In the social sciences, a new discourse on religion in modern societies has establisheditself. It is no longer the master narrative that religion is waning in significance thatdominates the perspectives in the social sciences. The new key words are “deprivatizationof the religious” (Jose Casanova), “return of the gods” (Friedrich Wilhelm Graf), “re- ´enchantment of the world” (Ulrich Beck)—or, quite simply, desecularization (Peter L.Berger). Insights of the sociological classics into the strained relationship between religionand modernity are regarded as no longer valid. Instead of speaking of the decline ofreligion in modern societies, of a strict contrast between modernity and tradition, scholarsnowadays emphasize the blurring boundaries between tradition and modernity and theresurgence of religion in modern societies. Obviously, the logic of reversal governs thisnew way of thinking: Criticizing the secularization theory has become a new masternarrative itself and often has a great deal to do with scaremongering. That’s why whatis required first is as precise a reconstruction as possible of what secularization theory isactually saying. The article in its first part provides a reconstruction of the propositionalcontent of secularization theory. The second step will then be to elaborate the variousmeanings of the concept of secularization. The third part finally deals with the criticismsof secularization theory and discusses the extent to which they are justified or not.Keywords: causal mechanisms, modernity, religion, secularization, social differentiation

I discuss the concepts of "seculariization" and its critique, starting with Brian W. WILSON and ending with David MARTIN and Joerg STOLZ. I present an overview on the most relevant contribution on this issue, including also Peter L. BERGER, Thomas LUCKMANN, Hubert KNOBLAUCH, Steve BRUCE, Pippa NORRIS/Ronald INGLEHART, Detlef POLLACK, Gert PICKEL, Rodney STARK, Karl GABRIEL, Monika WOHLRAB-SAHR, Marian BORCHARDT, José CASANOVA and Karel DOBBELAERE. I show the arguments and (some) empirical findings in favour and against secularization and conclude in the end, that secularization has to be taken serious, but has at the same time to be supplemented and transcended in order to adequately understand the present religious landscape and its processes and to correctly theorize about them.

Cauriensia. Revista anual de Ciencias Eclesiásticas, 2024

This paper attempts to contribute to the debate on theory of secularization by presenting critical arguments against it and-where possible-these arguments' refutation. Some of the arguments, however touch the core paradigm of secularization, and, it seems, can be answered only by developing a modified, but not necessarily contrary paradigm. The main objective of the paper is to be established against this backdrop, and it is to introduce and critically discuss the concept of desecularization. It shall be argued the concept of desecularization has potential to overcome the entanglement of paradigms of secularization in progressiveness, narrow-range scope, linearity and predicted directness of the role of religion. To illustrate the difference of paradigms, some particular cases of religious resurgence (Georgia, Hungary, Poland, USA) are briefly analyzed from the perspective of secularization and of desecularization.

zuercher-lehrhaus.ch

2016

Gathering together papers from a 2012 conference in Antwerp, the edited collection Radical Secularization?: An Inquiry into the Religious Roots of Secular Culture advances a philosophical inquiry into the meaning of secularization. In an increasingly postsecular world, debate and reflection on secularization now acknowledges the obsolescence of the linear secularization theories that dominated sociological thought in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea that religion would decline as modern industrial society progressed has now been repudiated by its own advocates, and now more nuanced assessments of the role of religion in the public sphere have been set forth. In particular, the idea that social and cultural “progress” is a value-neutral term has been called into question. Through the discourse on political theology the realization that many modern concepts are religious in nature has called into question the idea that the secular offers a value-neutral basis for culture and politics, an...

God and secularization, 2024

This article examines the phenomenon of secularization and its interaction with human religiosity, while also analyzing the political, moral, and social dimensions of this process. Drawing on historical examples—from the French Revolution and the emergence of the “Age of Reason” to contemporary societies—it traces the gradual displacement of religion from the public sphere. At the same time, it demonstrates that the religious dimension never truly disappears; rather, it transforms, finding expression in new forms such as political religions. By exploring the ideas of Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jürgen Moltmann, T. S. Eliot, Hak Joon Lee, Emilio Gentile, Charles R. Pinches, and Frits de Lange, the study shows that religious values remain central to shaping moral compasses, social order, and the content of political discourses. The author concludes that the complete removal of religion from public discourse may be excessive, as it disregards the inherently religious nature of humanity and the cultural roots underpinning contemporary norms. Consequently, the article suggests focusing on public theology as a means of harmoniously integrating religion into modern society, thereby reinforcing moral foundations and taking into account human nature in political decision-making.

