Secularization | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Secularization is a concept important to science, technology, and ethics, because it encapsulates influential general theories about how moral influence may be exercised over and by science and technology under different historical and social conditions.

Most societies incorporate practices, beliefs, and institutions that correspond roughly to the domain of religion in modern Western cultures. These religious features presuppose the existence of non-human entities with powers of agency (i.e., gods) or the existence of impersonal powers endowed with moral purposes (i.e., karma). Moreover they generally assume that these non-human agents or powers have an impact upon human affairs. Secularization is a process by which religion comes to have decreasing importance in society along several dimensions.

First there is a decline in the status, prestige, and power of persons, practices and institutions associated primarily with religion. Second there is a decline in the importance of religion for the exercise of non-religious roles and institutions, including those associated with politics and the economy. Third there is a decline in the number of persons who take religion seriously and the degree of seriousness with which those involved in religion continue to take it. Secularization is highly correlated with the extent of industrialization in a society and with the development of scientific practices and institutions. But there is serious disagreement regarding whether secularization is largely a consequence of the growth of science and industry; whether science, industrialization, and secularization are relatively independent features of a more general process of modernization; or whether secularization is a prerequisite rather than a consequence of the growing importance of science in a society.

Though he did not use the term, Auguste Comte (1798–1857) offered the first major theory of secularization in articulating what he called his law of three stages in his Positive Philosophy, developed in the 1820s. According to Comte every domain of knowledge passes through three progressive stages—a religious phase in which aspects of the universe are anthropomorphized (that is, human attributes including will and agency are projected onto non-human entities), a metaphysical phase in which impersonal forces (such as gravitational or electrical forces) are presumed to cause effects in the world, and a positive or fully scientific stage in which abstract causal explanations of events are abandoned in favor of general descriptive laws. Within Comte's system the rise of more reliable scientific knowledge drives out inferior religious belief; so secularization is a natural and necessary consequence of the rise of science. Even some sociologists of religion at the end of the twentieth century, such as Rodney Stark, retain a strong element of this positivist vision.

A near mirror image of the positivist view combines elements from the works of Early Modern historians such as Stephen McKnight and modern historians such as Howard Murphy. In their view Christian Humanism in the Renaissance focused Christian concerns on the amelioration of the human condition, encouraging the growth of science for the purpose of manipulating nature to serve human ends. Such views were strongly supported by Tomasso Campanella (1568–1639) in Italy, Johann Andreae 1586–1654> in the Germanies, and by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in England. Later, when many intellectuals became disillusioned with organized religion because of the religious wars on the continent or because of the failure of institutionalized religion to promote causes of social justice, they turned to science as an alternative source of values that could improve peoples lives. From this perspective, science in Europe was nurtured within a religious context and then became the beneficiary of secularizing trends that emerged first within the Christian community itself.

A third relatively simple explanation of secularization derives from an evolutionary understanding of religion prominent among anthropologists such as Roy Rappaport and David Sloan Wilson. From this perspective religions serve primarily to establish group cohesion and social solidarity by promoting altruistic rather than individualistic behaviors. The growth of commercial economies tended to break down cooperative tendencies within societies, to promote in-group competition and individualism, and simultaneously to encourage inter-group cooperation and culture contact. As a consequence the local authority of religion was undermined both internally, as egoistic, liberal, ideology increasingly governed forms of behavior, and from the outside, as it became clear that many varieties of religion existed in other societies without subverting the functioning of those societies.

Most social scientists at the beginning of the twenty-first century accept variants of a more complex account of secularization developed by Peter Berger and David Martin that grew out of the ideas of Max Weber (1864–1920). Within this account there are at least three interacting strands. One is a rationalizing trend that seems to emerge in monotheistic religions, especially those which, like Christianity, incorporate a transcendent God and therefore encourage attempts to understand the natural world without reference to specific instances of divine agency, and likewise grant human agency a predominant role in human affairs. Science and technology thus become consequences of the implicit rationality of transcendent monotheism. This rationalizing strand would not necessarily by itself significantly reduce the authority of religion, but interacting with the others it does.

The second strand is a socioeconomic strand that begins from the Weberian claim that the protestant ethic promoted the rise of industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism in turn encouraged the division of labor and promoted social differentiation into classes, breaking down the social homogeneity of pre-modern society and creating social and cultural diversity. The division of labor also transformed many social roles, which had once had important religious components, into specialized secular roles. Thus educators, health care professionals, government functionaries, and other professional groups developed specialized knowledge and institutions, creating new and non-religious sources of power and authority. Furthermore the breakdown of social homogeneity undermined the sense of communally shared values inculcated by religious practices and institutions.

Finally the Protestant Reformation promoted a sense of individualism that created a tendency for religious schism, the proliferation of competing sects, and a sense of religious relativism that was only exacerbated by culture contact with non-Christian cultures. One consequence of this relativism was the separation of Church and State, which found its most explicit separation in the first amendment to the U. S. Constitution. All of these tendencies—toward rationalization, science, and technological development; toward social differentiation and diversity; and toward religious pluralism—promoted the declining importance of religion relative to secular factors in promoting and controlling human activities. That is they all contributed to secularization.

In spite of such theories of secularization, it is clear that many issues associated with twenty-first century science and technology—from abortion to cloning, from nuclear weapons to internet piracy—are subject, even in such ostensibly secular societies as that of the United States, to religious interest-group influence. Thus the extent to which secularization adequately describes the general trend that shapes the context in which scientific, technological, and ethical interactions occur remains open to debate. There are even some proponents of cultural diversity and advocates of alternatives to modern European and North American industrial culture, who admit the importance of secularization, but who oppose the hegemony of the modern science and technology of those cultures and argue for a re-enchantment or re-sacralization of the world. These persons point to such earth-centered spiritual traditions as those of Native Americans, as models that might promote a healthier and ultimately a more sustainable science and technology.

Comte, Auguste;; Modernization;; Urbanization;; Weber, Max.

Berger, Peter. (1969). The Social Reality of Religion. London: Faber and Faber.

Berman, Morris. (1981). The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Influential updated Weberian account of secularization.

Bruce, Steve. (2002). God Is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell. Argues that science is more consequence than a cause of secularization, the chief driving force of which is cultural contact and a consequent awareness of the relativity of values.

Martin, David. (1978). A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Blackwell.

McKnight, Stephen A. (1989). Sacralizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of Modernity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Strong argument for the religious sources of modern science and, indirectly, of secularization.

Murphy, Howard. (1955). "The Ethical Revolt Against Christian Orthodoxy in Early Victorian England." American Historical Review (July): 800–817. Makes the argument that many nineteenth-century intellectuals turned to science as a source of values only as a consequence of a crisis of religious faith, rather than as a prelude to religious crisis.

Rappaport, Roy A. (1999). Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. One of many evolutionary accounts of the survival value of religion. This one emphasizes the role of religion in encouraging in-group truth telling.

Stark, Rodney. (1963). "On the Incompatibility of Religion and Science." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 3: 3–20. Updated version of the traditional positivist argument that superior scientific knowledge drives out inferior religious faith.

This is the complete article, containing 1,444 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page).