on education is illustrative of these limitations, and particularly the reference to Hungerman’s (2014) link between the implementation of the 1961 Quebec law which augmented mandatory schooling by 1 year and a coincident and significant drop in Catholic affiliation. Yet the idea that such a correlation indicates a causal bond is contradicted by even the most superficial contextualization. As a Quebecois myself, I can only think of how the provincial elections of 1960 brought to power liberal Jean Lesage, which marked a radical change in Quebec politics and culture, ending the Catholic-conservative reign of Maurice Duplessis and marking the beginning of what historians have called the Quiet Revolution, which saw Quebec modernize with ultra-rapidity and embark on a stark process of abandonment of traditional Catholic practice, to the extent that it went from one of the most ‘religious’ nation to one of the most ‘secular’ over the space of a decade. The quantitative data completely omits these basic historical facts, and therefore any direct and causal rapport between years of education and religious levels is highly reductionist and problematic. It is obviously not the rise of mandatory education by 1 year that caused religious practice to drop, but rather a profound cultural, social, political and religious mutation.

The same goes for the hypothetical effects of an increase in the number of psychotherapists, who would then act as ‘secular competition’ and thus contribute to the secularization process. Yet such increases do not simply happen, out of the blue. As Eva Illouz (2008) and others have shown, there has been a process of psychologization in the West and beyond, since the late 19th century. This amounts to much more than a rise in ‘secular competition’. It is rather tied to a profound mutation that has deeply affected religion well beyond the decline of church attendance rates. Religion itself has been profoundly psychologized since the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Quantitative research rests on the unexamined assumption of strong social differentiation. As economics for economists, some sociologists of religion seem to think about their object as being neatly compacted in an autonomous and well-differentiated box. Hence, the idea that the difference between the strong secular pathway of East Germany compared with West Germany’s supposedly ‘normal’ curve is due to ‘an external shock’—communism. Portraying the communist pathway in Eastern Europe as an ‘external shock’ (an expression also borrowed from economists) is flawed, as is the implicit assumption that liberal, capitalist democracies represent some kind of normal or natural trend. Religion is a part of society and culture, and it cannot be simply isolated from wider society.

What we don’t see: the world missing

What is missing in these accounts is a firm grounding in the world we live in, and which eludes quantitative methods. There is a reason why quantitative research such as Voas’ (2008) fails to identify the ‘triggers’ of the ‘secular transition’. As James Spickard (2015) would say, it is simply because ‘you can’t get there from here’. In other words, such methods are simply not able to provide any sensible answer to the research question. It is therefore no surprise that so many issues discussed by Stolz are indeterminate and require ‘further research’. Intelligible answers cannot be found by boxing up religion and isolating ‘factors’, but rather by understanding how religion affects and is affected by wider social logics. While Stolz acknowledges that religion is a ‘social fact’, the methodological individualism adopted by the research he surveys can only remark but fail to account for the importance of national pathways, to name just one example. ¹

Churched religion is assumed to provide the standard for ‘religion’, which is presented in quantitative terms. From ‘religious’ to ‘fuzzy’ and ‘secular’, we are faced with more or less religion, as if it was a liquid in glass. On the other hand, nothing can be said about the qualitative changes in religion. Churched religion appeared somewhere in the late 19th century, yet religion prior to this was different, and historians show how religion in the Middle-Ages was of a very different nature. Roman and Aztec religion were even more different. Yet if religion has changed prior to the 20th century, what are the bases for the assumption that it cannot change again significantly, as every other aspect of social life has over the course of modernity? The way quantitative categories are built assumes churched religion to be the essence of religion and its final stage. What the works of Voas and others show is therefore not the decline of religion but that of churched religion, that is, of a particular and peculiar historical form of religion. In the end, Voas’ model (for it is more a model than a theory) is at best a good representation of the effects of cohort replacement on the decline of churched religion. Otherwise, this research is something like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stolz is right to question the ‘fuzzy’ category and ask if the nebula of so-called alternative-holistic spiritualities can be fitted in this category. One can also question that of the ‘secular’. What does it mean to be labeled ‘secular’, therefore non-religious? We know that the rise of ‘nones’ (the survey category of ‘no religion’) in state surveys does not amount to any kind of significant rise in declared atheists. Is a declared ‘no religion’ who participates in meditation, self-growth, yoga, chi-gong, biodanza or neo-evangelical workshops truly ‘secular’ or even ‘fuzzy’ in any meaningful sense? Stolz rightly includes such practices in his ‘conventional’ definition of religion, yet it is obvious when looking at the research he presents that it is churched religion we are talking about, leaving such incidences out of the picture, not to mention minority religions. Secularization research therefore seriously over-determines its object as well as its results, and misses the most fundamental changes that have occurred over the last decades, and which are qualitative more than quantitative.

