7. What Is Secularization?
7. What Is Secularization?
Sociologically, the standard definition of secularization is, as Bryan Wilson frames it, “the process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance"1— the process, that is, whereby the various spheres of community life are "desacralized" through being transferred from religious control based on transcendent, "other-worldly" sanctions to some sort of technological control based on the belief that life in this world will hereby be made better. For what the process of secularization expresses is not in the first instance skepticism about traditional religion (though this may be, and often is, part of it); the first thing it expresses is a shift of the community's ruling interest from the possibilities of the next world to the possibilities of this one.
What prompts the shift is the discovery that technology can sweeten and transform human circumstances in a way that earlier ages never dreamed of. Such a shift could happen anywhere, and is currently happening almost everywhere. Thus, for instance, in India, where for centuries British judges conscientiously preserved and administered Hindu and Muslim law, the independent Republic has decided (I quote Lesslie New-bigin, sometime Bishop of Madras) "that India shall be a secular state dedicated to the achievement of a socialist pattern of society . . . legislation ... is determined by the intention that every citizen, irrespective of his religion or lack of it, shall be able to participate in the benefits and responsibilities of a welfare state. Thus legislation has been passed which is aimed to destroy completely elements in traditional religious law which are considered incompatible with this intention, such as untouchability, the dowry system and so on. These legislative acts, while they certainly lead public practice rather than following it, express the change which has in fact taken place in the way that Indians think about life."2
So it is not only in England, nor only in countries where Christianity has been dominant, that the forces of urbanization and industrialization, egged on by desire for overall material betterment, have snapped the strings by which a “sacral" society—that is, a community whose life was determined and interpreted by a religion—was previously held. Indeed, it is arguable that English secularization is mild compared with what happened in some places, for whatever else current legislation is doing it is not outlawing any part of Christian practice—not yet, at any rate. And this may alert us to the danger of generalizing about secularization in a way that is too general to be of use, or alternatively that treats as typical and universal local phenomena that are not universal at all.
Dr. David Martin goes so far as to write: "There is no unitary process called 'secularisation' arising in reaction to a set of characteristics labelled 'religious'. . . . One cannot talk in a unitary way about the causes of secularisation."3 This might be thought an overstatement, but at least it alerts us to the basic fact that wherever and at whatever rate secularization takes place its features vary according to the cultural and religious background of the community concerned. It simply is not the case that secularization in one community is a carbon copy of secularization in another. Let me illustrate.
Consider three countries belonging to Western Christendom, Germany, France and the United States of America. Germany has a religious background which is partly Lutheran, with a tradition of pietistic religiosity and subservience to the State, and partly Roman Catholic, with a tradition of vigorous political involvement. Against this background, Germany has developed a strong speculative philosophical tradition mesmerized by metaphysics, cool towards Christianity, and veering between the cosmic optimism of idealists like Hegel, for whom evil was good in the making, and the cosmic pessimism of existentialists like Heidegger, for whom suicide was the only course that made sense.
In France, by contrast, neither philosophy nor Protestantism has counted for very much, but for two centuries French intellectuals have been on an anticlerical rampage to free politics, education and social life from the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, which after being outlawed at the Revolution for its links with the old regime was reinstated by Napoleon with financial and other privileges in 1802, in a settlement which survived into this century.
In the U.S.A., the dynamics of the religious situation differ again. "In God We Trust" is stamped on the coins but religion is shut out of the schools; a rural, unsophisticated religious culture, Protestant and evangelical, strongest in the South and Midwest, coexists with a polished humanistic relativism pumped out from centers of learning; and though over 50 percent of Americans belong to and sometimes attend churches, as compared with 10 percent or less practicing their faith in France or England, church links have in America a significance which is much more social and ethnic, and much less religious, than is the case in other places. In each of these three countries today secularization is an observable fact, but in Germany it has sprung from philosophical ideologies, in France from social protest, and in the U.S.A. from a preoccupation with personal achievement, and the details of the process differ in each case.
Now Britain, as is often pointed out, is culturally as well as geographically insular, and so we should expect to find that British secularization too has features that are all its own. My purpose in saying this is simply to underline that, though secularization is a world-wide phenomenon, I shall not in these pages be generalizing about the world, but focusing primarily on Britain, trying to discern as clearly as possible what the secularizing process means here. Similar conditions exist, however, throughout the West— particularly in the U.S.A.—and the lessons learned from the secularization of British society may be profitably applied elsewhere.