Sociology of Religion on a Sunday

Some time ago, saint suggested that I should post some more on the sociology of religion. I’m thinking of reworking a conference paper from 2002 soon [posted below the fold], so this might be a good time to throw some ideas out there. For a long time, I’ve been interested in the interrelated questions of the way social science originated in and against theological knowledges through the Enlightenment, whether or not secularisation is an observation of reality or a normative prescription of liberal modernities, and the question of whether the religious ever went away – and its social and political implications. Today, I think it’s fair to say, we are even more aware of the role (overt and covert) of religion in our public life than we were in 2002. So I’d like to have another go at this essay – and would be interested in any thoughts readers might have – specifically on the paper or more generally on the points made in this intro.

Sociology of Religion, Secularization and Social Theory

Mark Bahnisch

This paper is part of a work in progress (Bahnisch 2002c) which seeks to conceptualise a social theory of religion, culture and politics adequate to the analysis of the postmodern social. Due to the constraints of the conference format in which it is being presented, it will necessarily be somewhat schematic and brief, but it is hoped that the paper can succeed in raising some key issues relating to conceptual lacunae in the sociology of religion as well as making some links between theory in the sociology of religion and Social theory more generally.

Swatos & Christiano (1999: 209) quite correctly observe that the secularization theory, and more recently empirical and conceptual debates about its birth, death and possible resurrection have been at the heart of theorizing and debates within the sociology of religion. Much of this debate revolves around two key issues. First, there is contention as to whether secularization can be an appropriate social-theoretical concept if it is accepted that it is inevitably contaminated by the normative investments surrounding its invention. Secondly, on a more prosaic but not unrelated level, it is argued that in any case secularization fails as theory due to a putative return or resurgence of the religious in postmodernity. This paper seeks to argue that secularization and its other, desecularization, are themselves embedded in and inescapably marked by theological metaphors of teleology. This is in part because of the stakes involved in the emergence of differentiation in modernity (driven initially by a normative secularization between the political and the theological). This tale of origins cannot escape the simultaneous invention of the polar concepts of the religious and the secular in early modernity. What this paper seeks to do is review aspects of the genealogy of secularization paying particular attention to the theological ghosts which continue to haunt sociology’s emancipatory self conception as a scientific discipline. The paper will then review some of the arguments against the secularization thesis in light of these themes. The aim of this argument is to suggest that social theorists of religion can still employ secularization as a normative analytic — when understood reflexively and as itself a social construction — in order to measure aspects of the specificity of the imbrication of the religious with the cultural and political at the turn of the new millennium. The argument will be grounded and illustrated with brief reference to empirical studies of Wicca (Bahnisch 2001) and religion as a cultural resource for political mobilization in both the culture wars of the American 1990s and recent conflicts represented as a “clash of civilizations” between the West (coded as Christian) and its Islamic other (Bahnisch 2002).

Modernity, Secularization, and (anti?) Theological Sociology

Turner (1992: 102) suggests, “the theme of secularization haunts… sociology”, noting that

Nineteenth-century social theorists as far removed as Friedrich Engels and Ferdinand Tonnies shared a common perspective in which it was confidently assumed that the development of capitalism would necessarily undermine the social and cultural bases of traditional religion.

While the secularization thesis — succinctly defined by Wilson (1966: 14) as “the process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance” — is associated (as is Sociology) with the late Nineteenth century and early Twentieth century and the names of Weber, Troeltsch and Durkheim, its roots in fact go back to early modernity. The theses of classical sociologists on religion have been well summarized by authors such as Turner (1992) and Stark & Finke (2000) and need not be reviewed here. Rather what is at stake in the current debates over secularization, desecularization and postmodernity can better be understood through a genealogy of secularization as an exemplary sociological figure.