Academia Letters, 2021

3000 word commissioned entry on "Secularization and De-Secularization" for Brill's Vocabulary for the Study of Religion (eds. Robert A. Segal, Kocku von Stuckrad), 2015. Entry abstract: Secularization is the decrease of either religion or its influence in any sphere of human activity, social, political, or otherwise. The exact extent and form in which such a decrease can and does take place, as well as whether such a process might also be reversed, are matters of intense debate. Secularization has drawn interdisciplinary attention from sociologists, philosophers, theologians, political theorists, historians, and other fields. De-secularization refers to the process of a return of either religion’s influence in personal, social, or political settings. This entry focuses on the historical development of the concept of the secular and secularization from the ancient to the contemporary world, as well as the main contours shaping the interdisciplinary debate about secularization today.

Religion, Globalization, and Culture

New york City, where he has taught since 1987. He has published widely in the areas of sociological theory, religion and politics, transnational migration, and globalization. His most important work, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), has appeared in multiple languages. He is presently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

European Journal of Sociology, 1969

A General theory of secularisation is closer to realisation in the sociology of religion than might be expected, in spite of the field being poorly developed. However, the sociology of religion has the advantage of being able to draw in a synthesising manner on neighbouring areas which are more developed, and in so doing will be able in return to suggest broad schemata of interpretation for use in those fields, especially political sociology. No doubt the notion of a general theory of secularisation remains premature, but premature statements do elicit more precise or even alternative formulations incorporating and subsuming wider ranges of material. In any case what follows is less a complete statement of a general theory than a specification of some of its components. Yet in another sense it is a theory, since it could be reduced to sets of overarching propositions and their integrally related sub-propositions, with appropriate qualifications and marginal rubrics.

AI

observe that secularization theory, and more recently empirical and conceptual debates about its birth, death and possible resurrection have been at the heart of theorizing and debates within the sociology of religion. Much of this debate revolves around two key issues. First, there is contention as to whether secularization can be an appropriate social-theoretical concept if it is accepted that it is inevitably contaminated by the normative investments surrounding its invention. Secondly, on a more prosaic but not unrelated level, it is argued that in any case secularization fails as theory due to a putative return or resurgence of the religious in postmodernity. This paper seeks to argue that secularization and its other, desecularization, are themselves embedded in and inescapably marked by theological metaphors of teleology. This is because of the stakes involved in the emergence of differentiation in modernity (driven initially by a normative secularization between the political and the theological). This tale of origins cannot escape the simultaneous invention of the polar concepts of the religious and the secular in early modernity. What this paper seeks to do is review aspects of the genealogy of secularization paying particular attention to the theological ghosts which continue to haunt sociology's emancipatory self conception as a scientific discipline. The paper will then review some of the arguments against the secularization thesis in light of these themes. The aim of this argument is to suggest that social theorists of religion can still employ secularization as a normative analyticwhen understood reflexively and as itself a social construction -in order to measure aspects of the specificity of the imbrication of the religious with the cultural and political at the turn of the new millennium. The argument will be grounded and illustrated with brief reference to empirical studies of Wicca (Bahnisch 2001) and religion as a cultural resource for political mobilization in both the culture wars of the American 1990s and recent conflicts represented as a "clash of civilizations" between the West (coded as Christian) and its Islamic other (Bahnisch 2003a).

It is ironic that debates over the validity of the secularization thesis have been a central focus in the sociology of religion in recent decades, considering the fact that the theory remained unchallenged by almost every leading figure in the study of religion prior to the 1960s and achieved “a truly paradigmatic status within the modern social sciences.” As religious belief and practice have continued to flourish despite global modernization, however, the central tenets of the previously uncontested thesis began to be questioned, leading many sociologists to declare secularization as a myth put forward by their European counterparts. This has prompted lively debate between researchers who continue to defend the inevitability of modern secularization and those who claim that religiosity will survive and flourish in the midst of global modernity. The following paper seeks to investigate and critically examine the different paradigms with which various scholars have approached the questions of modernization, secularization, and global religion.

There is a common view in the field of sociology, particularly, and social sciences, in general, that the world, as we know it, is a secular world and the role of religion in the public space is therefore minimal. This view has been challenged by a few sociologists of religion that pretended to see in the appearance of new religiosities and spiritualities, in the late 1970s and 1980s, a reawakening of the reality of the sacred and belief, now bound for the personal sphere and aside from the institutional functioning of churches and main denominations. Some of them have even talked about the privatization of religion and the disenchantment of the world, exhibiting mixed feelings of revivalism and nostalgia. They consider the thesis of secularization elaborated by important figures of sociology, like Max Weber, Durkheim and Marx, historically rooted and discredited by recent events in America and Great Britain and by the evolution of former atheist societies such as Russia and Eastern Europe. Modern sociologists of religion that subscribe to the thesis of secularization of the world, like Bryan Wilson, Steve Bruce and Charles Taylor, reformulated their initial outline of the model. These changes have not convinced those who shield themselves in the essentiality of religion in human society. The debate has somehow become frozen, in the two camps, around previous arguments. This essay looks to portray the evolution of the secularization thesis, taking in consideration other contributions beyond those originated in the English-speaking world. The Secularization Paradigm It was common, during the 1970s, to state that the Western world was more and more secularized and that only a few people recognized themselves as religious and pious.

