The Hedgehog Review Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture
A F T E R S E C U L A R I Z AT I O N
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The Hedgehog Review Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture
A F T E R S E C U L A R I Z AT I O N
Spring & Summer 2006 / Volume Eight / Numbers One & Two
This issue is co-sponsored by the Center on Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia. Copyright © 2006 Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture ISSN 1527-9677 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Editor. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Cover image © iStockphoto.com/Gregory Witczka All statements of opinion or fact are the responsibility of the author alone and not of
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Contents INTRODUCTION
After Secularization / 5 E ssa y s
Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective / 7 José Casanova Is Europe an Exceptional Case? / 23 Grace Davie Secularization and the Impotence of Individualized Religion / 35 Steve Bruce Challenging Secularization Theory: The Growth of “New Age” Spiritualities of Life / 46 Paul Heelas In Search of Certainties: The Paradoxes of Religiosity in Societies of High Modernity / 59 Danièle Hervieu-Léger Sellers or Buyers in Religious Markets? The Supply and Demand of Religion / 69 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart French Secularism and the “Islamic Veil Affair” / 93 Talal Asad Secularity without Secularism: The Best Political Position for Contemporary Jews / 107 David Novak American Religion and European Anti-Americanism / 116 Thomas Albert Howard Islam in the West or Western Islam? The Disconnect of Religion and Culture / 127 Olivier Roy Secularization, European Identity, and “The End of the West” / 133 Slavica Jakelić Islam in European Publics: Secularism and Religious Difference / 140 Nilüfer Göle
R eport from the field
Secularization in the Global South: The Case of Ethiopia / 146 Wilson N. Brissett I N T E RV I E W
An Interview with Peter Berger / 152 Charles T. Mathewes REVIEWS
A Review of Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism / 162 Christopher McKnight Nichols A Review of David Martin’s On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory / 167 Emily Raudenbush BIBLIOGRAPHIC REVIEW
Secularization: A Bibliographic Review / 170 Kevin M. Schultz
After Secularization
T
he idea that religion gradually ceases to be the guiding authority in the lives of individuals and in societies as they become more modern has roots in the intellectual and institutional heritage of the Enlightenment. But even in Enlightenment thought, there was never just one understanding of the relationship between the progress of humanity and the future of religion. Only a few prophets of religion’s decline—Karl Marx being the most notable among them—dared to predict that the world of the future would be a world without religion. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, did not speak of, or look forward to, the end of religion as such, but predicted that human enlightenment would be accompanied by a rational form of religious knowledge and experience. The history of the idea of secularization, in other words, has been a complex one and has involved a number of different, nuanced views. While the idea of secularization was not the property of the social sciences alone, the full embrace of a causal relationship between progress and religious decline happened precisely in the social sciences, which took this assertion to its theoretical heights in the form of secularization theory. The traditional version of secularization theory involved a two-fold claim: that modernization is a universal process that has similar features everywhere and that secularization is inseparable from modernization. From its earliest days, this secularization theory was thus inseparable from the sociological conceptualization of modernity. The decline of religion as a disenchantment of the world, Max Weber declared a century ago, was one of the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and constitutive of the general processes of modernity. Due to this intimate connection between the notions of secularization and modernity, the crisis of secularization theory occurred not only because of empirical evidence that came in the form of religious revivals around the world, but also because of a problem in its own conceptual foundation. As a result, for almost two decades now, social scientists have been divided into two camps: those who want to discard secularization theory altogether and those who want to preserve some part of it for limited use. Many agree that secularization theory still works (only) in Western Europe. Others suggest that secularization has occurred in the United States as well, not simply as a result of the general processes of modernization—industrialization and urbanization—but as a consequence of the actions of concrete historical agents. On the other side of the Atlantic, Paul Heelas proposes that, due to the rise of New Age spirituality in Western Europe, it is not only secularization but sacralization, too, that characterizes European religious life. Still others, who view secularization as a process of individualization and privatization of religion, read this New Age spirituality as ultimate proof of secularization processes.
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The claims in the secularization debate very much depend on one’s definition of both religion and secularization. Attempting to introduce some conceptual clarity and empirical accuracy into the debate, José Casanova suggests that secularization should be thought of as a three-fold phenomenon—the decline of religion, the differentiation of the secular spheres, and the privatization of religion. He is right, of course, but there are other ways in which secularization could be conceptualized; for example, as a weakening in the authority of the faith that is still embraced or as the re-symbolization of ancient creeds in ways that accommodate the modern world. Each one of these subtheses should be empirically and separately studied in the context of concrete historical cases. Arguably the most important realization that came out of the secularization debate was that the questions of what religion is and what it ought to be are mutually intertwined in our contemporary thinking of religion, just as they were in the times when secularization theory was born. The disentanglement of these two questions is vital if we are to see that what is at stake in the secularization debate is not just the destiny of the social sciences, but, much more importantly, our appreciation of the place of religion in the contemporary world. How are we to understand the different roles that religion plays in different societies and at the same time preserve our ability to conceptualize this as a problem? How should we approach the relationship between modernity and secularity while being aware that there is no single modernity, only multiple modernities? How might we understand secularization in a time and world after secularization? Religion today has not only survived the modern world, but even thrives in some senses. That said, as Peter Berger observed some decades ago, “something still happened.” The old secularization theory may not explain exactly what did happen, but it is pressing that we continue to try to make sense of it all. Given the nature of events unfolding in the world, much is at stake in how we address such questions.
—T.H.R.
essa y s
Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective José Casanova
O
ver a decade ago, I suggested that in order to speak meaningfully of “secularization,” we needed to distinguish between three different connotations:
a) Secularization as the decline of religious beliefs and practices in modern societies, often postulated as a universal, human, developmental process. This is the most recent but by now the most widespread usage of the term in contemporary academic debates on secularization, although it remains unregistered in most dictionaries of most European languages.
b) Secularization as the privatization of religion, often understood both as a general modern historical trend and as a normative condition, indeed as a precondition for modern liberal democratic politics.1 c) Secularization as the differentiation of the secular spheres (state, economy, science), usually understood as “emancipation” from religious institutions and norms. This is the core component of the classic theories of secularization, which is related to the original etymological-historical meaning of the term within medieval Christendom. As indicated by every dictionary of every Western European language, it refers to the
1
My book, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), put into question the empirical as well as the normative validity of the privatization thesis.
José Casanova is Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he has taught since 1987. He has published widely in the areas of sociological theory, religion and politics, transnational migration, and globalization. His most important work, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994), has appeared in multiple languages. He is presently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
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transfer of persons, things, meanings, etc., from ecclesiastical or religious to civil or lay use, possession, or control.2 Maintaining this analytical distinction, I argued, should allow for the examination of the validity of the three propositions independently of each other and thus refocus the often fruitless secularization debate into comparative historical analysis that could account for different patterns of secularization, in all three meanings of the term, across societies and civilizations. Yet the debate between European and American sociologists of religion remains unabated. For the European defenders of the traditional theory, the secularization of Western European societies appears as an empirically irrefutable fait accompli.3 But Europeans tend to switch back and forth between the traditional meaning of secularization and the more recent meaning that points to the progressive, and, since the 1960s, drastic and assumedly irreversible decline of religious beliefs and practices among the European population. European sociologists tend to view the two meanings of the term as intrinsically related because they view the two realities—the decline in the societal power and significance of religious institutions, and the decline of religious beliefs and practices among individuals—as structurally related components of general processes of modernization. American sociologists of religion tend to restrict the use of the term secularization to its narrower, more recent meaning of the decline of religious beliefs and practices among individuals. It is not so much that they question the secularization of society, but simply that they take it for granted as an unremarkable fact. The United States, they assume, was already born as a modern secular society. Yet they see no evidence of a progressive decline in the religious beliefs and practices of the American people. If anything, the historical evidence points in the opposite direction of progressive churching of the American population since independence.4 Consequently, many American sociologists of religion tend to discard the theory of secularization, or at least its postulate of the progressive decline of religious beliefs and practices, as a European myth, once they are able to show that in the United States none of the usual “indicators” of secularization, such as church attendance, frequency of prayer, belief in God, etc., evince any longterm declining trend.5
2
“Secularization,” The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Oxford: Elsevier, 2001) 13,786–91.