Historically, the genesis of the secularization thesis could be further traced (Bahnisch 2002) to a proximate origin in the conciliarist debates of the High Middle Ages. The conciliarist controversies developed from the reintroduction of categories of public and private through the rediscovery of Roman Law (both secular Law in German jurisprudence and the Canon Law movement of the Twelth and Thirteenth centuries). It is worth noting at this point, as this will become important for the argument later, that the basis of the secularization thesis — the differentiation of social life and the emancipation of particular domains from the theological — is in itself representative of the universalist, historicist and utopian tendencies of Western Christian thought (Martin 1969).

The increasing normative differentiation of the theological and the political, and the subsequent invention of the territorialized state as sovereign both derive from competing normative, universalist and utopian claims of dominion by both Emperor and Pope in the conciliarist controversies. This early debate, ostensibly a contest between two universalisms, in fact lays the basis for differentiation of secular and religious realms. Conciliarism in turn in can be interpreted as laying the foundations for the twin events of the Renaissance and the Reformation, both of which were also borne out of rapid social change, and both of which in turn gave rise to further social differentiation and mark the beginnings of modernity. The articulation of the sovereignty of the state by theorists such as Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes and Niccolo Machiavelli anticipates the consummation of state formation in the Westphalian settlement of 1648. Liberalism has its nascence with the emancipation of the political from the theological. This can be illustrated in the English context with reference to the relationship between John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government and the settlement of the Glorious Revolution which reproduces Westphalia’s abegnation of the rule of cui regno, cui religioso in the particular context of a non-organicist state Protestant church which increasingly comes to terms with religious dissent. Locke is also significant (as is Hobbes in a different way) through the introduction of the contractarian theory of legitimacy which refers sovereignty and the political to the citizen subject below rather than to God or the Church above. At the same time, controversies surrounding Renaissance humanism point to the parallel desire to reject revelation as the hegemonic foundation of any possible epistemology (Bahnisch 2002).

Sociology, as is well known, originates with Comte as a project which seeks to supplant both Theology and Philosophy as the master science of the human world. The origins of Sociology contain the tension which still underpins Sociology as a discipline — the positivist and universalist epistemology drawing on the desire to elaborate a science of human sociality and historicity and the contradictory desire to be a humanist a-Theology of liberation and emancipation. Such contradictions are normalized but not resolved in Weber’s Science as a Vocation (Gerth & Mills 1948) and continue to shape the disciplinary tension between “value-free statements” and critical and political interventions. It is clear then that secularization is a metonymic cipher for sociology writ small. The secular, as Martin (1969: 10-11) among others argue, has no meaning aside from its content as the excluded other of the dominant term of religion in a classic binary opposition. This insight can be reinforced by noting that the sense of religion as a system of beliefs and practices related to the sacral or the transcendental and discrete from the profane everyday world in itself arises in early modernity as a result of differentiation (Saler 2000) and as Cantwell Smith (1963) cogently argues, is a concept that originates in Protestant polemic.

Similarly, Sociology as an emancipatory knowledge by necessity had to oppose the universalism of Counter-Reformation Thomism with its own universalism — a subset of the wider epistemological claims of science to have discovered an extra-mundane point from which to view the world. Sociology restages the Reformation drama in one sense in its embodying of a protest against the pretensions of (Catholic) Theology and in another sense where styles of theorization such as Weber’s emphasis on the irony of history or the “sociology of fate” (Turner 1996) draws heavily on his Calvinist intellectual tradition while Durkheim’s organicism, reification of society and concern with anomie reflects integrist French Catholic thought of his age. In a different way, Marx’ oeuvre is imbued with German idealist philosophy of religion through his dependence on and opposition to Hegel, Stirner and Feuerbach among others that could be cited. The strong opposition between Catholicism as a teleological narrative of progress towards salvation and its universalist epistemology and between the faith in science and the progress of reason is mirrored in Sociology’s birth as polar opposition to Theology. But for classical sociology at least, Theology remains the “Queen of the Sciences” in the sense of having produced its demonic other in rationalist emancipatory social science.

