In characteristically robust style, Steve Bruce describes, explains and clarifies the ‘secularization thesis’, consciously pitching its defence and elaboration into a notably altered register of debate. Once ‘mainstream’ within sociology (and often still referred to as such), the ‘thesis’ is now frequently regarded with suspicion. The perception is that religion and spirituality, contrary to thesis expectations, have persisted and revived, prompting the accusation that secularization-ism itself harbours ideological secularism. As the current leading voice on his side of the house, Bruce moves to rebut this whole train of post-secular questioning (though he does not favour that term).
The social significance of religions in modern societies, and the intensity and specificity of their defining beliefs, are steadily diminishing. The weakening of socialization into life-defining religious norms and practices leads towards a relativistic pluralism of faiths, and ‘thin’, free-choice spiritual inclinations, from which situation indifference gradually sets in. In terms of church-going activity, once decline has started, in no country does it recover. In terms of the spectrum of belief, assuming three broad categories (the patently religious, intermediates and the patently non-religious), the balance is unmistakeably shifting from the first and second to the second and third.
Modern societies involve a congeries of inter-related factors signalling the differentiation of social life into separate institutional spheres, with attendant cultures and mentalities of individualization, techno-economic rationality, egalitarianism, democracy, and relativism. As a result, our lives of work, learning, law, art, leisure, health and social control become structurally and habitually detached from the authority of churches and the guidance of worldviews featuring supernatural deities with powers of moral intervention. Religious doctrines and values, partly in order to survive, and as part of the modern processes themselves, come merely to reflect societal and normative problems rather than to resolve them. Religion in hyper-modern conditions holds some traction, but this is more about our sense of gravitas, heritage, and nostalgia than about deep, encompassing identity.
Contrary to the ‘second hand caricatures’ and ‘trifling objections’ that make Bruce grumpy about feeling obliged to put an end to the sillier points of dispute (‘here endeth the lesson’, pp. 56, vi-vii), the secularization thesis does not claim that religion will necessarily die out; or that it is unimportant to those who still feel the need for it; or that it cannot revive from time to time; or that it plays no valuable role in society; or that its basic falsity has been exposed by a superior scientific mindset. Nor is he minded to controvert the view that believers act out of intrinsic religious motivation rather that as dictated to by instrumental interests or societal functions – though he knows that sociological accounting for religion cannot do without some measure of the latter. So sheer reductionism and determinism must be avoided, and good stock must be taken of the role of religion where it makers a social difference, for example in ‘cultural transitions’ associated with migration, and in aspects of minority ‘cultural defence’. But secularization is ‘retarded’ by such phenomena, not blocked, so that even if secularization has certainly not been ‘inevitable’, being the product of contingent societal changes, it still looks well-nigh ‘irreversible’
The feeling that secularizationists make too much of declining church attendance focuses attention on the extent of religious activity and thought outside or on the margins of the official institutions. One possibility here is that, just as in the past popular religious belief took many forms that did not conform to established Christian doctrine, so there may be widespread forms of Christianity at work today of an informal but nevertheless strong sort. Bruce thinks that this protest involves a blatant comparative mismatch. Even if popular religious understanding since medieval times was sometimes very different from, and even resistant to, that of the clergy, no one reasonably doubts that it was definitively Christian rather than, say, pagan, and pervasive, vital, and doctrinal in a way that simply does not apply today. To the further counter that we must not mistake the decline of religion for the key element behind all changes in popular culture in more recent times, namely the sharp demise of deeply collective norms and practices, Bruce replies that this is precisely the point of secularization theory: to be culture- and thought-defining, religion must effectively be passed on to subsequent generations through uniform, regular, and largely unquestioning community mechanisms, and it is precisely these that the modern processes of individualization, pluralization and pervasive technological intercourse with the world have worn down. Those desiring relief from that gloomy prospect will appeal to the primordial nature of religion (whether as a matter of innate need or divine gift). But sociologists should regard such appeals as either inherently speculative or circular, partly because the needs that religion purportedly fulfils are unmanageably many and conflicting. The key is to examine the social conditions of religion's reproduction.
Bruce insists that churchgoing remains the crucial indicator in the debate, because all manner of remnants of religiously inflected popular culture, from supernatural thinking and folk religion, to one's general sense of religious selfhood and the ‘social’ use of church facilities and rituals for purposes of marriage, community singing, youth work, baptism, tourism, and so forth, decline in close association with rates of church attendance itself. As for the sort of ‘vicarious’ religion supposedly instanced in the way that we seem to invest effervescently in celebrities, raves, ecology, cathedral-visiting, the death of Princess Diana, and so on, Bruce warns against a manifest logical and sociological fallacy: religion and its concomitant intense affect may well be taken very seriously by the devout, but this does not mean that whatever anyone takes seriously or experiences intensely can be assimilated to religion. As for studies that perceive organic religious communities in Britain thriving as late as the 1970s, with a hint that they might still be lingering on, Bruce is very dubious. Just to make sure, he dashes down from Aberdeen to check out Staithes, promptly reporting back the expected total lack of evidence.