3
Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
4
Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Andrew M. Greeley, Religious Change in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
5
Rodney Stark, “Secularization, R.I.P.,” Sociology of Religion 60.3 (1999): 249–73; Rodney Stark and William S. Bainbridge, The Future of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
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The new American paradigm has turned the European model of secularization on its head.6 In the extreme “supply-side” version of the rational choice theory of religious markets, American sociologists use the American evidence to postulate a general structural relationship between disestablishment or state deregulation, open and free competitive and pluralistic religious markets, and high levels of individual religiosity. What was until now the American exception attains normative status, while the previous European rule is now demoted to being a deviation from the American norm. The low levels of religiosity in Europe are now supposedly explained by the persistence of either the religious establishment or highly regulated monopolistic or oligopolistic religious markets.7 But the internal comparative evidence within Europe does not support the basic tenets of the American theory. Monopolistic situations in Poland and Ireland are linked to persistently high levels of religiosity, while increasing liberalization and state deregulation elsewhere are often accompanied by persistent rates of religious decline.8 An impasse has been reached in the debate. The traditional An impasse has been reached theory of secularization works relatively well for Europe, but in the debate. not for the United States. The American paradigm works relatively well for the U.S., but not for Europe. Neither can offer a plausible account of the internal variations within Europe. Most importantly, neither works very well for other world religions and other parts of the world. Thus, in order to overcome the impasse and surmount the fruitless debate, one needs to make clear the terminological and theoretical disagreements. But most importantly, one needs to historicize and contextualize all categories, refocus the attention beyond Europe and North America, and adopt a more global perspective.9 While the decline and privatization sub-theses have undergone numerous critiques and revisions in the last fifteen years, the understanding of secularization as a single process of functional differentiation of the various institutional spheres or sub-systems of modern societies remains relatively uncontested in the social sciences, particularly within European sociology. Yet one should ask whether it is appropriate to subsume the multiple and diverse historical patterns of differentiation and fusion of the various
6
R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 98.5 (1993): 1,044–93.
7
Theodore Caplow, “Contrasting Trends in European and American Religion,” Sociological Analysis 46.2 (1985): 101–8; Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone, “A Supply-Side Interpretation of the ‘Secularization’ of Europe,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33 (1994): 230–52; Roger Finke, “The Consequences of Religious Competition: Supply-Side Explanations for Religious Change,” Rational Choice Theory and Religion: Summary and Assessment, ed. L. A. Young (New York: Routledge, 1997) 45–65.
8
Steve Bruce, “The Supply-Side Model of Religion: The Nordic and Baltic States,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39.1 (2000): 32–46.
9
José Casanova, “Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: Towards a Global Perspective,” Predicting Religion, ed. Grace Davie, Paul Heelas, and Linda Woodhead (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 17–29.
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institutional spheres (that is, church and state, state and economy, economy and science) that one finds throughout the history of modern Western societies into a single teleological process of modern functional differentiation. One should further ask the extent to which it is possible to dissociate the analytical reconstructions of the historical processes of differentiation of Western European societies from general theories of modernity that postulate secular differentiation as a normative project or global requirement for all “modern” societies. In other words, can the theory of secularization as a particular theory of European historical developments be dissociated from general theories of global modernization? Can there be a non-Western, non-secular modernity or are the self-definitions of modernity inevitably tautological insofar as secular differentiation is precisely what defines a society as “modern”? I fully agree with Talal Asad that the secular “should not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually secular are inextricably emancipates itself from the controlling power of ‘religion’ and thus achieves the latter’s relocation.”10 In the historibound together and mutually cal processes of European secularization, the religious and condition each other. the secular are inextricably bound together and mutually condition each other. Asad has shown how “the historical process of secularization effects a remarkable ideological inversion…. For at one time ‘the secular’ was a part of a theological discourse [saeculum],” while later “the religious” is constituted by secular political and scientific discourses, so that “religion” itself as a historical category and as a universal globalized concept emerges as a construction of Western secular modernity.11
…the religious and the
But Asad’s own genealogy of the secular is too indebted to the self-genealogies of secularism he has so aptly exposed, and fails to recognize the extent to which the formation of the secular is itself inextricably linked with the internal transformations of European Christianity, from the so-called Papal Revolution to the Protestant Reformation, and from the ascetic and pietistic sects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the emergence of evangelical, denominational Protestantism in nineteenth-century America. Should one define these transformations as a process of internal secularization of Western Christianity, or as the cunning of secular reason, or both? A proper rethinking of secularization will require a critical examination of the diverse patterns of differentiation and fusion of the religious and the secular and their mutual constitution across all world religions.
10 Talal
Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christiantiy, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) 191.
11 Asad
192; see also Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
10
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The contextualization of categories should begin with the recognition of the particular Christian historicity of Western European developments, as well as of the multiple and diverse historical patterns of secularization and differentiation within European and Western societies. Such a recognition in turn should allow a less Euro-centric comparative analysis of patterns of differentiation and secularization in other civilizations and world religions, and more importantly the further recognition that with the world-historical process of globalization initiated by the European colonial expansion, all these processes everywhere are dynamically interrelated and mutually constituted.
Multiple Differentiations, Secularizations, and Modernities There are multiple and diverse secularizations in the West and multiple and diverse Western modernities, and they are still mostly associated with fundamental historical differences between Catholic, Protestant, and Byzantine Christianity, and between Lutheran and Calvinist Protestantism. As David Martin showed, in the Latin-Catholic cultural area, and to some extent throughout Continental Europe, there was a collision between religion and the differentiated secular spheres—that is, between Catholic Christianity and modern science, modern capitalism, and the modern state.12 As a result of this protracted clash, the Enlightenment critique of religion found here ample resonance; the secularist genealogy of modernity was constructed as a triumphant emancipation of reason, freedom, and worldly pursuits from the constraints of religion; and practically every “progressive” European social movement from the time of the French Revolution to the present was informed by secularism. The secularist self-narratives, which have informed functionalist theories of differentiation and secularization, have envisioned this process as the emancipation and expansion of the secular spheres at the expense of a much diminished and confined, though also newly differentiated, religious sphere. The boundaries are well kept; only they are relocated, drastically pushing religion into the margins and into the private sphere. In the Anglo-Protestant cultural area, by contrast, and particularly in the United States, there was “collusion” between religion and the secular differentiated spheres. There is little historical evidence of any tension between American Protestantism and capitalism and very little manifest tension between science and religion in the U.S. prior to the Darwinian crisis at the end of the nineteenth century. The American Enlightenment had hardly any anti-religious component. Even “the separation of church and state” that was constitutionally codified in the dual clause of the First Amendment, had as much the purpose of protecting “the free exercise” of religion from state interference as that of protecting the federal state from any religious entanglement. It is rare, at least until very recently, to find any “progressive” social movement in America appealing to
12 David
Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).