Springer eBooks, 2022

In the first chapter of this book, I picked up two ideas from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age and ran with them. The first idea was that analyses of secularization should be pitched on the level of unarticulated assumptions underpinning collective practices and technologies. This, I suggested, untethers the process of secularization from the question of people's conscious beliefs, articulated experiences, or preferred identity markers. The second idea was that secularity denotes a specific kind of time mediated on this level; in other words, that secularity is one kind of time that makes certain technological collective practices make sense. This untethers secularity from the concept of 'religion'. Contemporary historiographies of the secular are more or less stuck in a conceptual blind alley debating identity markers and religion's 'others'. In this book, I have tried to show that these two elements of Taylor's thesis, when pragmatically developed and combined with recent theoretical and historiographical turns, offer a possible way out. Of course, many historians are interested in the development of 'religion', or concerned with affirming certain groups' self-identification as 'secular' in the 'nonreligious' sense. I expect some of them might find the idea of removing these questions entirely from histories of secularization a little controversial. Of course, the ways that people articulate their experience of having 'beliefs' and 'non-beliefs' or being 'religious' or 'nonreligious' are important simply because so many are socially and politically

This article refers to the genesis, dimensions of secularization thesis. Research on this topic in the socialist countries is also mentioned.

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to the debate on secularization taking place today in our intellectual milieu. I believe that a discussion of the process of secularization independent of those processes taking place in the societal space of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is doomed to descend into prejudice. For this reason, I attempt to link two significant processes which began in world history around 1800 and which continue to this day in various corners of the world. These are the formation of national identity and the process named secularization almost from the moment of its inception. In this paper, I shall survey theories of the origin of secularization and anti-secularization, and of national identity and national consciousness. This minor research results in eight propositions, some of which represent conclusions that follow from current quantitative and historical data, and others are hypotheses still to be proven. One significant outcome of these, I believe, is finding arguments against a kind of secularizational segregation. For example, I attempt to show that living as a society in a developed country neither theoretically nor practically means unconditional secularization, and the converse. We may say the same regarding fundamentalism. As far as the concept of secularization itself is concerned, I believe that the very process christened secularization in the nineteenth century is in direct opposition to the essence of this word, and we could call it rather the 'institutionalization of the sacral' . The process of the transformation of a religion into a universal institution, in the same way as the process of the formation of national identity, began spreading at one and the same time and with the very same instruments (education and the mass media). As a result, we obtained two processes which challenged societies with their own versions of collective identity. I shall attempt to show that two types of institutional religion were formed as a consequence of this 'rivalry': transcendental (which works exclusively on a strategy to save the soul) and detranscendentalized (which is incorporated into national identity and which elaborates actions and future strategies from a perspective of national tradition). The numbers of their adherents in any society differ radically from each other. In any specific society, the percentage of religious people and, similarly, that of churchgoers, as well as the presence or absence of fundamentalism, are dependent on which of these two types is present. I shall show below how this typology of currently existing religions explains quantitative material that is at first glance so inexplicable and which has accumulated over the last century as a result of research into world religions and secularization.

MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 2008

Recent studies have been challenging and complicating our understanding of secularization, but most scholars assume that secularization is well underway. In this essay, I briefly examine the conflicting versions of secularization in three books. I ultimately try to show why it is naive to think that secularization has begun to take hold in the West. I specifically show how Nietzsche was fully aware of the fact that religion was becoming more dominant in the political sphere by the late nineteenth century and how he predicted that it would become horribly dangerous by the twentieth century. To clarify my point, I focus on the Nazis' version of Christianity, which Nietzsche defined with stunning precision.

