Secularization

Now that we have begun to understand religious organizations, it is important to understand a process which is both changing their relationships with wider society and changing the organizations themselves: the process we call ‘secularization’. The term ‘secularization’ has been used in a variety of ways by those who

research organizations. Benson and Dorsett (1971) use it to express a religious organization’s positive involvement in the wider world; Norman (2002) and Brannon (1971) use it to refer to religious organizations abandoning their distinctive theological and ethical values in the face of a changing society; Callum Brown (2001) uses it to refer to a recent radical change in the way we see our lives, distancing us from Christian symbols; and there is a long history of the term’s use as a description of a long-standing social process going back into the nineteenth century, a process which has distanced science’s discourse and institutions from discourse within religious organizations (Bruce 1992; Martin 1969; 1978). It is in this last sense that I shall be using the term, for this is the sense which is about what is happening to religious organizations and to their relationships with the society in which they are set; but I shall also occasionally use it to refer to consequences for religious organizations of the wider social process. It is important to study secularization because it is having far-reaching

effects on religious and faith-based organizations and on Western society as a whole. Modernization has given us a diverse moral and cultural landscape, religious practice has declined (Bruce 1995), and a diverse secularization has occurred, distancing religious organizations, language and behaviours from all other organizations, language-uses and behaviour-patterns (ibid.) – something which seems not yet to have happened to the same extent in the USA (Davie 2002; Demerath and Williams 1992) but which is now beginning to happen there too (Gill 2003: 210). As Putnam has pointed out, lower membership of religious organizations and a more privatized religion is giving us ‘the devoutly observant and the entirely unchurched’ (Putnam 2000: 75), and neither group comprises the kind of people who contribute much to social capital:

So secularization isn’t simply a matter for the churches. There has been much debate as to whether secularization is mainly a change

in prevailing ideas, mainly a collapse in religious practice, or mainly a change in relationships between institutions. Hugh McLeod believes that the most important aspect of the secularization

process is a religious change brought about by a flow of ideas common to Western Europe (McLeod 1974: 285), and Owen Chadwick has charted the change of attitudes caused by this process as it affected this country in the nineteenth century. By 1900, most people believed that miracles do not happen, people were honoured for sincerity rather than chided for lack of faith, no longer could religious facts escape historical study, Christians began to know that Jesus was a man, and God was distanced from the details of disaster (Chadwick 1975: 17, 37, 194, 225, 262; McLeod 1981: 93; MacIntyre 1967: 24ff.). According to Chadwick, there is no unitary phenomenon, but he still believes it right to use an ‘umbrella term’ (‘The historian often has to use words to describe large processes’) and that ‘something happened to religious people which affected their attitude to the world . . . We may have less sense of providence in our lives’ (Chadwick 1975: 226, 258). Peter Berger is less tentative. The presecularized society is one in which

‘religion legitimates social institutions by bestowing upon them an ultimately valid ontological status, that is, by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference’. Pluralism creates subsocieties, each with its own plausibility structures, and ‘secularization’ follows: ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols’ (Berger 1969: 33, 50; cf. Bell 1997: 199). In his recent The Death of Christian Britain, Callum Brown writes: ‘It took

several centuries . . . to convert Britain to Christianity, but it has taken less than forty [years] for the country to forsake it.’ Whether and how the religious practices which Brown’s book is about relate to Christian faith is a complex question, and whether Britain has ever been ‘Christian Britain’ is an equally complex one, but it is clear from his data that there was a turning-point in 1963, since when children have largely ceased to be baptized in Church, marriages have occurred less in Church, churchgoing has fallen (except amongst minority ethnic groups), and Sunday Schools have declined. Since 1963,