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“secularist” values; appeals to the Gospel and to “Christian” values are certainly much more common throughout the history of American social movements, as well as in the discourse of American presidents. The purpose of this comparison is not to reiterate the well-known fact that American society is more “religious” and therefore less “secular” than European societies. While the first may be true, the second proposition does not follow. On the contrary, the United States has always been the paradigmatic form of a modern secular, differentiated society. Yet the triumph of “the secular” came aided by religion rather than at its expense, and the boundaries themselves became so diffused that, at least by European ecclesiastical standards, it is not clear where the secular ends and religion begins. As Tocqueville observed, “not only do the Americans practice their religion out of selfinterest, but they often even place in this world the interest which they have in practicing it.”13 Yet it would be ludicrous to argue that the United States is a less functionally differentiated society, and therefore less modern, and therefore less secular, than France or Sweden. On the contrary, one could argue that there is less functional differentiation of state, economy, science, etc., in étâtiste France than in the United States, but this does not make France either less modern or less secular than the United States. When American sociologists of religion retort from their provincial perspective that secularization is a European myth, they are right if only in the sense that the United States was born as a modern secular state, never knew the established church of the European caesaro-papist absolutist state, and did not need to go through a European process of secular differentiation in order to become a modern secular society. If the European concept of secularization is not a particularly relevant category for the “Christian” United States, much less may it be directly applicable to other axial civilizations with very different modes of structuration of the religious and the secular. As an analytical conceptualization of a historical process, secularization is a category that makes sense within the context of the particular internal and external dynamics of the transformation of Western European Christianity from the Middle Ages to the present. But the category becomes problematic once it is generalized as a universal process of societal development and once it is transferred to other world religions and other civilizational areas with very different dynamics of structuration of the relations and tensions between religion and world, or between cosmological transcendence and worldly immanence. The category of secularization could hardly be applicable, for instance, to such “religions” as Confucianism or Taoism, insofar as they are not characterized by high tension with “the world,” insofar as their model of transcendence can hardly be called “religious,” and insofar as they have no ecclesiastical organization. In a sense, those religions that have always been “worldly” and “lay” do not need to undergo a process of secular-
13 Alexis
12
de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) 284.
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ization. To secularize—that is, “to make worldly” or “to transfer from ecclesiastical to civil use”—is a process that does not make much sense in such a civilizational context. In this respect, China and the Confucian civilizational area have been “secular” avant la lettre. It is the postulated intrinsic correlation between modernization and secularization that is highly problematic. There can be modern societies like the U.S., which are secular while deeply religious, and there can be pre-modern societies like China, which from our Euro-centric religious perspective look deeply secular and irreligious.14 It just happened that the particular, specifically Christian, Western European dynamic of secularization became globalized with the expansion of European colonialism, and with the ensuing global expansion of capitalism, of the European system of states, of modern science, and of modern ideologies of secularism. Thus, the relevant questions become how Confucianism, Taoism, and other world religions respond to the global expansion of “Western secular modernity,” and how all the religious traditions are reinterpreted as a response to this global challenge. The concept of multiple modernities, first developed by S. N. Eisenstadt, is a more adequate conceptualization and pragmatic vision of modern global trends than either secular cosmopolitanism or the clash of civilizations. In a certain sense, it shares elements from both. Like cosmopolitanism, the concept of multiple modernities maintains that there are some common elements or traits shared by all “modern” societies that help to distinguish them from their “traditional” or pre-modern forms. But these modern traits or principles attain multiple forms and diverse institutionalizations. Moreover, many of these institutionalizations are continuous or congruent with the traditional historical civilizations. Thus, there is both a civilization of modernity and the continuous transformation of the pre-modern historical civilizations under modern conditions, which help to shape the multiple modernities. Most of the modern traits may have emerged first in the West, but even there one finds multiple modernities. Naturally, this multiplicity becomes even more pronounced as non-Western societies and civilizations acquire and institutionalize those modern traits. Modern traits, moreover, are not developed necessarily in contradistinction to or even at the expense of tradition, but rather through the transformation and the pragmatic adjustment of tradition. In this respect, the multiple modernities position shares with the clash of civilizations position the emphasis on the relevance of cultural traditions and world religions for the formation of multiple modernities.
14 Indeed,
in the same way as the U.S. appears as an “outlier” or deviant case among advanced post-industrial societies, similarly China appears as an outlier among agrarian societies. Actually, China evinces the lowest level of religious beliefs and religious participation of any country in the world, challenging the assumed correlation between insecurity/survival values and religious beliefs and participation. On the Norris/Inglehart scale, agrarian China—at least its Confucian elites—would have appeared for centuries as a highly secular-rational society. See Figures 10.1 and 10.2 in Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 224–6.
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Secular cosmopolitanism is still based on a rigid dichotomous contraposition of sacred tradition and secular modernity, assuming that the more of one, the less of the other. The clash of civilizations perspective, by contrast, emphasizes the essential continuity between tradition and modernity. Western modernity is assumed to be continuous with the Western tradition. As other civilizations modernize, becoming ever more like the West, they will also maintain an essential continuity with their respective traditions— thus, the inevitable clash of civilizations as all modern societies basically continue their diverse and mostly incommensurable traditions. The multiple modernities position rejects both the notion of a modern radical break with traditions as well as the notion of an essential modern continuity with tradition. All traditions and civilizations are radically transformed in the processes of modernization, but they also have the possibility of shaping in particular ways the institutionalization of modern traits. Traditions are forced to respond and adjust to modern conditions, but in the process of reformulating their traditions for modern contexts, they also help to shape the particular forms of modernity.
Decline, Revival, or Transformation of Religion? The progressive decline of institutional Christian religion in Europe is an undeniable social fact. Since the 1960s an increasing majority of the European population has ceased participating in traditional religious practice on a regular basis, while still maintaining relatively high levels of private individual religious beliefs. Grace Davie has characterized this general European situation as “believing without belonging.”15 At the same time, however, large numbers of Europeans, even in the most secular countries, still identify themselves as “Christian,” pointing to an implicit, diffused, and submerged Christian cultural identity. Danièle Hervieu-Léger has offered the reverse characterization of the European situation as “belonging without believing.”16 From France to Sweden and from England to Scotland, the historical churches (Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, or Calvinist), although emptied of active membership, still function, vicariously as it were, as public carriers of the national religion. In this respect, “secular” and “Christian” cultural identities are intertwined in complex and rarely verbalized modes among most Europeans. Yet traditional explanations of European secularization by reference to either increasing institutional differentiation, increasing rationality, or increasing individualism are not persuasive since other modern societies, like the United States, do not manifest similar levels of religious decline. Once the exceptional character of European religious developments is 15 Grace
Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing Without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
16 Danièle
Hervieu-Léger, “Religion und Sozialer Zusammenhalt in Europa,” Transit: Europäische Revue 26 (Summer 2004): 101–19.
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recognized, it becomes necessary to search for an explanation not in general processes of modernization but rather in particular European historical developments. Indeed, the most interesting issue sociologically is not the fact of progressive religious decline among the European population since the 1950s, but the fact that this decline is interpreted through the lenses of the secularization paradigm and is therefore accompanied by a “secularist” self-understanding that interprets the decline as “normal” and “progressive”—that is, as a quasi-normative consequence of being a “modern” and “enlightened” European. The secularization of Western European societies can be explained better in terms of the triumph of the knowledge regime of secularism, than in terms of structural processes of socio-economic development. The internal variations within Europe, moreover, can be explained better in terms of historical patterns of church-state and church-nation relations, as well as in terms of different paths of secularization It is the tendency to link among the different branches of Christianity, than in terms of processes of secularization to levels of modernization.
processes of modernization…
It is the tendency to link processes of secularization to that is at the root of our processes of modernization, rather than to the patterns of fusion and dissolution of religious, political, and societal impasse at the secularization communities—that is, of churches, states, and nations— debate. that is at the root of our impasse at the secularization debate. Following Weber we should distinguish analytically the community cult and salvation religious communities.17 Not every salvation religion functions as a community cult—that is, is co-extensive with a territorial political community or plays the Durkheimian function of societal integration. One may think of the many denominations, sects, or cults in America that function primarily as religions of individual salvation. Nor does every community cult function as a religion of individual salvation offering the individual qua individual salvation from sickness, poverty, and all sorts of distress and danger—one may think of state Confucianism in China, Shintoism in Japan, or most caesaro-papist imperial cults. Lesser forms of “folk” religion tend to supply individual healing and salvation. The Christian church and the Muslim umma are two particular though very different forms of historical fusion of community cults and religions of individual salvation. The truly puzzling question in Europe, and the explanatory key in accounting for the exceptional character of European secularization, is why national churches, once they ceded to the secular nation-state their traditional historical function as community cults—that is, as collective representations of the imagined national communities and carriers of the collective memory—also lost in the process their ability to function as religions of individual salvation. Crucial is the question of why individuals in Europe, once they lose faith in their national churches, do not bother to look for alternative
17 Max
Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religion,” From Max Weber, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946) 272.
