The religious landscapes in both Europe and the United States are increasingly diverse in different ways, but the overall trend on both sides of the Atlantic is toward greater secularization and a multiplicity of different approaches to religion. We are seeing a landscape in Western societies that is becoming both more secular and more diverse.
The idea of secularization has a long and distinguished history in the social sciences, with many seminal thinkers arguing that religiosity was declining throughout Western societies. The seminal social thinkers of the nineteenth century—Auguste Comte, Her¬bert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud—all believed that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the advent of industrial society. They were far from alone; ever since the Age of the Enlightenment, leading figures in philosophy, anthropology, and psychology have postulated that theological superstitions, symbolic liturgical rituals, and sacred practices are the product of a past that will be outgrown in the modern era. The death of religion was the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century; indeed, it has been regarded as the master model of sociological inquiry, where secularization was ranked with bureaucratization, rationalization, and urbanization as the key historical revolutions transforming medieval agrarian societies into modern industrial nations.
During the last decade, however, this thesis of the slow and steady death of religion has come under growing criticism; secularization theory is currently experiencing the most sustained challenge in its long history. Critics point to multiple indicators of religious health and vitality today, ranging from the continued popularity of churchgoing in the United States to the emergence of New Age spirituality in Western Europe, the growth in fundamentalist movements and religious parties in the Muslim world, the evangelical revival sweeping through Latin America, and the upsurge of ethno-religious conflict in international affairs.*
In a fierce critique, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke suggest it is time to bury the secularization thesis: “After nearly three centuries of utterly failed prophesies and misrepresentations of both present and past, it seems time to carry the secularization doctrine to the graveyard of failed theories, and there to whisper ‘requiescat in pace.’”
Talk of burying the secularization theory is premature. The critique relies too heavily on selected anomalies and focuses too heavily on the United States (which happens to be a striking deviant case) rather than comparing systematic evidence across a broad range of rich and poor societies. We believe that the importance of religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially those living in poorer nations, facing personal survival-threatening risks. We argue that feelings of vulnerability to physical, societal, and personal risks are a key factor driving religiosity, and we demonstrate that the process of secularization—a systematic erosion of religious practices, values, and beliefs—has occurred most clearly among the most prosperous social sectors living in affluent and secure post-industrial nations.
Secularization is a tendency, not an iron law. One can easily think of striking exceptions, such as Osama bin Laden who is (or was) extremely rich and fanatically religious. But when we go beyond anecdotal evidence, we find that the overwhelming bulk of evidence points in the opposite direction: people who experience ego-tropic risks during their formative years (posing direct threats to themselves and their families) or socio-tropic risks (threatening their community) tend to be far more religious than those who grow up under safer, more comfortable, and more predictable conditions. In relatively secure societies, the remnants of religion have not died away, but the importance and vitality of religion, its ever-present influence on how people live their daily lives, has gradually eroded.
The strongest challenge to secularization theory arises from American observers who commonly point out that claims of steadily diminishing congregations in Western Europe are sharply at odds with U.S. trends, at least until the early 1990s. Here we focus upon how we can best explain “American exceptionalism.”
Religious market theory postulates that intense competition between rival denominations (supply) generates a ferment of activity, explaining the vitality of churchgoing. We compare evidence supporting this account with the theory of secure secularization, based on the idea that societal modernization, human development, and economic inequality drive the popular demand for religion. (See Figure 1.)
Evidence in Western Europe consistently and unequivocally shows two things: traditional religious beliefs and involvement in institutionalized religion, first, vary considerably from one country to another; and, second, have steadily declined throughout Western Eur¬ope, particularly since the 1960s. Studies have often reported that many Western Euro¬peans have ceased to be regular churchgoers today outside of special occasions such as Christmas and Easter, weddings and funer¬als, a pattern especially evident among the young.
Trends in recent decades illustrate the consistency of the secularization process irrespective of the particular indicator or survey that is selected. All the trends point consistently downward. Moreover, the erosion of religiosity is not exclusive to Western European nations; regular churchgoing also dropped during the last two decades in affluent Anglo-American nations such as Canada and Australia. One reason for the decline in religious participation during the late twentieth century lies in the fact that during these years many common spiritual beliefs have indeed suffered considerable erosion in post-industrial societies.
Among post-industrial societies, the United States is the exception in its combination of high rates of religious pluralism and participation: the theory does indeed fit the American case, but the problem is that it fails to work elsewhere. What matters for the societal vulnerability, insecurity, and risk that we believe drives religiosity are not simply levels of national economic resources but their distribution as well.