2013

The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion

Up to the last decades of the twentieth century, a striking feature of European history seemed to be the momentous decline over a period of two hundred years of the influence of religion in public affairs. In France, probably the most extreme case, less than one-third of the population at the turn of the century declared a belief in God and less than five percent attended Sunday services. That didn't imply that there was no "spirituality," but it was relegated to the private sphere. Subjective attachment to "values" such as justice or liberty replaced dogma. From an anthropological perspective, this "privatization of religion" was the antonym of religion since the latter is by nature a collective phenomenon. As a consequence, many were predicting the "exit from religion." 1 The modern world, it was thought, would be fashioned more and more by science and technology, the premises of which seemed incompatible with the "irrationality" of religious beliefs. This long-term process has received a name: "secularization," a derivative from the Latin "saeculum," i.e., century, meaning "the world" as opposed to the "rule" of the Christian orders. Nothing of the sort has actually happened. It is now at times claimed that secularization has come to a stop and even that "religion is back." 2 Many events and evolutions seem to point in that direction but the most often cited is what is dubbed "the return of religious violence," especially in its Islamic version. This account lacks plausibility altogether. Are we seriously to believe that religion is playing a game of hide and seek with humanity? This is contrary to

Religions, 2019

In its declaration of principles, the 1987 Philippine Constitution provides for the separation of Church and State. While the principle honors distinctions between temporal and spiritual functions, both Church and State maintain a unique and cooperative relationship geared towards the common good. However, traditional boundaries governing political and religious agency have been crossed during Duterte’s presidency causing a conflict between leaders of government and the Catholic hierarchy. In the process, the conflict has resurfaced issues about the principle of Church-State separation. What accounts for the changing Church-State relations in the Philippines? How will this conflict affect State policy towards religion, religious freedom, and religious education? In the present study we discuss the present context of the Church-State separation principle in the Philippines. We argue that institutional relations between Church and State remain stable despite the Duterte-Catholic Churc...

Religions, 2022

Starting off by categorizing the specific means through which modernity manifests itself in the field of religion and utilizing an ethnography-based methodological strategy, the following paper documents the emergence of Zalmoxianism, a contemporary replica of the religion of the Dacians, which are considered the ancestors of Romanians; they used to inhabit areas around the Carpathians and the Lower Danube before the Roman Conquest (106 A.D.). While subscribing to the theoretical precepts meant to surpass the sociological prejudice according to which modernity exhausts a religiously transcendent view on the world, this paper closely analyzes the conceptual deconstruction of secularization as a total phenomenon while sat the same time isolating the social actor as a non-secularized segment.

Critical Research on Religion, 2019

Analysis of the psychological processes involved in generating the sense of supernatural agency, as well as social scientific research into the factors most directly associated with the prevalence of religious belief and practice (religiosity), both support a common finding: the direct correlation between levels of existential anxiety and the prevalence and intensity of religiosity (religious belief and practice). All functional elements of religion (beliefs, rituals, prayers) involve efforts to invoke, activate, and deploy supernatural causal agency of one sort or another. But religiosity varies throughout the world. This paper reviews psychological evidence that existential anxiety is the core factor activating the intra-psychic mechanisms that give rise to and constitute the nature of religiosity, and that variations in physical and socio-cultural pressures impinging on the individual give rise to variations in anxiety. This combination of intrinsic psychological mechanisms driven though existential anxiety by extrinsic physical, economic, and social pressures indicates that religiosity is best understood as a social-psychological process: socio-cultural factors activating anxiety which in turn drives the intra-psychic mechanisms generating the sense of supernatural agency expressed in belief and practice. By the same token, for analytical purposes, religions are most effectively viewed as social-psychological organisms: social organisms driven by intrapsychic mechanisms that constitute religious convictions and practices in the way that we find them-dedicated to and engaged with supernatural agency in its various forms.

Religion, 2023

This article employs ethnographic material from Sweden and Estonia to examine the relationship between religion and the love of nature in Northern Europe – a region known for its widespread secularisation. We propose that the existential depth that is often ascribed to nature experiences in this part of the world points to a facet of the secularisation process, indicating that love of nature among today's Northern Europeans is deeply entangled with the processes of modernisation. The article provides a historical analysis of how this phenomenon arose and explores ways of approaching it that move beyond the religious-secular dichotomy. It concludes by construing love of nature as belonging to an ‘existential field’ in the Northern European cultural landscape.

Politics and Religion, 2023

Existing research proves the connection between religion and social attitudes toward biopolitical topics. The purpose of our analyses was to deepen reflection on these connections. We explored the internal pluralization of religiosity and ideological self-placement and their significance for orientations toward abortion, in vitro fertilization, and homosexuality, subjects of intensive political debate engaging the Catholic Church. Our analysis, based on a nationally representative sample of Catholics in Poland, leads to the conclusion that, despite high indicators of religiosity, the capacity of the Roman Catholic Church to form a consistent cognitive perspective among its followers is limited. Even among Catholics who present fully institutionalized religiosity (∼25%), only half agree with the Church's teaching on biopolitical themes. These findings are discussed in the context of the importance of intra-religious pluralism for understanding the ideological role of religion in countries with high levels of belonging to one, dominant form of it.

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