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salvation religions. In a certain sense, the answer lies in the fact that Europeans continue to be implicit members of their national churches, even after explicitly abandoning them. The national churches remain there as a public good to which they have rightful access when it comes time to celebrate the transcendent rites of passage, birth, and death. It is this peculiar situation that explains the lack of demand and the absence of a truly competitive religious market in Europe. In contrast, the particular pattern of separation of church and state codified in the dual clause of the First Amendment served to structure the unique pattern of American religious pluralism. The United States never had a national church. Eventually, all religions in America, churches as well as sects, irrespective of their origins, doctrinal claims, and ecclesiastical identities, turned into “denominations,” formally equal under the constitution and competing in a relatively free, pluralistic, and voluntaristic religious market. As the organizational form and principle of such a religious system, denominationalism constitutes the great American religious invention.18 Along with, yet differentiated from, each and all denominations, the American civil religion functions as the community cult of the nation. At first, the diversity and substantial equality was only institutionalized as internal denominational religious pluralism within American Protestantism. America was defined as a “Christian” nation and “Christian” meant solely “Protestant.” But eventually, after prolonged outbursts of Protestant nativism directed primarily at Catholic immigrants, the pattern allowed for the incorporation of religious others, Catholics and Jews, into the system of American religious pluralism. A process of dual accommodation took place whereby Catholicism and Judaism became American religions, while American religion and the nation were equally transformed in the process. America became a “Judeo-Christian” nation, and Protestant, Catholic, and Jew became the three denominations of the American civil religion. The fact that religion, religious institutions, and religious identities played a central role in the process of incorporating European immigrants has been amply documented and forms the core of Will Herberg’s well-known thesis.19 Herberg’s claim that immigrants became more religious as they became more American has been restated by most contemporary studies of immigrant religions in America.20 It is important to realize, therefore, that immigrant religiosity is not simply a traditional residue, an Old World
18 Sydney
E. Mead, “Denominationalism: The Shape of Protestantism in America,” The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Andrew M. Greeley, The Denominational Society: A Sociological Approach to Religion in America (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1972).
19 Will 20 See
Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960).
José Casanova, “Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism: A EU/US Comparison,” The New Religious Pluralism and Democracy, ed. Thomas Banchoff (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
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survival likely to disappear with adaptation to the new context, but rather an adaptive response to the New World. The thesis implies not only that immigrants tend to be religious because of a certain social pressure to conform to American religious norms, something that is undoubtedly the case, but more importantly, that collective religious identities have always been one of the primary ways of structuring internal societal pluralism in American history.21 In my view, the thesis also offers a more plausible explanation of American religious vitality than rational choice supply-side theories of competitive religious markets. There is a sense in which both European secular developWhen it comes to religion, ments and American religious developments are rather unique there is no global rule. and exceptional. In this respect, one could certainly talk, as Europeans have done for decades, of “American exceptionalism,” or one could talk, as it has become fashionable today, of “European exceptionalism.” But both characterizations are highly problematic, if it is implied, as it was in the past, that America was the exception to the European rule of secularization, or if it is implied, as it often is today, that secular Europe is the exception to some global trend of religious revival.22 When it comes to religion, there is no global rule. All world religions are being transformed radically today, as they were throughout the era of European colonial expansion, by processes of modernization and globalization. But they are being transformed in diverse and manifold ways. All world religions are forced to respond to the global expansion of modernity as well as to their mutual and reciprocal challenges, as they all undergo multiple processes of aggiornamento and come to compete with one another in the emerging global system of religions. Under conditions of globalization, world religions do not only draw upon their own traditions but also increasingly upon one another. Inter-civilizational encounters, cultural imitations and borrowings, diasporic diffusions, hybridity, creolization, and transcultural hyphenations are all part and parcel of the global present. Sociologists of religion should be less obsessed with the decline of religion and more attuned to the new forms that religion is assuming in all world religions at three different levels of analysis: the individual level, the group level, and the societal level. In a certain sense, Ernst Troeltsch’s three types of religion—“individual mysticism,” “sect,” and “church”—correspond to these three levels of analysis.23 At the individual level the
21 Racialization
has been the other primary way of structuring internal societal pluralism in American history. Not religion alone, as Herberg’s study would seem to imply, and not race alone, as contemporary immigration studies would seem to imply, but religion and race and their complex entanglements have served to structure the American experience of immigrant incorporation—indeed, they are the keys to “American exceptionalism.”
22 Grace
Davie, “Europe: The Exception that Proves the Rule?” The Desecularization of the World, ed. Peter Berger (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999).
23 Ernst Troeltsch,
The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches (New York: MacMillan, 1931).
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predictions of Troeltsch and William James at the beginning of the last century concerning individual mysticism have held well.24 What Thomas Luckmann called “invisible religion” in the 1960s remains the dominant form of individual religion and is likely to gain increasing global prominence.25 The modern individual is condemned to pick and choose from a wide arrangement of meaning systems. From a Western monotheistic perspective, such a condition of polytheistic and polyformic individual freedom may seem a highly novel or postmodern one. But from a non-Western perspective, particularly that of the Asian pan“Invisible religion”…remains theist religious traditions, the condition looks much more the dominant form like the old state of affairs. Individual mysticism has always been an important option, at least for elites and religious of individual religion…. virtuosi, within the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions. What Inglehart calls the expansion of post-materialist spiritual values can be understood in this respect as the generalization and democratization of options until now only available to elites and religious virtuosi in most religious traditions. As the privileged material conditions available to the elites for millennia are generalized to entire populations, so are the spiritual and religious options that were usually reserved for them. I would not characterize such a process, however, as religious decline. But what is certainly new in our global age is the simultaneous presence and availability of all world religions and all cultural systems, from the most “primitive” to the most “modern,” often detached from their temporal and spatial contexts, ready for flexible or fundamentalist individual appropriation. At the level of religious communities, much of sociology has lamented the loss of Gemeinschaft as one of the negative consequences of modernity. Both individualism and societalization are supposed to expand at the expense of community. Theories of modernization are predicated on the simple dichotomies of tradition and modernity, and of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Most theories of secularization are based on the same simple dichotomies and ultimately on the premise that in the long run processes of modern societal rationalization make community inviable. But the fact is that modernity, as Tocqueville saw clearly, offers new and expanded possibilities for the construction of communities of all kinds as voluntary associations, and particularly for the construction of new religious communities as voluntary congregations. The sect is, of course, the paradigmatic type of a voluntary religious congregation. But in the traditional theory, the sect lives in a high and ultimately unsustainable tension with the larger society. American denominationalism, by contrast, can be understood as the generalization and relaxation of the sectarian principle of voluntary religious association.
24 William
James, Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
25 Thomas
Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
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Most of the so-called “cults,” “new religions,” or “new religious movements” assume the form of voluntary congregations, but so do the most dynamic forms of Christianity, like the Christian base communities in Latin America or the Pentecostal churches throughout the world, or the most dynamic forms of Islam—such as Tablighi Jamaat, a form of evangelical Islam akin to early nineteenth-century American Methodism—and the many forms of Sufi brotherhoods. Even world religions, like Hinduism or Buddhism, that have a less developed tradition of congregationalism, are emerging as prominent new institutional forms, particularly in the immigrant diasporas. This institutional transformation in the immigrant diasporas is in turn affecting profoundly the religious institutional forms in the civilizational home areas. At the societal level of what could be called “imagined religious communities,” secular nationalism and national “civil religions” will continue to be prominent carriers of collective identities, but ongoing processes of globalization are likely to enhance the reemergence of the great “world religions” as globalized transnational imagined religious communities. While new cosmopolitan and transnational imagined communities will emerge, the most relevant ones are likely to be once again the old civilizations and world religions. Therein lies the merit of Samuel Huntington’s thesis.26 But his geo-political conception of civilizations as territorial units akin to nation-states and superpowers is problematic, leading him to anticipate future global conflicts along civilizational fault lines. In fact, globalization represents not only a great opportunity for the old world religions insofar as they can free themselves from the territorial constraints of the nation-state and regain their transnational dimensions, but also a great threat insofar as globalization entails the de-territorialization of all cultural systems and threatens to dissolve the essential bonds between histories, peoples, and territories that have defined all civilizations and world religions.
