March 31, 2005
ARTICLES OF FAITH
Secularization Doesn’t Just Happen (Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, March, 2005)
“As society became more modern, it became more secular.” That sentence has about it a certain “of courseness.” It or its equivalent is to be found in numerous textbooks from grade school through graduate school. The connection between modernization and secularization is taken for granted. Christian Smith, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, challenges what everybody knows in an important new collection of essays by several sociologists and historians, The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (University of California Press, 484 pp., $60). The challenge is not novel with Smith. Social scientists who had long propounded “secularization theory,” Peter L. Berger very notably among them, have in recent years undergone a major change of mind. The contribution of Smith’s big book is in his detailed analysis of the dubious (sometimes contrary to fact) assumptions underlying the theory, and in the case studies he and his colleagues present showing how various interest groups have employed the theory in the service of their own quest for power, usually at the expense of religion and religious institutions.There are, writes Smith, seven crucial and related defects in conventional secularization theory. Over-abstraction: the literature of the theorists routinely spoke of “differentiation,” “autonomization,” “privatization,” and other abstract, if not abstruse, dynamics disengaged from concrete factors of social change such as interests, ideologies, institutions, and power conflicts. Lack of human agency: the theory was big on process without protagonists. It depicted secularization without secularizers. According to the theory, secularization just happens. Overdeterministic inevitability: “Religion’s marginalization from public life is portrayed as a natural or inevitable process like cell mitosis or adolescent puberty.” Secularization theory reflects a view of linear social evolution in the tradition of Comte and Spencer. “If there is one truth that history teaches us beyond doubt,” wrote the great Durkheim, “it is that religion tends to embrace a smaller and smaller portion of social life.” Any questions, class?
Idealist intellectual history: here the history of ideas is determinative. Owen Chadwick’s The Secularization of the European Mind (note the focus on the mind) puts the primary explanatory emphasis on the philosophy of liberalism, evolutionary theory, Marxist ideology, and so forth. Smith writes, “Culture, philosophy, and intellectual systems certainly matter. But they cannot be abstracted from the real historical, social, political, legal, and institutional dynamics through which they worked and were worked upon.” Romanticized history: there was in the view of secularization theorists an “age of faith”—for instance, the thirteenth century—which was succeeded and displaced by the age of reason and modernity. Then everything was religious; now everything, or at least everything that matters in public, is secular. Against that view, anthropologist Mary Douglas writes: “Secularization is often treated as a modern trend. But the contrast of secular with religious has nothing whatsoever to do with the contrast of modern with traditional or primitive. The idea that primitive man is by nature deeply religious is nonsense. The truth is that all of the varieties of skepticism, materialism, and spiritual fervor are found in the range of tribal societies. They vary as much from one another on these lines as any chosen segment of London life.”
An overemphasis on religious self-destruction: Berger’s 1967 The Sacred Canopy suggested that the Judeo-Christian tradition “carried the seeds of secularization within itself.” Ancient Israel’s monotheism began the secularization process by historicizing and rationalizing ethics, a process which Catholicism temporarily restrained but which the Protestant Reformation returned to full force in bringing about a “disenchanted” (Weber) world. A host of theorists agreed that the Reformation and the cultural exhaustion following the “wars of religion” hastened the process of secularization. While not discounting such claims entirely, Smith writes, “What most versions of secularization theory overlook is the important role played by other, nonreligious and antireligious actors in the process of secularization. At the very least, our analytical framework should include room to account for all the players who may have been involved in a process of change.”
Seventh and finally, underspecified causal mechanisms: the influential Bryan Wilson, for example, simply asserted the incompatibility of modernity and religion: “The moral intimations of Christianity do not belong to a world ordered by conveyor belts, time-and-motion studies, and bureaucratic organizations. The very thought processes which these devices demand of men leave little place for the operation of the divine.” One is reminded of the “demythologizing” New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann and his dictum that a man who knows how to work a light switch cannot believe in divine causality. Again, it was Berger who wrote very persuasively, thirty and more years ago, about the powerful linkage between “social structure” and consciousness. To all this Smith responds: “But sociologists and historians give too little attention to explaining exactly how and why these social changes had their supposed detrimental effects on religion. Exactly why did urbanization or technological developments have to undermine religious authority? Exactly how did industrialization and immigration work to produce religious privatization? Why should we treat these as some kind of ‘great gears of history’ that inexorably grind their way toward religious privatization? Rather than all nodding our scholarly heads together in what could be premature analytical closure, we need to go back and force ourselves to answer these questions again.”
Although these seven dubious beliefs clearly run through just about everything secularists think and do, most of them are certain they live in a world of pure and objective empiricism with minds uncluttered by prejudice or dogmatic influence.
Posted by Peter Burnet at March 31, 2005 2:26 PMSounds like pure rationalization to me. The one factor he fails to mention is the misuse of the courts to protect 'minority' views, at least in this country. It is not a natural development but an imposed one which flies in the face of a natural evolution of social mores.
Posted by: Tom C., Stamford, Ct. at March 31, 2005 5:09 PMAll that writing, and he left out Gutenberg's printing press.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at March 31, 2005 5:27 PMOf course it doesn't "just happen". Nothing good just happens, you have to work for it. How many religious wars does it take before people figure out that piety and political power are a deadly combination.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at April 1, 2005 12:04 AMWell, if there were not any secularizers, I expect Orrin to stop dissing Darwin, Marx and Freud.