At a less abstract level of generalization, Martin (1969) has also argued in his essay ‘Some utopian aspects of the concept of secularization’ that the secularization thesis is heavily dependent even in its more recent articulations on a teleological view of history that is not far from Comte’s theory of the three stages. Similarly, he suggests that secularization represents a utopian yearning in the same way that religion can be characterized as the instantiation of utopian desires. He further claims that sociologists of religion reverse both Catholic and Protestant narratives of history:

Secularization has been conceived as based on certain presuppositions of Judaism and Christianity from which important reservations and qualifications have been removed. Thus the attributes of God, such as unity and harmony, are given a mundane reference, and partial meanings in history replaced by total meanings (Martin 1969: 31).

The genealogy presented in this section along with Martin’s insights suggest that secularization itself is primarily a normative construction closely reflecting its historical genesis in the originary differentiation of state and religion that stands at the heart of liberalism’s emergence as a distinct and hegemonic mode of governmentality in the European West. A psychoanalytical social theorist might argue that the wish for the disappearance of religion embodied in the origins of the secularization thesis is a hysterical defense. However, it is sufficient for the purposes of this argument to claim that secularization and Sociology more generally are both constituted through the mirroring of the universalist epistemological claims of Theology and that this historical origin continues to haunt theory in the sociology of religion. It should also be clear that the comparative relegation of the sociology of religion to a position of subservience to social theory (Martin 1969, Stark & Finke 2000) is itself illustrative of a need to deny the tensions between a scientist epistemology and a quasi-salvific critical mission as both of these tendencies originate in the twinfold process of inventing a humanistic knowledge to replace and consummate Theology’s mission and self representation.

Criticisms of the Secularization thesis

It was argued at the outset of this paper that at least two main attacks have been made on the validity of the secularization thesis. First, it is (correctly) held to be largely a normative rather than an empirical theory, though this objection is not usually stated in these terms. Secondly, it is argued that the theory is either contradicted by evidence adding up to a return of the religious, or that it was never true and recent trends have made its empirical falsity even more starkly evident. A variety of empirical evidence is presented against the thesis — for instance its unwarranted generalization from Northern European countries and inapplicability to the United States or the persistence of basic Christian beliefs in survey research among populations in the West. Another line of refutation (also valid) is its historical and cultural specificity. Indeed, attempts to link secularization with modernization theory were particularly inopportune when applied to Islamic Arabia and North Africa where the social bases for secularist ideologies were weak indeed (Kepel 1994).

There are however a number of problems with the evidence adduced in support of the second argument against the validity of secularization. First, the exceptionalism of America and the differences in patterns of secularization count only against the most broad brush theories of secularization — Martin’s 1978 study A General Theory of Secularization is a nuanced and plausible argument which explains such variations. Secondly, surveys which report on the incidence of belief in (for instance) life after death necessarily reveal very little about the degree of importance placed on such beliefs (or often whether they are strongly held or specifically Christian) and it is difficult to see how the persistence of the cultural and symbolic significance of religion per se counts against secularization when it is a theory of differentiation in modernity and of a resultant decline in the social significance of religion. In addition, there are explanations for such survivals (particular in regard to rites of passage rituals and the historic origins of institutions such as marriage) in Martin’s theory which are rarely adequately refuted.

A related objection is the pro-religious spirit which imbues the arguments of anti-secularizationists such as Stark & Finke (2000) despite or because of their arguments for a truly value free sociology of religion instead of the normatively agnostic or rationalist orientation characteristic of theorizing of the style of the secularizationists. The next section will outline Turner’s objections to the theory. Among these is its illicit conflation of several distinguishable elements. Swatos & Christiano (1999: 214) write:

There is no question that in most of the Western world there has been at least sufficient separation of church and state, the primary locus of differentiation, that people are capable both of living their lives apart from direct “interference” on the part of religion and that people may choose among various religions without suffering civil disabilities. If this is what is meant by secularization, then there is no debate over “the secularization thesis”.