Religious Privatization, Religious De-Privatization, or Both? It is unlikely that either modern authoritarian regimes or modern liberal democratic systems will prove ultimately successful in banishing religion to the private sphere. Authoritarian regimes may be temporarily successful through repressive measures in enforcing the privatization of religion. Democratic regimes, by contrast, are likely to have greater difficulty in doing so, other than through the tyranny of a secular majority over religious minorities. As the case of France shows, laïcité can indeed become a constitutionally sacralized principle, consensually shared by the overwhelming majority of citizens, who support the enforcement of legislation banishing “ostensible religious symbols” from the public sphere because they are viewed as a threat to the national system or the national tradition. Obviously, the opposite is the case in the United
26 Samuel
P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
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States, where secular minorities may feel threatened by Judeo-Christian definitions of the national republic. I cannot find a compelling reason, on either democratic or liberal grounds, to banish in principle religion from the public democratic sphere. One could at most, on pragmatic historical grounds, defend the need for separation between “church” and “state,” although I am no longer convinced that complete separation is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for democracy. The attempt to establish a wall of separation between “religion” and “politics” is both unjustified and probably counterproductive for democracy itself. Curtailing the “free exercise of religion” per se must lead to curtailing the free exercise of the civil and political rights of religious citizens and will ultimately infringe on the vitality of a democratic civil society. Particular religious discourses or particular religious practices may be objectionable and susceptible to legal prohibition on some democratic or liberal ground, but not because they are “religious” per se. Tocqueville was perhaps the only modern social theorist who was able to elaborate these issues with relative clarity and freed from secularist prejudices. He questioned the two central premises of the Enlightenment critique of religion, namely that the advancement of education and reason and the advancement of democratic freedoms would make religion politically irrelevant. He anticipated, rather presciently, that the democratization of politics Curtailing the “free exercise of and the entrance of ordinary people into the political arena would augment, rather than diminish, the pubreligion” per se must lead to lic relevance of religion. He found empirical confirmacurtailing the free exercise of tion in the democratic experience of the United States, the civil and political rights at the time the most democratic of modern societies and the one with the highest levels of literacy.27
of religious citizens and will
ultimately infringe on the vitality
The history of democratic politics throughout the world has confirmed Tocqueville’s assumptions. of a democratic civil society. Religious issues, religious resources, interdenominational conflicts, and secular-religious cleavages have all been relatively central to electoral democratic politics and to the politics of civil society throughout the history of democracy. Even in secular Europe, where a majority of the political elites and of ordinary citizens had taken the thesis of privatization for granted, unexpectedly, contentious religious issues have returned again to the center of European politics.28 It is not surprising therefore that this should be even more the
27 The fact that Tocqueville uses the subterfuge of discussing the problems of black slavery and the genocide
of the Native American in a separate chapter at the end of Book I because “they are outside democracy” shows the extent to which Tocqueville was at least implicitly aware that America was a “racial” democracy, for whites only, and therefore far from being a model democracy.
28 José Casanova, “Religion, Secular Identities, and European Integration,” Religion in an Expanding Europe,
ed. Timothy Byrnes and Peter Katzenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
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case in the United States, where historically religion has always been at the very center of all great political conflicts and movements of social reform. From independence to abolition, from nativism to women’s suffrage, from prohibition to the civil rights movement, religion has always been at the center of these conflicts, but also on both sides of the political barricades. What is new in the last decades is the fact that for the first time in American political history, the contemporary culture wars are beginning to resemble the secular-religious cleavages that were endemic to continental European politics in the past. Religion itself has now become a contentious public issue. If today I had to revise anything from my earlier work, it The rules for protection would be my attempt to restrict, on what I thought were from the tyranny of religious justifiable normative grounds, public religion to the public sphere of civil society. This remains my own personal majorities should be the same normative and political preference, but I am not certain democratic rules used to that the secular separation of religion from political society or even from the state are universalizable maxims, defend from the tyranny of any in the sense that they are either necessary or sufficient democratic majority. conditions for democratic politics. As the example of so many modern secular authoritarian and totalitarian states show, from the Soviet Union to secular Turkey, strict no establishment is by no means a sufficient condition for democracy. On the other hand, several countries with at least nominal establishment, such as England or Lutheran Scandinavian countries, have a relatively commendable record of democratic freedoms and of protection of the rights of minorities, including religious ones. It would seem, therefore, that strict separation is also not a necessary condition for democracy. Indeed one could advance the proposition that of the two clauses of the First Amendment, “free exercise” is the one that stands out as a normative democratic principle in itself, while the no-establishment principle is defensible only insofar as it might be a necessary means to free exercise and to equal rights. In other words, secularist principles per se may be defensible on some other ground, but not as intrinsically liberal democratic ones. The rules for protection from the tyranny of religious majorities should be the same democratic rules used to defend from the tyranny of any democratic majority. The protection of the rights of any minority, religious or secular, and equal universal access should be central normative principles of any liberal democratic system. In principle one should not need any additional particular secularist principle or legislation. But as a matter of fact, historically and pragmatically, it may be necessary to disestablish “churches”—that is, ecclesiastical institutions that claim either monopolistic rights over a territory or particular privileges, or it may be necessary to use constitutional and at times extraordinary means to disempower entrenched tyrannical majorities.
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Finally, on empirical grounds there are good reasons why we should expect religion and morality to remain and even to become ever more contentious public issues in democratic politics. Given such trends as increasing globalization, transnational migrations, increasing multiculturalism, the biogenetic revolution, and the persistence of blatant gender discrimination, the number of contentious public religious issues is likely to grow rather than diminish. The result is a continuous expansion of the res publica while the citizen’s republic becomes ever more diverse and fragmented. The penetration of all spheres of life, including the most private, by public policy; the expansion of scientific-technological frontiers giving humanity Demiurgic powers of self-creation and self-destruction; the compression of the whole world into one single common home for all of humanity; and the moral pluralism that seems inherent to multiculturalism—all these transcendent issues will continue to engage religion and provoke religious responses.
22
Is Europe an Exceptional Case? Grace Davie
A
number of factors must be taken into account if we are to understand the place of religion in twenty-first-century Europe.1 These include the legacies of the past, more particularly the role of the historic churches in shaping European culture; an awareness that these churches still have a place at particular moments in the lives of modern Europeans, even though they are no longer able to discipline the beliefs and behavior of the great majority of the population; an observable change in the churchgoing constituencies of the continent, which operate increasingly on a model of choice, rather than a model of obligation or duty; and the arrival in Europe of groups of people from many different parts of the world, notably the global South, with very different religious aspirations from those seen in the host societies. Each of these factors will be taken in turn in order to answer the question set out in the title: is Europe an exceptional case in terms of its patterns of religious life? The answer leads in turn to more questions. If we conclude that Europe is indeed “exceptional,” why is this so? Or, conversely, why not? And what can we say about the future? Will Europe continue within the trajectory set by its past or will it become more like the patterns found elsewhere? Or—it must be asked—will the rest of the world become more like Europe?
1
Overviews of the place of religion in European societies can be found in Gerhard Robbers, ed., State and Church in the European Union (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996); René Rémond, Religion and Society in Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Andrew M. Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile (London: Transaction, 2003); John Madeley and Zsolt Enyedi, eds., Church and State in Contemporary Europe: The Chimera of Neutrality (London: Frank Cass, 2003); Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, eds., The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and in the publications emerging from the European Values Study, listed on the frequently updated EVS website <www.europeanvalues.nl/ index2/htm>. Alongside these overviews, there is a rapidly growing literature on the presence of Islam in Europe; see Jorgen Nielsen, Muslims in Western Europe (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2004) for a useful summary of this material.