There was only one secularizer, because only one was needed -- Lorenzo Valla.
Lucky for the world that his work coincided with that Gutenberg guy.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at April 1, 2005 1:21 AM"There was only one secularizer, because only one was needed -- Lorenzo Valla."
Harry's found his common ancestor.
Posted by: Peter B at April 1, 2005 4:18 AMSo, Robert, what do you believe will result in perfect peace? Un-pious political power or pious political power?
There is no such thing as Christianity and politics, just politics. Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence." (John 18:36)
Posted by: Randall Voth at April 1, 2005 9:28 AMRandall, that is a trick question. There will never be perfect peace. But politics driven mainly by piety, or the desire to please God, rather than the desire to acheive an optimal balance of order, peace, prosperity and liberty for society, will tend towards extreme repression, as seen in the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at April 1, 2005 11:11 AMRobert skirts the issue: order, peace, prosperity and liberty have value for a reason beyond utility which is the assumed value of each individual, not in the eyes of other men but in the eyes of God. Attaining the goals of order, peace, prosperity, liberty and JUSTICE requires governance of the individual by the individual to the greatest practical extent. Morality does not arise through reason alone, without the aid of religious based morality, self-governance directed toward a transcendant good is justifiable only in theory.
Posted by: Tom C., Stamford,Ct. at April 1, 2005 1:39 PMA politics driven by the "desire to achieve an optimal balance of order, peace, prosperity and liberty for society"? Where? In this century just past the two most potent secular ideologies were Nazism and Bolshevism, which fought each other with absolute savagery when they weren't busy butchering their own. I understand your fear of traditional religious warfare, Robert; I don't understand how you arrive at the belief that you've found a way past it. State worship is still worship, and we've proved ourselves just as willing to kill for the new religions as our ancestors were for the old ones.
Posted by: joe shropshire at April 1, 2005 1:57 PMBingo!
'Just as willing to kill' for beliefs.
If we are ever going to get beyond that (I don't think we will), then we have to stop acting willynilly on our beliefs and think about what we're doing.
In other words, Tom's all wet. The last thing we want to keep doing is referrring decisions to woollyminded fantasies and start thinking about consequences.
You don't need a Big Spook to do that.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at April 1, 2005 2:32 PMWhich brings us to the rock you keep stumbling on, Harry: we have to stop acting willynilly on our beliefs and think about what we're doing.. But that's just it: we did. There was nothing willy-nilly about either Nazism or Bolshevism, and you know enough history to know that their worst butcheries were their most carefully planned ones. We are perfectly capable, as a race, of anticipating, planning, and welcoming consequences we know full well to be murderous, even genocidal. "Thinking things through" is by itself no defense against that.
Posted by: joe shropshire at April 1, 2005 2:55 PMWho needs God when there's a Harry thinking things through for us?
Posted by: Tom C., Stamford,Ct. at April 1, 2005 3:14 PMOr to be more directly on point: Stalin, to take one example, thought through the consequences of starving out the Kulaks; concluded that they were favorable to Stalin; and pressed ahead. Nothing woolly-minded about that. You've elevated rational decision-making into a Big Spook of your own, and you're as helpless as a tsunami victim to explain what went wrong when it delivers a repulsive outcome.
Posted by: joe shropshire at April 1, 2005 3:22 PMThanks Joe. Beautifully said. If it could be rationalized as favorable to the great helmsman it was favorable to the Marxist/Leninist program of the materialist utopia. Seemed reasonable to many at the time. Still seems reasonable to Harry.
Posted by: Tom C., Stamford,Ct. at April 1, 2005 3:33 PMAnd in addition to Stalin, Mao, etc., let's not forget all the "thinking through" that was done by German and other European scientific and intellectual elites between Darwin and WW11, as well as by endless numbers of post-colonial leaders in the third world who "thought through" their national developments with the assistance of tens of thousands of Western thinkers, bureaucrats and NGO's on nation building, most of them untouched by any menacing piety.
Posted by: Peter B at April 1, 2005 5:52 PMRobert, first you said religion results in war, then it is repression.
How has religion caused the repression of North Koreans, or, say, the 75% unemployed in Zimbabwe?
I think Harry's right. We need to start attributing physical consequences to physical things, like politics and unopposed thuggery; and attribute spiritual consequences to spiritual things.
Posted by: Randall Voth at April 1, 2005 8:11 PMWho exactly are the secularists? This whole discussion is clouded by some very fuzzy semantics. Is Neuhaus complaining about the secularization of government, or the secularization of culture? How can a culture where 80% of the people are religious be considered secular?
When I speak of piety with respect to political power, I'm talking about theocracy, government with the sole aim of pleasing God, as defined by some autocrat's imagination. A ruler can be religious and pious in his personal spiritual life but still govern to acheive an optimal balance of order, peace, prosperity and liberty for society. The point is that the former is driven by a foolhardy obsession with purity and perfection, while the latter accepts the fact that man is imperfect, and the best society achievable by men will be imperfect. The former is akin to driving a car while looking up at the sky, the second is akin to driving the car while watching the road.
Communism is a religion, and the Stalins, Maos and Pol Pots were examples of pious theocrats.
Randall, I think I am in agreement with your last post.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at April 3, 2005 12:24 PM