In addition, the research surveyed is despairingly Western-centric, and Voas’ model monolithically evolutionist. These two dimensions are tied, as ethnocentricity warrants an evolutionist narrative. The example of the retarded ‘secular transition’ of Greece can only be sustained if one extracts this country from its socio-historical context and isolates it from the rest of the world. Twentieth-century nation-building in Greece relied heavily on Christian Orthodoxy, as elsewhere in the Orthodox world (before the communist period). Here secularism was never as strong as in the Christian West. The decline of churched religion starts with Greece’s integration within global culture and the global economy (resulting in EU integration), and I find it extremely hazardous to maintain an evolutionist scheme. If we free ourselves of Western-centricity, we are forced to recognize that the same global trends are present in Greece as in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. Seeing things on a linear temporal scale, in which the West is seen as the spearhead of History and all other regions of the globe either fall behind or beside the model, is problematic in the light of the last four decades of critical theory and the rise of currents such as Post-Colonialism. As the case of Greece exemplifies, the flaws and unfounded assumptions built into Voas’ quantitative method explain the results. A closer look at the qualitative level and a less ethnocentric approach reveals a very different story than that of linear decline. Far from being reinforced, this version of secularization is fragilized even further.

In the face of such limitations, I believe a holistic approach that captures societies in their movement and dynamics, as well as one attentive to how transversal logics are at work in reshaping all social spheres, is more apt for seizing what is happening to religion. What do we see, then, if we free ourselves from outdated ethnocentricity, open religion’s little box and look around? In my view, considering things in a wider focus shows that history has not been linear and continuous, but that there has been a major shift in global societies over the last decades. This is obvious when one looks at current politics: the formerly stable institutionalizations of the 20th century are being subjected to a radical critique, almost everywhere. Religious institutions are thus not the only modern institutions subject to disaffiliation and critique, far from it. Whether we look at modern political parties, representational democratic institutions or the rise of populism and charismatic authorities, the political realm is being torn apart and profoundly reconfigured under our very eyes. Other modern institutions are similarly being challenged, be it the medical institution in the face of alternative and holistic therapies, education, law, the contestation of science in the era of ‘post-truth’, the erosion of the aura of intellectual elites and so on. How can this not have something to do with religion?

‘Religion’ has not only been fuzzing and/or disappearing: it has changed and is changing profoundly. Behind the come-to-majority of ‘nones’, a major shift has changed the very nature of religion, and this is something which the standard of churched religion cannot even begin to see. Qualitative research shows that behind the neat categories of surveys, religion is not only becoming ‘fuzzy’ and fighting ‘secular competition’: it is becoming mixed with tourism, entertainment, business, politics, health, therapeutics and well-being in entirely new ways which resists diagnoses of disappearance into ‘the secular age’. Religious institutions are being forced to reform and adopt managerial techniques and discourses, as well as see their mission as providing services which they must brand and target to a public. New religious missions of the charismatic or alternative spirituality type are inherently entrepreneurial and mediatized. Charismatic authorities are replacing rational-institutional ones, in religion just as in politics. Mystical currents and experiential religiosity are re-legitimized and re-mixed, as are traditional practices and indigenous religiosities. These developments are not only Western: they are global. In fact, they appear in even cruder light in many parts of the Global South than they do when we keep our gaze focused solely on Western realities. These trends are transversal and universal, and cannot be isolated within the confines of ‘the West’ vs ‘the rest’. As in the formidable rise of the global halal market, they emerge out of transnational fluxes that remain entirely invisible from within the secularization paradigm.

In the 1920s, that is when the Voas model sees the ‘secular transition’ start, societies were still largely the same as in the 19th century as concerns social classes, socialization modes, familial models, relations to authority, morality based on honor and so on. Post-war affluence in Western countries accompanied or catalyzed a profound change in values and the consummation of what Charles Taylor (2002) calls the ‘cultural revolution of modernity’, of which consumerism – modern consumption of goods built into a model of citizenship and desirable ethos – was a central part and vector. At the turn of the 1980s, this new individualistic, libertarian and expressive culture had become mainstreamed through the coming to adulthood of the baby boomer generation. It is then that the neoliberal revolution occurred, turning a marginal economic current into a dominant set of ideologies, policies and entrepreneurial culture that has since projected to dismantle the welfare, communist and post-colonial state and transfer its regulatory powers to the mechanisms of the market. The result has been a profound reconfiguration of every aspect of society ever since, and their reshaping and re-legitimation within a market imaginary and terminologies. A closer look at religion shows a similar level of transformation.

In the end, the advances made by secularization research over the last 20 years, especially within quantitative research, can be boiled down to confirming what we already knew: the decline of churched religion. In the light of the radical epistemological, methodological and empirical critique whose outlines I have tried to sketch, the seven areas of ‘advances’ discussed in the presidential address erode into near insignificance. On the other hand, secularization research fails to see the elephant in the room: that our world is not that of the first half of the 20th century, that decline doesn’t capture what’s really going on, and that churched religion can no longer be the standard for ‘religion’.