Grace Davie has a personal Chair in the Sociology of Religion at the University of Exeter, where she is also the Director of the University’s Centre for European Studies. She is the author of Religion in Britain since 1945 (1994), Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (2000), and Europe: The Exceptional Case (2002). The Sociology of Religion: A Critical Agenda will appear in 2007.
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Cultural Heritage Two points are important in relation to the role of the historic churches in shaping European culture; the Christian tradition is indeed a crucial element in the evolution of Europe, but it is by no means the only one. O’Connell identifies three formative factors or themes in the creation and re-creation of the unity that we call Europe: Judeo-Christian monotheism, Greek rationalism, and Roman organization.2 These factors shift and evolve over time, but their combinations can be seen in forming and reforming a way of life that we have come to recognize as European. The religious strand within such combinations is self-evident. One example will suffice: the Christian tradition has had an irreversible effect on the shaping of time and space in this part of the world. Both week and year, for instance, follow the Christian cycle, even if the major festivals are beginning to lose their resonance for large sections of the population. Or to put the same point in a different way, we have had heated debates in parts of Europe about whether or not to shop on Sundays. We do not, for the most part, consider Friday an issue in this respect—though this may change. The same is true of space. Wherever you look in Europe, there is a predominance of Christian churches, some of which retain huge symbolic value. This is not to deny that in some parts of Europe (notably the larger cities) the skyline is becoming an indicator of growing religious diversity. Europe is changing, but the legacies of the past remain deeply embedded in both the physical and cultural environment.
Vicarious Religion Physical and cultural presence is one thing; a “hands-on” role in the everyday lives of European people quite another. Commentators of all kinds agree that the latter is no longer a realistic aspiration for the historic churches of Europe. That does not mean, however, that the churches have entirely lost their significance as markers of religious identity. In my own work, I have explored this continuing ambiguity through the concept of “vicarious religion.”3 By vicarious, I mean the notion of religion performed by an active minority but on behalf of a much larger number, who (implicitly at least) not only understand, but, quite clearly, approve of what the minority is doing. The first half of the definition is relatively straightforward and reflects the everyday meaning of the term—that is, to do something on behalf of someone else (hence the word “vicar”). The second half is more controversial
24
2
James O’Connell, The Making of Modern Europe: Strengths, Constraints and Resolutions, University of Bradford Peace Research Report no. 26 (Bradford: University of Bradford, 1991).
3
Grace Davie, Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
I s europe an e x ceptional case ? / davie
and is best explored by means of examples. Religion, it seems, can operate vicariously in a wide variety of ways: churches and church leaders perform ritual on behalf of others; church leaders and churchgoers believe on behalf of others; church leaders and churchgoers embody moral codes on behalf of others; churches, finally, can offer space for the vicarious debate of unresolved issues in modern societies. Each of these propositions will be taken in turn in order to demonstrate the fruitfulness of looking at European religion from this point of view. The least controversial of the above list concerns the role of both churches and church leaders in conducting ritual on behalf of a wide variety of individuals and communities at critical points in their lives. The most obvious examples can be found in the continuing requests, even in a moderately secular society, for some sort of religious ritual at the time of a birth, a marriage, and, most of all, a death. In many parts of Europe, though not in all, the demand for the first two of these diminished sharply in the later decades of the twentieth century. The same is not true with respect to churches’ services at the time of a death. It is at this point, if no other, that most Europeans come into direct contact with their churches and would be deeply offended if their requests for a funeral were met with a rejection. A refusal to offer either a funeral liturgy or appropriate pastoral care would violate deeply held assumptions. Exactly the same point can be made the other way round. It is perfectly possible to have a secular ceremony at the time of a death; de facto, however, relatively few people do this. Much more common is what might be termed a “mixed economy” funeral—that is, a liturgy in which the religious professional is present and the Christian structure maintained but filled with a variety of extraneous elements, including secular music or readings and, with increasing frequency, a eulogy rather than a homily. Princess Diana’s funeral in September 1997 offers an excellent example. Churches, moreover, maintain vicariously the rituals from which a larger population can draw when the occasion demands it, and whilst that population anticipates a certain freedom in ritual expression, they also expect the institutional structures to be kept firmly in place. But churches and church leaders do more than conduct ritual: they also believe on behalf of others. And the more senior or visible the role of the church leader, the more important it becomes that this is done properly. English bishops, to give but one example, are rebuked (not least by the tabloid press) if they doubt in public; it is, after all, their “job” to believe. The most celebrated, and not entirely justified, case of a “doubting bishop” in the Church of England was that of David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham from 1984 to 1994.4 To a large extent the controversy turned on a frequently
4
Shortly after David Jenkins’ consecration in York Minster, the building was struck by lightning, an event that was seen by some as a sign of divine displeasure. This episode was given extensive press coverage at the time (July 1984). See also David Jenkins’ own account in The Calling of a Cuckoo (London: Continuum, 2002).
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misquoted statement concerning the Resurrection. The phrase “not just a conjuring trick with bones” quickly turned into the opposite, for which the Bishop was widely pilloried. The cultural expectation, in other words, is that bishops believe. When they doubt, something quite clearly has gone amiss. Similar pressures emerge with respect to behavioral codes: religious professionals (both local for debate regarding particular, and and national) are expected to uphold certain standards of behavior—not least, more rather often controversial, topics that are than less traditional representations of family difficult to address elsewhere in society? life—and incur criticism when they fail, from outside churches as well as within. It is almost as if people who are not themselves participants in church life want the church’s representatives to embody a certain social and moral order, thereby maintaining a way of living that has long since ceased to be the norm in the population as a whole. Failure leads to accusations of hypocrisy but also to expressions of disappointment (interestingly, royal divorces provoke a similar reaction). Such expectations become at times unreasonable, particularly in relation to the partners and children of religious personnel; it is hardly surprising that clergy families come under strain. The pressures on the Catholic priest are somewhat different, given the requirement of celibacy, but in their own way they are equally demanding.
Could it be that churches offer space
A final possibility with respect to vicariousness develops this point further, and more provocatively. Could it be that churches offer space for debate regarding particular, and often controversial, topics that are difficult to address elsewhere in society? The current debate about homosexuality in the Church of England offers a possible example, an interpretation encouraged by the intense media attention directed at this issue—and not only in Britain. Is this simply an internal debate about senior clergy appointments in which different lobbies within the church are exerting pressure? Or is this one way in which society as a whole comes to terms with profound shifts in the moral climate? If the latter is not true, it is hard to understand why so much attention is being paid to the churches in this respect. If it is true, sociological thinking must take this factor into account. Either way, large sections of the European media are, it seems, wanting to have their cake and eat it too, pointing the spotlight at controversies within the church whilst maintaining that religious institutions must, by their very nature, be marginal to modern society. Social scientific observers of the scene cannot afford to make a similar mistake. The public attention displayed in the examples set out above demands that we understand how religious institutions matter even to those who are not “participants” in them (in the conventional sense of the term). That, moreover, is the norm in European societies—a situation rather different from that found in the United States. Indeed, in a decade of lecturing across both Europe and the U.S., I have seldom met an audience in the former who do not immediately grasp the notion of vicariousness and its implica26
I s europe an e x ceptional case ? / davie
tions for the European scene. This is much less the case in the United States, where the connections between the population and their religious organizations are very differently understood. There are exceptions, but to act vicariously is not part of American self-understanding.5 Herein, moreover, lies an important explanation for the “exceptional” nature of Europe’s religion. It derives from a particular history of state-church relationships, out of which grows the notion of a state church (or its successor) as a public utility rather than a private organization. A public utility is available to the population as a whole at the point of need and is funded through the tax system. Precisely that combination remains in place in the Lutheran countries of Europe. Elsewhere both constitutional and financial arrangements have been modified (sometimes radically), but the associated mentalities are, it seems, more difficult to shift.