Indeed.

It will be the argument of this paper in the concluding section that this is assuredly the most conceptually elegant version of the secularization thesis, but that the thesis remains a normative as much as a scientific thematization, and that debate over the many local instances of dedifferentiation and desecularization in the postmodern West (and the globalizing World) should indeed take place. Such a debate could usefully pay regard to the secularization thesis if it were understood as a normative separation between the religious and the political fundamental to liberal governmentalities. This would be a much more productive line of research than the confusion inherent in the adducing of statistics of belief by American sociologists such as Stark & Finke who are representative of what they claim to be a paradigm shift in (largely US) sociology of religion. To conflate incidences of religious beliefs in various Western nations and the growth of some conservative evangelical denominations in several parts of the world with desecularization more generally is invalid. This is so not least for the reason that the equation of the religious with beliefs that can be articulated is a product of the reconceptualization of religion in early modernity — both from the Protestant rubric of sola scriptura and from the Counter-reformation dogmatism and decatholicisation of the Council of Trent, the Society of Jesus and the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Inquisition. In other words, many of the ‘empirical’ arguments against secularization fall prey to both conceptual confusion and to a reliance on unexamined premises grounded in phenomena which are themselves the result of modern differentiation and the creation of an opposition between the sacred and the profane. What is missed in this style of sociology is the political significance of religion’s enduring potential as a cultural resource for identity formation and of the many associated cultural and political dedifferentiations and desecularizations raging around the Globe in what Kepel (1994) aptly dubs ‘the Revenge of God’.

At a level more concerned with broader issues of social theory and historical sociology in the Weberian vein, Turner (1992: 103-105) has argued that the secularization thesis conflates faith, religion and Christianity and elides the distinction between sacral cultural practices at a popular level and religion as an institutionalized and intellectualized preserve of certain strata and as a social form of domination. Turner also highlights what is now becoming broadly accepted among historians of popular religion in the European Middle Ages — that large aspects of sacral practice and religious belief were intertwined with pagan survivals, magical rituals and that intellectual atheism and for that matter, complete indifference to Christianity were not phenomena that had no existence before the Enlightenment (Thomas 1997, Stark & Finke 2000). This is another instance of Martin’s argument relating to the willingness of sociologists of religion to accept and transform or invert Catholic narratives — in this case of a “golden age of faith”. Turner also comments that the economic aspects of the decline of religion’s hegemonic position are often allowed to elide the political dynamics, an argument supported in a different way by this paper. Issue could be taken with the emphases of aspects of Turner’s arguments, but this paper broadly supports its thrust. However, in the context of the argument regarding the style of theorization now characteristic of American sociologists of religion, Turner can perhaps better be pressed into service to aid a call for a more historically, theoretically and culturally reflexive version of the secularization thesis as a normative element of liberalism and modernity. It is to the painting of a picture of what such a style of theorizing would look like and its adequation to postmodern desecularisations and dedifferentiations that the paper now turns in conclusion.

Secularization, Desecularization and Postmodernity: Secularization as a reflexive normative analytic

Theorists such as Heelas (1998), Bauman (1998), Fenn (2001) and Lyon (1999) all have noted particular mutations of the religious and the social in postmodernity — which can profitably be analyzed using categories of dedifferentiation and desecularization. Kepel (1994) has intriguingly argued based on comprehensive historical studies of Jewish, Islamic, Protestant and Catholic retraditionalizing movements that their emergence can be precisely dated to events around the late 1960s and early 1970s: the very time when studies of political economy and globalization would suggest the financialization of late capitalism began, and the commodity reached new levels of social penetration. Similarly, in terms of cultural developments such as the increased reflexivity of identity and embodiment, theorization and research have pinpointed this era as variously late modern or postmodern (Giddens 1991). The list of features of the modern social which have approached their hyperbolic limits in postmodernity could be extended indefinitely, but perhaps it is simpler to twist Jameson (1991) somewhat and assert that postmodernity is the social dominant of late capitalism.

