Assess The View Of Secularisation

Assess the views that secularisation has been a feature only of Modern European societies (33 marks).
Secularisation refers to the decline in religious beliefs, practices, power and commitment. Depending on the definition of religion, it can be argued that Modern European societies have undergone a secularisation process. It is difficult to examine to a certain extent how religious people were before and how religious they are in today’s society. The view that secularisation has been a feature of only Modern European societies are arguable as there are many different types and definitions of religion, and also it does not take into account secularisation on a more global scale.
The British Social Attitudes Survey in 1991
showed that while many people claim to believe in god, very few attended church in the UK. According to Bruce, the high point for British church attendance was between 1860 and 1910, when around 28% of the adult population were members. This figure shows that the apparent church attendance from these years was low, suggesting that secularisation was already taking place. However, it has already been identified that many people are still religious, they may just not have the time or level of commitment to attend churches or holy places to pray or worship. A advantage of using official statistics such as those from The British Attitudes Survey, is that they can be easily reached by sociologists and allow them to obtain date from large sample sizes that would be very difficult to do by one’s self. Official statistics are also readily available and relatively inexpensive, so researchers can afford to spend a greater amount of time and money analysing the data that has already been collected. The statistics from The British Social Attitudes Survey may show that secularisation is a feature of a Modern European society such as the UK, although, these figures do not take into account the changing modern world. This includes people not being able to attend church due to new commitments that did not exist in the past.
Rationalisation refers to the process by which rational ways of thinking and acting come to replace religious ones. Many sociologists, including Max Weber, have argued that Western Society such as Modern European ones have undergone a process of rationalisation in the last few centuries. For Weber, the medieval Catholic worldview that dominated Europe saw the world as an ‘enchanted garden’. God and other spiritual beings such as the Devil and Angels were believed to be present and active in this world, changing the course of events through supernatural powers. Humans could attempt to change these beings and forces through prayers, spells, fast or pilgrimages. These ideas and beliefs suggest that rationalisation had taken place within Catholic parts of some Modern European societies. However, the protestant reformation brought a new worldview. Instead of the interventionist God of medieval Catholicism, Protestantism saw God as a transcendent, something that exists above and beyond, or outside, this world. This meant that events were no longer to be explained as the work of unpredictable workings of natural forces. Using science and reason, humans could discover the laws of nature, understand and predict how the world works, there was no longer a need for religious explanations of the world, since the world was no longer an enchanted garden. Therefore in Weber’s view the Protestant Reformation begins the disenchantment of the world, it squeezes out magical and religious ways of thinking and starts off the rationalisation process that leads to the dominance of the rational mode of thought. By rationalisation and disenchantment taking place, this provides evidence that secularisation may be taking place not only within Modern European societies, but also globally due to Martin Luther King being a key leader in starting the process of rationalisation.
Talcott Parsons defines structural differentiation as a process of specialisation that occurs with the development of industrial society. Separate, specialised institutions develop to carry out functions that were previously performed by a single institution. Parsons suggests that this is happening to religion, it dominated pre-industrial society, but with industrialisation it has become a smaller and more specialised institution. According to Parsons, structural differentiation leads to the disengagement of religion. Its functions are transferred to other institutions such as the state and it becomes disconnected from wider society. An example of this is the church losing the influence it once had on education, social welfare and the law. This suggests that people do not look to religion for guidance or to help create and imply rules on society. This may mean that religion is therefore declining in the power and status it once had in modern European societies. Bruce agrees that religion has become separated from wider society and lost many of its former functions. He believes that it has become more privatised and is only available to a certain community or inside homes and family units. This is a negative for religion as it is causing it to decline and therefore many modern societies are becoming more secularised. By structural differentiation taking place, religion is becoming a less important factor within major institutions within society. This causes secularisation to happen because the need for and education of religion is now happening within a smaller institution such as a family unit or the home. This suggests that Religious beliefs are now largely a matter of personal choice and religious institutions have lost much of their influence on wider society.
According to Berger (1969), religious diversity is where instead of there being only one religious organisation and only one interpretation of the faith, there are many. An example of this was in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church held an absolute monopoly where it had no competition from other faiths, beliefs or religions. As a result, everyone lived under a single sacred canopy or set of beliefs shared by all. This gave these beliefs greater plausibility because they had no challengers and the Church’s version of the truth was unquestioned. This allowed the power of the Catholic beliefs to grow and therefore think they were superior to any other belief that may become apparent in the future. Society is thus no longer unified under the single sacred canopy provided by one church. Instead, religious diversity creates a plurality of life worlds, where people’s perceptions of the world vary and where there are different interpretations of the truth. Berger argues that this creates a crisis of credibility for religion. Religious beliefs become relative rather than absolute – what is true or false becomes simple a personal point of view and this creates the possibility of opting out of religion together. The idea of religious diversity therefore allows there to be many religions that people can choose to believe and follow. This makes measuring religion and religious beliefs very difficult and therefore may suggest secularisation, especially within in modern societies in Modern Europe.