From Obligation to Consumption The changing nature of churchgoing in modern Europe is important to understand, and to do so, one must clarify the constituency: here are Europe’s diminishing, but still significant churchgoers—those who maintain the tradition on behalf of the people described in the previous section. And here an observable change is taking place: from a culture of obligation or duty to a culture of consumption or choice. What until somewhat recently was simply imposed (with all the negative connotations of this word), or inherited (a rather more positive spin), becomes instead a matter of personal choice: “I go to church (or to another religious organization) because I want to, maybe for a short period or maybe for longer, to fulfill a particular rather than a general need in my life and where I will continue my attachment so long as it provides what I want, but I have no obligation either to attend in the first place or to continue if I don’t want to.” As such, this pattern is entirely compatible with vicariousness: “the churches need to be there in order that I may attend them if I so choose.” The “chemistry,” however, gradually changes, a shift that is discernible in both practice and belief, not to mention the connections between them. There is, for example, an easily documentable change in the patterns of confirmation in the Church of England. The overall number of confirmations has dropped dramatically in the post-war period, evidence once again of institutional decline. In England, though not yet in the Nordic countries, confirmation is no longer a teenage rite of passage, but a relatively rare event undertaken as a matter of personal choice by people of all ages. Indeed, there is a very marked rise in the proportion of adult confirmations among the candidates overall—up to 40 percent by the mid-1990s (by no means enough, however, to offset the fall among teenagers).
5
Grace Davie, “Vicarious Religion: A Methodological Challenge,” Religion in Modern Lives, ed. Nancy Ammerman (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
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Confirmation becomes, therefore, a very significant event for those individuals who choose this option, an attitude that is bound to affect the rite itself—which now includes the space for a public declaration of faith. Confirmation becomes an opportunity to make public what has often been an entirely private activity. It is increasingly common, moreover, to baptize an adult Taken together, these events candidate immediately before the confirmation, a gesture indicate a marked change in which is evidence in itself of the fall in infant baptism some twenty to thirty years earlier. Taken together, these events the nature of membership in indicate a marked change in the nature of membership in the historic churches… the historic churches, which become, in some senses, much more like their non-established counterparts. Voluntarism (a market) is beginning to establish itself de facto, regardless of the constitutional position of the churches. Or to continue the “chemical” analogy a little further, a whole set of new reactions are set off that in the longer term (the stress is important) may have a profound effect on the understanding of vicariousness. The trends are considerably more visible in some parts of Europe than in others. There is, for instance, a marked parallel between the Anglicans and the Catholic Church in France in this respect: adult baptisms in the Church of England match very closely those in France—indeed, the similarity in the statistics is almost uncanny, given the very different ecclesiologies embodied in the two churches (one Catholic and one Protestant).6 But it is precisely this shift across very different denominations that encourages the notion that something profound is taking place. Lutheran nations, however—despite their reputation for being the most secular countries in Europe—still stick to a more traditional pattern as far as confirmation is concerned, though the manner in which they do this is changing. Large numbers of young people now choose the option of a confirmation camp rather than a series of weekly meetings.7 In making this choice, confirmation becomes an “experience” in addition to a rite of passage, implying a better fit with other aspects of youth culture. The stress on experience is important in other ways as well. It can be seen in the choices that the religiously active appear to be making, at least in the British case. Here, within a constituency that is evidently reduced, two options stand out as disproportionately popular. The first is the conservative evangelical church—the success story of late twentieth-century churchgoing, both inside and outside the mainstream. These are churches that draw their members from a relatively wide geographical area and work on a congregational, rather than parish, model. Individuals are invited to opt in rather than opt out, and membership implies commitment to a set of specified beliefs and behavioral codes. For significant numbers of people, these churches offer firm boundaries, clear
28
6
Davie, Religion in Modern Europe, 71–2.
7
The figures for confirmation stay particularly high in Finland.
I s europe an e x ceptional case ? / davie
guidance, and considerable support—effective protection from the vicissitudes of life. Interestingly, however, it is the softer charismatic forms of evangelicalism that are doing particularly well; old-fashioned Biblicism, relatively speaking, is losing its appeal. Very different and less frequently recognized in the writing about religion in modern Britain (as indeed in Europe) is the evident popularity of cathedrals and city-center churches. Cathedrals and their equivalents deal with diverse constituencies. Working from the inside out, they are frequented by regular and irregular worshippers, pilgrims, visitors, and tourists, though the lines between these groups frequently blur. The numbers, moreover, are considerable—the more so on special occasions, both civic and religious. Hence, concerns about upkeep and facilities lead to difficult debates about finance. Looked at from the point of view of consumption, however, cathedrals are places that offer a distinctive product: traditional liturgy, top-class music, and excellence in preaching, all of which take place in a historic and often very beautiful building. A visit to a cathedral is an aesthetic experience, sought after by a wide variety of people, including those for whom membership or commitment presents difficulties. They are places where there is no obligation to opt in or to participate in communal activities beyond the service itself. In this respect, they become almost the mirror image of the evangelical churches already described.8 What then is the common feature in these very different stories? It is the experiential or “feel-good” factor, whether this be expressed in charismatic worship, in the tranquility of cathedral evensong, or in a special cathedral occasion (a candlelit carol service or a major civic event). The point is that we feel something; we experience the sacred, the set apart. The purely cerebral is less appealing. Durkheim was entirely correct in this respect: it is the taking part that matters for late modern populations and the feelings so engendered.9 If we feel nothing, we are much less likely either to take part in the first place or to continue thereafter.
New Arrivals The final factor in this complicated mosaic is somewhat different: the growing number of incomers in almost all European societies. There have been two stages in this process. The first was closely linked to the need for labor in the expanding economies of post-war Europe—notably in Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Wherever possible, each of these countries looked to its former empire to expand its workforce: Britain to the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent, France to the
8
The attraction of cathedrals and city-center churches is closely related to the growth in pilgrimage across Europe; see Davie, Religion in Modern Europe, 156–62.
9
See in particular Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912; London: Harper Collins, 1976).
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Mahgreb, Germany (with no empire) to Turkey and the former Yugoslavia, and the Netherlands to its overseas connections (Indonesia and Surinam), but also to Morocco. The second wave of immigration occurred in the 1990s and included, in addition to the places listed above, both the Nordic countries and the countries of Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal)—bearing in mind that the latter, until very recently, have been countries of emigration rather than immigration. The turnaround has been truly remarkable—the sharpest illustration of all being the transformation in the 1990s of Dublin, Ireland, from a relatively poor city to a thriving, expensive, and increasingly diverse place to live.10 Different host societies and different countries of provenance have led to a complex picture—generalization is dangerous. Some points are, however, common to most, if not all, cases. It is important to remember that those who are arriving in Europe are coming primarily for economic reasons—they are coming to work. If the first wave provided labor for expanding industrial economies, the second filled a rather different gap. As the twentieth century drew to a close, Europeans were becoming increasingly aware that there were insufficient numbers to employ in Europe to support the rising proportion of dependent people—notably the growing number of retired. The pull factor in this case is the shifting demographic profile in Europe. A second point follows from this: all is well, or relatively well, as long as there is sufficient work for everyone in an economy able to maintain the services necessary for incoming populations. All is less well when there is a downturn in the economy (as happened in the late 70s and 80s) or when those who work to support dependent Europeans become dependent themselves. Hence the unrest in France in the autumn of 2005: a population excluded both from the economy itself, and from its concomitant benefits, expressed its frustration on the streets. What, though, are the implications for the religious life of Europe? The short answer is that they vary from place to place depending on both host society and new arrivals. Britain and France offer an interesting comparison. In Britain immigration has been much more varied than in France, both in terms of provenance and in terms of faith communities. West Indians, for example, are Christians—and much more formed in their Christianity than their British equivalents. One result of this is the vibrant AfroCaribbean churches of Britain’s larger cities—some of the most active Christian communities in the country.11 From the sub-continent, moreover, come Sikhs and Hindus as well as a sizeable number of Muslims (1.5 million). Britain is also a country where ethnicity and religion criss-cross each other in a bewildering variety of ways (only Sikhs and Jews claim ethno-religious identities). The situation in France is very different:
10 In
terms of its religious life, Ireland is in many respects a “Mediterranean” country. It is also very like Poland, insofar as Catholicism has become a marker of national identity.