What the book in fact relates is the collapse of a set of moral presuppositions and a set of practices – and, of course, an important religious practice is going

to church. Voluntary activity has been in decline since the end of the Victorian era (Yeo 1976), and it is possible to regard a decline in church-going as one instance of this trend. Robin Gill offers another (or rather, an additional) explanation: that the Victorians built and rebuilt too many churches in rural Britain, that twentieth-century city centres became depopulated and lost their church-going middle classes, that the result was empty churches: and empty churches are not welcoming so they emptied even more (Gill 2003). It looks as if there are several reasons for a decline in churchgoing – and

there are reasons for pauses in that decline: African immigration has helped to halt the decline in South London, but this will clearly be a temporary phenomenon. But, whatever the causes, decline is what is happening, especially in rural areas. Congregations are their members, and congregations’ memberships are their only means of activity in their communities, so whilst for a while smaller numbers might be able to generate similar levels of engagement, ageing and smaller congregations in many communities mean that religious organizations will not relate so strongly to other social institutions. So secularization is a change of attitude and belief and a decline in

churchgoing – but it is also a change in the relationships between institutions, and we shall see later in this chapter that my own work on the history of the South London Industrial Mission (SLIM; see Torry 1990) has shown that important links between the Church and secular institutions disintegrated during the 1960s, and so to locate a process which we might call ‘secularization’ in the 1960s seems reasonable, provided we recognize that we are talking about a set of attitudes and institutional involvements which are not all there is to be said about ‘Christianity’. During the Second World War, which was when SLIM was born, religious

institutions and symbols were frequently made welcome in industry and commerce, but by the mid-1960s the welcome was waning. As Bryan Wilson puts it more generally: ‘The boards of large impersonally organized corporations find a place on their agenda for market research, but one may safely speculate that none of them accord time to the discussion of the religious implications of business activity’ (Wilson 1982a: 39). Religion is of diminished relevance to the consciousness of individuals and to the activity of institutions, and these two parts of the process of secularization belong together and reinforce each other (ibid.: 54). There is still much religious belief, and some of those men and women sitting around the boardroom table may well be practising Christians attempting to put their faith into practice; but individually and corporately they are ‘secularized’ by a ‘process by which religious institutions, actions and consciousness lose their social significance’ (ibid.: 150). The ‘social space’ in which people operate renders their religious beliefs irrelevant (Wilson 1976: 6). Underlying the whole secularization process is ‘the irreconcilability of the suppositions of faith in the supernatural and its arbitrary unexplained authority, and the suppositions that underlie all other

activities and operations in which modern men engage in their everyday lives’ (ibid.: 13). Wilson suggests that institutions are of greater social significance than are

private beliefs and that, for the sociologist, religion is primarily an institutional phenomenon (Wilson 1966: xviii). By making these choices, he renders ‘common religion’ irrelevant to the definition of ‘secularization’ (which is unnecessarily to restrict the debate) and concentrates our attention on institutions (which he is right to do). Organized religion is on the decline, the Churches are becoming service agencies alongside other autonomous agencies which have taken over many of the Church’s former functions such as medicine, education and social welfare, clergy are no longer an important source of information or of ethical standards (industrial chaplains are no longer regarded as industrial relations experts, as they once were), and the Church reflects a moral consensus rather than defining it (Wilson 1966: 15, 18, 41, 65). (As we shall see, SLIM’s history reflects the changing ethics of industry’s management.) Secularization has now moved out from the economic sphere, where it began, and has gradually stripped the Church of its social influence, leaving us with a religion which is ‘public rhetoric and private virtue’ (Berger 1969: 133). Callum Brown’s view is that the Reformation, the Enlightenment and

modern science have neither constituted nor caused the death of Christianity in this country; that people continue to believe in God, in the efficacy of prayer, and in life after death; and that the major change is that people now believe without belonging. This is true; but there seems also to have been a radical change in the way we think, not just in what we do, and Brown recognizes this when he writes: ‘From the 1960s a suspicion of creeds arose that quickly took the form of a rejection of Christian tradition and all formulaic construction of the individual’, and the result is that ‘Britain is showing the world how religion as we have known it can die’ (Brown 2001: 193, 198). Christian tradition and the way we think have simply parted company. No longer can religion provide an integrated set of definitions of reality which can serve as a common universe of meaning for society and its institutions; instead, it forms ‘subworlds’ and creates sectarian groups which compete for customers (Berger 1969: 133, 137). If industry is one such subworld, and religious organizations are another, then we should expect that denominations will find it difficult to justify paying for an industrial mission which does not serve the Church as an institution. In 1969, David Martin questioned the notion of ‘secularization’ and initiated

a widespread debate. He suggested that there are complex interrelations between the religious and the secular (Martin 1969: 4), that empirical methods are widespread only amongst intellectuals, that religious institutions thrive or decline for a variety of reasons, and that a variety of ‘secularizations’ occur and that the concept ‘secularization’ cannot be defined in a unitary manner (just as

