Did you know secularization has been dead for seven years now? Sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke declared it so in their influential 2000 book, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. In a chapter provocatively titled “Secularization, R. I. P.,” Stark and Finke wrote, “… it seems time to carry the secularization doctrine to the graveyard of failed theories, and there to whisper ‘requiescat in pace.’” Not so fast. Based on developments on a number of fronts, it seems clear that secularization is anything but dead.
What is secularization, anyway? Writing in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, scholar John Sommerville identified secularization with (1) increasing differentiation between the economic, political, legal, and moral aspects of society and their associated structures; (2) the transformation of religious institutions into secular institutions; (3) the transfer of activities from religious to secular institutions; (4) a shift in individuals’ focus from “ultimate” concerns to proximate concerns; and (5) a general decline in religiosity. Theorists like Mark Chaves find this overbroad, preferring a concept of “neo-secularization” that he associates particularly with the decline of religious authority over aspects of life peripheral to faith. Neo-secularization occurs when people look outside of religious institutions for services or guidance they might formerly have obtained within them. Examples include seeking counseling from a professional therapist instead of one’s pastor and seeking social opportunities in the larger society rather than mostly at church functions. This resembles my notion of exsularity, the preference to reach outside of one’s belief community—and around traditional intermediary structures—in more and more aspects of life.
Enough hairsplitting—we can agree to treat secularization as something we know when we see it. Stark and Finke declared it dead, and they are not to be taken lightly. Among other things, we owe to their 1992 book, The Churching of America, 1776–1990, the recognition that Revolutionary-era America held far fewer church members than was widely supposed. Stark’s 1996 solo work, The Rise of Christianity, gave a refreshingly this-worldly account of the social factors that might have helped Christianity overspread the Roman Empire. Still, Stark is no friend of seculars: in his 2005 book The Victory of Reason, he claimed that Enlightenment ideals and capitalist principles descend exclusively from Christian thinking.
So, what were Stark and Finke celebrating when they proclaimed the death of secularization—and what makes me newly confident that they’re wrong? Stark and Finke actually proclaimed the death of the “secularization hypothesis,” the idea that religious devotion can be expected to wane and ultimately collapse as the result of advances in science, education, political and social freedom, and economic productivity. That pillar of the French Enlightenment, the Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789), captured the concept when he quipped: “If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.”
During the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, most freethinkers (and not a few sociologists) assumed “the end of faith” was around the corner. By around 1970, it was clear that religion wasn’t fading away. Quite to the contrary, the fastest-growing faith category was a doctrinally conservative, politically muscular Christian evangelicalism.
For those reasons, back in 2000, when Stark and Finke issued their famous RIP for secularization, a reasonable observer might well have agreed with them. On the international scene, communism had fallen and a renascent piety bubbled across the old East Bloc. Reactionary theological literalism was sweeping the Muslim and Hindu worlds, displacing the legacies of secular cosmopolitans like Atatürk and Nehru. On the home front, secularization in the United States seemed twice doomed, pincered between the evangelical colossus and rapidly rising immigration from Latin America. Hispanics constituted the nation’s fastest-growing minority, doubling in just twenty years. While many individuals might convert from their ancestral Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism, there seemed no way this famously devout population would be swayed from its passionate connection to faith.
Guess what happened? Since 2000, much of the “evidence” for this pessimistic view—indeed, most of the “evidence” suggesting that secularization might soon be expunged from American life—has collapsed. After years of passing through a dark tunnel, I’m starting to think we might—might—be returning into the secular sunlight.
Let’s start abroad. As early as 2002, independent scholar Gregory Paul alerted FREE INQUIRY readers that religious participation was in sharp decline across the First World with the sole exception of the United States. Eastern Europe’s re-Christianization turned out to be a patchy affair; for every Poland or Russia that re-embraced Catholicism or Orthodoxy, there’s a counterexample like eastern Germany or the Czech Republic where irreligion remains common. In the February/March 2007 FREE INQUIRY—which bore the cover line “Post-Christian Europe”—political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart suggested a reason the United States and Europe differ so sharply. They argue that secularization proceeds fastest where economic and welfare uncertainties are low. With Americans’ tattered social safety net subjecting millions to unpredictable life prospects without parallel in Europe, Third-World levels of religious commitment are perhaps unsurprising.
Of all the reasons to think secularization might be in trouble abroad, only one still holds up today: Islamic and (to a lesser extent) Hindu fundamentalism remain disturbingly in the ascendancy. Still, on balance, international affairs have unfolded largely as we might expect them to if the secularization hypothesis were valid.
How about the domestic situation? Surprisingly, over the last few years, most of the indicators have been leaning our way. Among United States evangelical and fundamentalist Christian churches, growth trends have actually flattened. Evangelical political activism stumbled badly with the 2006 elections. Welcome as this was, it had been during the peak years of evangelical growth that America’s nonreligious minority doubled in size. Observers marveled as the respondents claiming no religious preference (the “nones”) rose from 8 to as high as 16 percent over about ten years. Some cautioned against making too much of this—in a 2003 FREE INQUIRY article, the eminent sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan argued that as many as 60 percent of the nones might be denomination shoppers or eclectic spiritual seekers. The number of atheists, agnostics, and other hard seculars might not be growing that much, or at all. A 2005 Pew Trust-University of Akron survey disproved Duncan’s surmise. Not only did it register 16 percent of Americans with no religious affiliation—the highest number yet—it reported that two thirds of them were atheists, agnostics, or hard seculars. Contrary to Duncan’s theory, most of the unprecedented growth in Americans living without a religion seemed to involve people like us.
There remained only one trend still portending serious trouble for the dream of a secular America: the prospect of a rapidly expanding Hispanic population whose generations-deep, rock-ribbed piety might render it immune to the secularizing tug of American life. But look what’s happened! The Hispanic minority is growing as rapidly as anticipated—it now numbers greater than 14 million—but according to current research, Hispanic Americans are surrendering to the “secularizing tug of American life” after all. Indeed, they are abandoning religion at about the same rate as any other minority entering the American mainstream.
New York Times reporter Laurie Goodstein summarized “a wave of research” showing that “Hispanics are just as likely as other Americans to identify themselves as having ‘no religion,’ and to not affiliate with a church.” One in five U. S. Hispanics has changed religions—almost exclusively through apostasy from Roman Catholicism—and current demographics suggest that Hispanics leaving Catholicism today are at least half as likely to abandon religion altogether as they are to convert to evangelical Protestantism. So many Hispanic men have given up church that, in several American cities, fast-growing soccer leagues popular among recent immigrants can play their games on Sunday mornings.
With evangelicalism at reduced throttle, with the number of “hard seculars” continuing to multiply, and with the prospect that America’s fast-growing Hispanic community is as secularizable as any previous minority group, it seems more reasonable than ever to hope that, one day, America will look more like Western Europe in its level of popular piety. (See also Allen B. Downey’s “The Godless Freshman,” p. 56 this issue.) Sorry, Drs. Stark and Finke. Secularization isn’t dead. It was only sleeping—and less soundly than we thought.
Tom Flynn is the editor of FREE INQUIRY and the editor of The New Encycopedia of Unbelief (Prometheus Books, 2007).
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