ABSTRACT
This chapter helps one to understand how critical secularization is as a necessary preparation for and accompaniment to any argument advanced for the uniqueness of our civilization regarding a universalizing process. Secularization has several aspects: according to the theologian Harvey Cox, it involves the disenchantment of nature, the desacralization of politics, and the deconsecration or relativizing of human values. The cultural historian Larry Shiner has developed a five-part schema of secularization: the decline of religion, conformity with the world, the desacralization of the world, the disengagement of society from religion, and the transposition of beliefs and patterns of behavior from the religious to the secular sphere. Although secularization admittedly has generated some extreme products of its own—witness Russian communism or twentieth-century fascism—the concern of this chapter has been the necessary adhering of the secular to the universalizing process, allowing the process to neutralize certain cultural peculiarities nurtured by religion.
