secularization

secularization, secularization thesis

Secularization is the process whereby, especially in modern industrial societies, religious beliefs, practices, and institutions lose social significance. The decline of religion is measured by religious attendance, commitment to orthodox belief, support for organized religion in terms of payments, membership, and respect, and by the importance which religious activities such as festivals assume in social life. It is argued that, on these criteria, modern societies have gone through a process of secularization in the twentieth century.

The secularization thesis maintains that secularization is an inevitable feature of the rise of industrial society and the modernization of culture . It is argued that modern science has made traditional belief less plausible; the pluralization of life-worlds has broken the monopoly of religious symbols ; the urbanization of society has created a world which is individualistic and anomic ; the erosion of family life has made religious institutions less relevant; and technology has given people greater control over their environment, making the idea of an omnipotent God less relevant or plausible. In this sense, secularization is used as a measure of what Max Weber meant by the rationalization of society.

Critics of the secularization thesis argue that it exaggerates the level of commitment to organized religion in pre-modern societies; implicitly equates secularization with the decline of Christianity , and these two issues should be kept separate; underestimates the importance of new religious movements in so-called secular societies; cannot easily explain important variations between industrial societies (such as the United States and Great Britain) in terms of the nature and rate of secularization; fails to consider the role of religion in nationalist culture such as in Poland and Ireland; and overlooks secular alternatives to religion (such as humanism ) which may function like a religion without involving a belief in the sacred (see, for example, the works of, such as his The Religious and the Secular, 1969, or A General Theory of Secularization, 1978).

Peter L. Berger (The Social Reality of Religion, 1969) has argued that human beings require a ‘sacred canopy’ in order to make sense of the world, because meaninglessness is a threat to our need for an orderly universe. Thomas Luckmann (The Invisible Religion, 1963) suggests that modern societies have an invisible religion . Supporters of the secularization thesis, such as (see his Religion in Sociological Perspective, 1982) maintain that the diversity, plurality, and fragmentary nature of new religious movements, youth cultures, and counter cultures is in fact evidence of the church's loss of social authority. Where religion appears to flourish, for example in the United States, it is primarily as a channel for nationalist sentiments. Therefore, when sociologists examine the complex relationship between ideology, nationalism, and religious change, it is clear that there are many different patterns of secularization. See also civil religion.