ABSTRACT
The theme of secularization haunts both sociology and classical Marxism. Nineteenth-century social theorists as far removed as Friedrich Engels and Ferdinand Tönnies 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. The whole ethos of capitalist culture (with its emphasis on rapid social and technical change, the prominence of exchange relations, and the emerging personal anonymity of the metropolis) was thought to be inimicable to the very roots of Christianity. Max Weber, for whom the rationalization of the life-world remained a central question (Hennis 1987), assumed that the destruction of both traditional and charismatic elements in social relations would lead eventually to the privatization of all religious practice and belief; religion would have to be played pianissimo within the private subjectivity of everyday relations. For Weber’s colleague Ernst Troeltsch (1931) the historic contradiction between the sect and the Church which has characterized the institutional history of Christendom since its foundations would be eroded by the development of capitalism, creating a context in which a universal Church simply could not exist. The future for Troeltsch therefore would be one in which personal forms of mysticism were the only possible religious life style. For Georg Simmel (1968), the cultural and personal modernism which was an essential feature of urban life in capitalism would also undermine the historic framework within which religious institutions had flourished (Frisby 1984).