Secularisation in the United States of America has been measured in several different ways.
One of these was the showing the decline in church attendance. Wilson found that in 1962, 45% of Americans attended church on Sundays. However, he argued that churchgoing in America was more an expression of the ‘American way of life’ than of deeply held religious beliefs. Kirk Hadaway was working with a team of researchers employed by major churches in 1993; found that this figure did not match the churches’ own attendance statistics. If 40% of Americans were going to church, which was figure found by an opinion survey, the churches would be full - but they were not. This shows that in America, religion was part of daily life but not in the same way of that of ‘religious people’ in Modern Europe. Therefore in America, church attendance was instead part of a daily routine. This meant that when trying to analyse the secularisation of the country, church attendance could not be a way of showing the religiosity of America. Bruce concludes by saying that a stable rate of self-reported church attendance of about 40% has masked a decline in attendance across the United States. The widening gap may be due to the fact that it is still seen as socially desirable or normative to go to church, so people will have stopped going but said that they do attend in a survey. The statistics found from both sociologists individual research and self-reported opinion polls show vaguely how secularisation
has occurred within the United States of America, and therefore show how it is not just a feature of Modern European societies. This supports the religious market theory proposed by Stark and Bainbridge.
Norris and Inglehart reject the religious market theory on the grounds that it only applies to America and fails to explain the variations in religiosity between different societies. They argue that the reason for variations in religiosity between societies is not different degrees of religious choice, but different degrees of existential security. Religion meets a need for security, and therefore societies where people feel secure have a low level of demand for religion. This suggests that poor societies have high levels of insecurity and thus have high levels of religiosity, whereas in rich societies people have a higher standard of living which means a greater sense of security, therefore lower levels of religiosity. This suggests that the demand for religion if not constant. Norris and Inglehart provide the idea that global population growth undermines the trend towards secularisation. As a result, while rich countries are becoming more secular, the majority of the world is becoming more religious. Vasquez accepts that Norris and Inglehart offer a valuable explanation of different levels of religious participation not only in Europe and in the USA, but globally. However he makes two criticisms of their theory. The sociologists only use quantitative data about income levels; they don’t examine peoples own definitions of ‘existential security’. Vasquez argues that qualitative data is also needed. He also suggests that Norris and Inglehart only see religion as a negative response to deprivation. They ignore the positive reasons people have for religious participation and the appeal that some types of religion have for the wealthy. The findings found by Norris and Inglehart suggest some strong reasons for secularisation within certain social groups, but the criticisms from Vasquez raise the issue that they only look for the negatives. Overall, the information shows that in most Modern European Societies, secularisation may happen due to the development of these societies being developed.
Grace Davie is one sociologist who argues against secularisation theory.
In her view, religion is not declining but simply taking a different, more privatised form. For example, people no longer go to church because they feel they have to or because it is ‘respectable’ to do so. Although churchgoing has declined, this is simply because attendance is now a matter of personal choice rather than the obligation it used to be. As a result, we now have believing without belonging – where people hold religious beliefs but don’t go to church. Thus, the decline of traditional religion is matched by the growth of a new form of religion. Danielle Hervieu-Leger continues the theme of personal choice and believing without belonging. She agrees that there has been a dramatic decline in institutional religion within Europe, with fewer people attending church in most countries. This is partly because of what she calls cultural amnesia. Nowadays, we have largely lost the religion that used to be handed down from generation to generation, because few parents no longer teach their children their beliefs or religion. Instead, parents today let their children decide for themselves as individuals what they want to believe. As a result, young people no longer inherit a fixed religious identity and they are ignorant of traditional religion. However, individual consumerism has replaced collective tradition. People today now feel they have a choice as consumers of religion; therefore they have
become spiritual shoppers. This suggests that religion has become a spiritual journey in which we choose the elements we want to explore and the groups we wish to join. As a result of these trends, religion no longer acts as the source of collective identity that it once did. However, Hervieu-Leger notes that religion does continue to have some influence on society’s values. This suggests that secularisation of solid religion is occurring, but the idea that spirituality is growing throughout Modern European societies and globally suggests that a new type of “religion” may be increasing. Therefore secularisation may evolve and decline.
In conclusion, secularisation is occurring if you want to measure the decline in beliefs of true religions and their past or current followers. But on the other hand, secularisation may not be occurring in more modern societies due to ideas such as spiritual shopping for Danielle Hervieu-Leger. When monitoring whether societies are becoming secular, more factors and detail needs to be applied due to the many types of ‘religion’ and ‘faiths’ that are growing a developing not only in Modern European Societies, but also on a Global scale.