Yet the level of economic inequality proves strongly and significantly related to both forms of religious behavior, but especially to the propensity to engage in individual religiosity through prayer. Figure 2 illustrates this relationship; the United States is exceptionally high in religiosity in large part, we believe, because it is also one of the most unequal post-industrial societies under comparison.
Despite private affluence for the well-off, many American families, even in the professional middle classes, face serious risks of loss of paid work by the main breadwinner, the dangers of sudden ill health without adequate private medical insurance, vulnerability to becoming a victim of crime, as well as the problems of paying for long-term care of the elderly. Americans face greater anxieties than citizens in other advanced industrialized countries about whether or not they will be covered by medical insurance, be fired arbitrarily, or be forced to choose between losing their jobs and devoting themselves to their newborn children. The entrepreneurial culture and the emphasis on personal responsibility has generated conditions of individual freedom and delivered considerable societal affluence, and yet one trade-off is that the United States has greater income inequality than any other advanced industrial democracy. By comparison, despite recent pressures on restructuring, the secular Scandinavian and West European states remain some of the most egalitarian societies, with relatively high levels of personal taxation but also an expansive array of welfare services in the public sector, including comprehensive healthcare, social services, and pensions.
Growing up in societies in which survival is uncertain is conducive to a strong emphasis on religion; conversely, experiencing high levels of existential security throughout one’s formative years reduces the subjective importance of religion in one’s life. As a society moves past the early stages of industrialization and life becomes less nasty, less brutish, and longer, people tend to become more secular in their orientations. The most crucial explanatory variables are those that differentiate between vulnerable societies and societies in which survival is so secure that people take it for granted during their formative years.
Thus, while economic development brings systematic changes, a society’s cultural heritage continues to influence cultural direction. While secularization started earliest and has moved farthest in the most economically developed countries, little or no secularization has taken place in the low-income countries, meaning that the cultural differences linked with economic development not only are not shrinking, but are growing larger. This expanding gap between sacred and secular societies around the globe has important consequences for our current religious and political landscapes, our cultural change, and our new forms of identity politics.
*Fundamentalist is here used in a neutral way to refer to those with an absolute conviction in the fundamental principles of their faith, to the extent that they will not accept the validity of any other beliefs.
Further Reading
Aldridge, Alan. Religion in the Contemporary World.
Cambridge: Polity, 2000.
Bruce, Steve, ed. Religion and Modernization.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Bibby, Reginald W. “The State of Collective Religiosity in Canada: An Empirical Analysis.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthro¬pology 16, no. 1 (1979).
Bok, Derek. The State of the Nation: Government and the Quest for a Better Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Bradley, David, Evelyn Huber, Stephanie Moller, Francois Nielsen, and John D. Stephens. “Distribution and Redistribu¬tion in Post¬industrial Democracies.” World Politics 55, no. 1 (2003): 193–228.
Esping-Andersen, Gosta. Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hicks, Alexander. Social Democracy and Welfare Capitalism: A Century of Income Security Policies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
McAllister, Ian. “Religious Change and Secularization: The Trans¬mission of Religious Values in Australia,” Sociological Analysis 49, no. 3 (1998): 249–63.
McFate, Katherine, Roger Lawson, and William Julius Wilson, eds. In Poverty, Inequality, and the Future of Social Policy: Western States in the New World Order. New York: Russell Sage, 1995.
Mol, Hans. The Faith of Australians. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985.
Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Pippa Norris is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and is currently serving a two-year term as Director of the Democratic Governance Group at the United Nations Development Program in New York. Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political Science and Program Director at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He helped found the Eurobarometer surveys and directs the World Values surveys. He has also served as a consultant to the U.S. State Department and the European Union. This essay is adapted from the article “Sellers or Buyers in Religious Markets? The Supply and Demand of Religion” by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, which appeared in the Spring and Summer 2006 Hedgehog Review.
Captions:
Figure 1. Religious behavior in postindustrial societies. Mean frequency of attendance at religious services per society is based on responses to the question “Apart from weddings, funerals and christenings, about how often do you attend religious services these days? More than once a week (7), once a week (6), once a month (5), only on special holidays (4), once a year (3), less often (2), never or practically never (1).” Mean frequency of prayer is based on “How often do you pray to God outside of religious services? Every day (7), more than once a week (6), once a week (5), at least once a month (4), several times a year (3), less often (2), never (1).” (World Values Survey, pooled 1981–2001)
Figure 2. Religiosity and economic inequality. Mean frequency of prayer per society is based on responses to the question “How often do you pray to God outside of religious services? Every day (7), more than once a week (6), once a week (5), at least once a month (4), several times a year (3), less often (2), never (1).” (World Values Survey, pooled 1981–2001) Economic inequality is gauged by the GINI coefficient. (World Bank, World Development Indicators, www.worldbank.org, 2002)
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