Much effort has gone into the possibility that contemporary expressions of spirituality represent religion in modern guise, thus offsetting the apparent unpopularity of established churches. Bruce admires some of the fieldwork in studies that pursue this hypothesis, but regrets to inform that the basic findings themselves do not support it. He cannot help scoffing at the idea that yoga, Feng Shui, Findhorn, or the ‘transformational’ rhetoric of management motivation discourse equate to sombre religious conviction, but even a more generous attitude leaves the principal contentions of secularization undisturbed. He calculates that only around 1% of the well-known Kendal Study sample is resolutely spiritual, which converts to just 270 new-agers as against 11,000 fewer regular worshippers in that town over several decades. And a 2001 Scottish survey gives a near-majority identifying as non-religious, by contrast with 2% spiritual (8% on the loosest definition).
The proposition that religion never disappears has also drawn sustenance from ‘supply-side’ theories, so Bruce turns his attention to that quarter, concisely rubbishing the unsociological rational choice assumptions behind the distinctly American ‘market conditions’ model, which depicts religion positively thriving in conditions of competitive diversity. He also disputes the empirical evidence for ‘American exceptionalism’ more generally. Of course, comparatively speaking, the USA is plainly more religious than certain European nations. But the crucial benchmark, again, is historical and internal: over time, the USA shows a distinct bleaching out of both the substantive content and the imperative standing of Christian belief (God as a real person, hell, miracles, not sinning). The tendency for American survey respondents to over-claim their faithfulness may also be changing.
The charge of Eurocentrism against secularization theory is normally extended by reference to the vibrancy of religion in non-Western contexts. As with the American case, Bruce does not dispute the relativities involved. Nor do we have to expect that the Rest will follow the West, exactly, in the achievement of multiple modernities. Yet, indisputably, the world is modernizing, and as such, for Bruce, global secularization processes are becoming more visible, notably in political procedures, institutional organization, and the articulation of civic, public spaces within which more liberal concerns and pluralistic contestation are expressed. No doubt counter instances of theocratic capture and fundamentalist upsurge can be attested (though these are themselves largely political and modern in logic and conduct), but over the long haul, and alongside marked social stratification and cosmopolitan deliberation, the jury is still out on what Peter Berger calls ‘the desecularization of the world’. The likely verdict might well follow the Russian case, where, following a minor religious resurgence after the fall of Communism, all the signposts to secularization have been re-set.
Bruce's important book stands as the single most articulate guide to the content and merits of the secularization thesis, though it will hardly bring debate to a halt. Some supporters might find it odd that Bruce plays down the contribution to secularization of materialist scientific understanding, given his strong emphasis on cumulative inter-generational change. It is not unsociological, as he implies, to highlight the purely ideational aspect, given the centrality of mass and higher education to modernity. Other sympathisers will accept more readily than him that explanation in terms of modernity's core features and pathways is an enterprise of theoretical and evaluative (re)construction, not a matter of the empirical record alone.
For religiously minded critics, each batch of evidence presented by Bruce will be thought to screen out some other batch having contrary implications. And inductive reasoning, we will be reminded, is never decisive. Does it necessarily follow, for example, from the prevalence of belief-pluralism, banal technological rationality, and individualization that religion, despite setbacks, will not finally triumph? A Catholic social interpreter like Charles Taylor cannot bring himself to think so, trusting instead that pluralism will enrich our ultimate concerns and multiply access to the Transcendent. Do developments in the non-West necessarily mean that secularization will go all the way there? Not if we are prepared to take the ‘multiple modernities’ concept seriously, through which lens many and new forms of religious-secular stabilisation might readily be imagined and established. Bruce makes much of the notion that religion will only survive where it has ‘work to do other than relating individuals to the supernatural’ (p. 49), and he treats such work as confirmation of the dimension of secularization that is ‘internal’ to religion. But it will be said that religion always has had such work to do, and that success in that regard is intrinsically bound up with the values and commitments that motivate it. Such commitments, moreover, can have a sociological and even socialistic coloration, as in assorted ‘faith in the city’ initiatives. Thus, if, as sociologists often allege, our modern capitalistic, consumer, pragmatic societies are becoming chronically anomic, fragmented, dysfunctional and disillusioned, and thus in need of collective transformation in the name of society itself, why rule out, a priori, the part that religion might play (to its own benefit) in some appropriately grand rectification? It is a pity that Bruce's rather positivistic posture inclines him to avoid such wider issues, not least because the book lacks a concluding chapter.