It is not being argued that diverse aspects of the manifestation of the religious in postmodernity — commodification, the individualization of identity work, the emergence of retraditionalizing projects seeking to reconfigure social relations of gender, sex and sexuality, the sacrality of the body — are causally linked to financial globalization in some unproblematized way or are mere epiphenomenona of recent economic or political reconfigurations. Rather, in the spirit of Weber, what is needed is a style of sociological theorizing that is interpretive, broad in scope and in search of ‘elective affinities’. With Lyon (1996), such thematizations should treat the religious as a category with its own specificity in social theory rather than as derivative of other concepts. However, perhaps paradoxically, this paper will conclude by suggesting that such investigations should be local and limited as well as ambitiously interpretive.

Sociologists of religion are confronted with phenomena such as the growth of postmodern religious movements such as Wicca (Bahnisch 2001). At the same time however, while Wicca has many affinities with broader cultural and social aspects of postmodernity, it is subject to forces of modernist normalization such as the increasing propensity of some American Wiccan groups to form ‘churches’ and adopt ‘seminary’ styles of professional and vocational formation. But it is also subject to an increasing commodification through popular culture, raising different possibilities for its use in identity work (Hopkins 2002).

Another salient example of a postmodern object of study for the sociology of religion is the events of September 11 2001. A modernist sociological analysis of such events might deploy categories derived from modernization theory or suggest that what is at play is an opposition between rationalization and tradition. Such an analysis would, however, be manifestly inadequate as well as close in spirit to ideological fantasies of a “clash of civilizations” which are merely the political and discursive representations of the will to power of American elites. A much more specific and local analysis would instead draw eclectically on Said’s theory of the Other (Said 1995) and the rhetorical mobilization by President Bush, his administration and the media of religious cultural symbols to inscribe the figure of the Other which is the basis for the properly political distinction of friend and enemy and thus of a justification of war (Bahnisch 2002c). Other present day phenomena could be enumerated — for example, the linkages between the resacralisation of the body and radical body modification (Bahnisch 2002b). But what is being suggested here is that the religious manifests in a range of social, cultural and political sites and figurations whose specificity needs analysis, within a broad frame of reflexive conceptualizations of the normative and its opposites (secularization/desecularization and differentiation/dedifferentiation).

Earlier, it was argued that the secularization thesis should be conceived as a normative differentiation in liberal modernity between the political and the religious. To this degree the thesis partakes in the universalism common to predominant styles of sociological theorizing and is also a verse in the utopian gospel of liberalism. Sociology can never be an exact science, and it would probably be of benefit for it to renounce its more universalist aspirations, if not perhaps all its utopian ones. The sociology of religion would benefit from a style of theorizing which combines a rethinking of the political (Bahnisch 2002a) with an attentiveness to the cultural dimensions of religion. This is not a call for collapsing sociology of religion into cultural studies nor for Sociology to abjure the rigour which is its strength nor for a turn to purely “decorative sociology”, but rather for a style of thematization akin to the “New American cultural sociology” (Smith 1998) which is attentive to the mediation and symbolic significance of religious narratives and tropes. Concepts from a nuanced historical sociology such as modernity can be usefully employed and many contemporary manifestations of the eruption of the religious might be measured against a normative tendency to reinstate and reinscribe secularization and differentiation as against local and tendentious desecularizations and dedifferentiations. What is crucial is that sociologists of religion understand that secularization is only a tendency (as is desecularization) and it is a tendency with strong affinities to liberal governmentality. Thus secularization does not just ‘happen’ but rather is a way of constructing the world that constantly needs reinforcement and reinscription by social and political subjects. In short, this paper is a call for Sociology to understand its religious and totalizing origins, but contribute to its own re-enchantment so as better to analyze what is distinctly new and interesting about the religious dimensions of politics, culture and the social at the beginning of the new millennium.