‘religion’ cannot be). ‘Secularization’ includes ‘a large number of discrete elements loosely put together in an intellectual hold-all’ (ibid.: 4, 16, 57, 2). On the basis of the discussion above, during which the notion of

‘secularization’ has included a loss of religious belief, the privatization of belief, a decline in churchgoing, and a loss of ecclesiastical influence in relation to other social institutions, I can sympathize with Martin’s point. ‘Secularization’ is not ‘a more or less unified syndrome of characteristics subject to an irreversible master-trend’ (ibid.: 4). But by 1978 Martin had thought again, and published A General Theory of

Secularization, in which he makes a number of generalizations whilst at the same time detailing the wide variety of characteristics created by differing social contexts. He lists a number of factors which lead to secularization: urban concentration; heavy industry and predominantly proletarian populations (leading to decline in religious institutions); geographical and social mobility (which erode stable religious communities); differentiated societies (leading to pluralism in religion and to the Church becoming differentiated from other institutions such as those providing education and welfare); and a parallel differentiation between the religious and other aspects of the individual’s life (leading to the disintegration of institutional religion). ‘In the modern situation . . . all organic solidarities, whether of nation or religion or class, are partly undermined’, and the most general tendency is towards ‘an apathy which retires from explicit institutional religion’ (Martin 1978: 3, 83, 92). Jeffrey Cox, in his detailed study of religious practice in Lambeth from 1870

to 1930 (Cox 1982), agrees with Martin’s warnings about the concept of ‘secularization’, but chides him for developing a ‘general theory’ which he believes has become a substitute for enquiry about the causes of decline in religious institutions, the kind of enquiry which he conducted into Lambeth’s churches. (Gill’s similar enquiry into Victorian church-building led him to conclude that the Victorians built too many churches, that they were therefore half-empty, that therefore they weren’t welcoming, and that secularization was the result; in Bruce 1992: 90-117.) A similar caveat is entered by Mary Douglas (Douglas 1970: 36, 40f.; cf. Bell 1997: 200) who points out that the Nuer and Dinka tribes have for centuries exhibited what we might call secular trends. Whilst agreeing with Martin and Cox that we must take care not to invent a unitary syndrome out of a diversity of tendencies, I believe that we can still link together the trends which Martin lists and that we can legitimately use the ‘umbrella term’ (Chadwick 1975: 266) ‘secularization’ to refer to them. Grace Davie (2002) offers a different perspective: questioning the notion of

secularization, pointing out that Europe is unusual, that other parts of the world are far from secular, and that there might be particular reasons for Europe turning its back on particular forms of religion – though not on religion in general, for people remain remarkably spiritual in outlook. But the most problematic areas are those of private religious beliefs and individual

religious practice. Private ‘common religion’ is difficult to quantify and evaluate, and it is very difficult to know whether or not it has altered. Religious practice, as Cox suggests, is affected by a variety of historical circumstances, is difficult to quantify, and in the USA it is strong and still affects society at many points (Cox 1982: 12; cf. Bruce 1995: vii). This is a good reason for concentrating on the more visible institutional aspects of the diverse secularization phenomenon, particularly as institutional involvements are as likely to affect individual beliefs and behaviour as they are to affect organizational belonging. Accordingly, I take ‘secularization’ to mean: ‘The drawing apart and declining integration of religious and secular institutions and their personnel’, thus making ‘secularization’ part of the process of diversification and change rather than a process somehow separate from everything else which is going on in society. Catherine Bell offers a clear description of the consequences: ‘Underlying many of the most nuanced discussions is the idea that secularism [a term which here means the result of the process of secularization] entails basic social processes in which major societal institutions are differentiated from each other and no longer represent the same values or work together to provide an overall coherence to social life’ (Bell 1997: 198; cf. Martin 1995).