11 There
is a negative side to this story. For a variety of reasons, among them racism, Afro-Caribbeans were largely excluded from mainstream churches when they first arrived in Britain, an episode that the historic churches have come to regret bitterly.
30
I s europe an e x ceptional case ? / davie
here immigration has been largely from the Maghreb, as a result of which France has by far the largest Muslim community in Europe (between 5 and 6 million)—an almost entirely Arab population. Rightly or wrongly, “Arab” and “Muslim” have become interchangeable terms in popular parlance in France. Britain and France can be compared in other ways as well— Rightly or wrongly, “Arab” an exercise that provokes some interesting questions, among and “Muslim” have become them the tensions between democracy and tolerance. France, interchangeable terms in for example, is markedly more democratic than Britain on almost all institutional or constitutional measures. France is a popular parlance in France. Republic, with a secular state, two elected chambers, and no privileged church (in the sense of connections to the state). There is a correspondingly strong stress on the equality of all citizens whatever their ethnic or religious identity. Hence, France holds a strongly assimilationist policy towards incomers, with the express intention of eradicating difference—individuals who arrive in France are welcome to maintain their religious belief and practices, provided these are relegated to the private sphere. They are actively discouraged from developing any kind of group identity. Exactly the same point can be put as follows: any loyalty (religious or otherwise) that comes between the citizen and the state in France is regarded in negative terms. The result, whether intended or not, is a relative lack of tolerance, if by tolerance is meant the freedom to promote collective as well as individual expressions of religious identity—that is, those expressions that impact the public as well as the private sphere. Britain is very different. On a strict measure of democracy, Britain fares less well than France—with no written constitution, a monarchy, a half-reformed and so far unelected House of Lords, and an established church. More positively, Britain has a more developed tradition of accommodating group identities (including religious identities) within the framework of British society, a feature that owes a good deal to the relatively greater degree of religious pluralism that has existed in Britain for centuries rather than decades. Hence a markedly different policy towards newcomers: the goal becomes the accommodation of difference rather than its eradication. Rather more provocative, however, are the conclusions that emerge if you look carefully at who, precisely, in British society is advocating religious as opposed to ethnic toleration. Very frequently it turns out to be those in society who do not depend on an electoral mandate: the royal family, significant spokespersons in the House of Lords (where other faith communities are well represented by appointment, not by election), and prominent members of the established Church. The latter, in fact, become the protectors of “faith” in general rather than the protectors of specifically English expressions of Christianity.12
12 For
a more detailed presentation of this argument, including the discussion of specific examples, see Grace Davie, “Pluralism, Tolerance and Democracy: Theory and Practice in Europe,” The New Religious Pluralism and Democracy, ed. Thomas Banchoff (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
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One further point is significant and reflects a shift that is taking place right across Europe. The growing presence of other faith communities in general, and of the Muslim population in particular, is challenging some deeply held European assumptions. The notion that faith is a private matter and should, therefore, be proscribed from public life—notably from the state and from the education system—is widespread in Europe (not only in France). Conversely, many of The growing presence of those who are currently arriving in this part of the world other faith communities in have markedly different convictions, and offer—simply by their presence—a challenge to the European way of doing general, and of the Muslim things. Reactions to this challenge vary from place to place, population in particular, is but at the very least, European societies have been obliged to re-open debates about the place of religion in public as challenging some deeply held well as private life—hence the heated controversies about European assumptions. the wearing of the veil in the school system and about the rights or wrongs of publishing material that one faith community in particular finds offensive. The repercussions of the now famous (or infamous) Danish cartoons are a case in point.13 The lack of comprehension on both sides of this affair, together with an unwillingness to compromise, led alarmingly fast to dangerous confrontations, both in Europe and beyond. Such episodes raise a further point which, if developed, could become an article in its own right. That is the extent to which the secular elites of Europe use these events in order to articulate an ideological alternative to religion. The point to grasp in the space that remains in this paper is that such elites—just like their religious alter-egos— vary markedly from place to place. The fact that the cartoons were first published in Denmark was not simply a coincidence; nor was the insistence on the part of the media in some countries rather than others (most notably France) that the cartoons should be repeatedly re-published in order to affirm the freedom of speech. Such attitudes have historical roots. France, for example, is the European society where the Enlightenment has been most obviously configured as a freedom from belief, an attitude which finds expression in the democratic, though not always very tolerant, institutions already described. In the United States, the Enlightenment becomes something very different: a freedom to believe. A developed treatment of this theme would reveal, however, that other European societies (much of Northern Europe, Germany, and Italy) fall somewhere between the two. Europe as ever is far from homogeneous.
13 The
cartoons were first published in the autumn of 2005 and reprinted in many parts of Europe in the early months of 2006. The depictions of Mohammed were considered derogatory by many sections of the Muslim community; for most Europeans, they were simply “cartoons.”
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Concluding Remarks Several things are happening simultaneously in the religious life of Europe. The fact that they are occurring at the same time is partly a coincidence—each, however, encourages the other. The historic churches, despite their continuing presence, are losing their capacity to discipline the religious thinking of large sections of the population (especially the young). Simultaneously, the range of religious choice is widening all the time both inside and outside the historic churches. New forms of religion are coming into Europe from outside, largely as the result of the movement of people. Finally, at least some of the people arriving from outside are offering a significant challenge to the widely held assumptions about the place of religion in European societies. It is equally clear that at least some aspects of exceptionality can be pursued by framing these statements in the form of questions, and by looking carefully at their implications for the religious life of Europe. For example: is Europe likely to produce a religious market like that found in the United States? The turn from obligation to consumption could be seen in this light. Conversely: is the residue of the state church sufficiently strong to resist this—maintaining thereby the notion of religion as a public utility rather than a freely chosen voluntary activity? And where in these complex equations do we place the newly arrived populations, whether Christian or not? The answers must be tentative, but I will offer three; the last takes the form of a cautious prediction about the future of religion in Europe. There are effectively two religious economies in Europe, which run alongside each other. The first is an incipient market, which is emerging among the churchgoing minorities of most, if not all, European societies, and in which voluntary membership is becoming the norm, de facto if not de jure. The second economy resists this tendency and continues to work on the idea of a public utility, in which membership remains ascribed rather than chosen. In this economy opting out, rather than opting in, remains the norm and is most visible at the time of a death. Interestingly, the two economies are in partial tension, but also depend upon each other—each fills the gaps exposed by the other. Exploring these tensions offers a constructive route into the complexities of European religion in the twenty-first century. Religion will increasingly penetrate the public sphere, a tendency driven largely by the presence of Islam in different parts of Europe. Paradoxically, in many ways this is easier for the active, increasingly voluntarist, Christian minorities to understand than those who remain passively attached to their (public) historic churches. For the former, seriously held belief leads to public implications; for the latter, seriously held belief is seen as a threat rather than an opportunity. The religious situation in Europe is and will remain distinctive (if not exceptional), given the legacies of the past. It is not, however, static. Clearly things are changing, 33
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and in some places very fast. Exactly how they will evolve is not easy to say, but I will conclude by making a cautious and three-fold prediction—the first part is tentative, the second more certain, and the third increasingly evident. First—I think that vicarious religion will endure at least until the mid-century, but maybe not for much longer. It follows that the actively religious in Europe will increasingly work on a market model, but the fact that their choices will include the historic churches complicates the issue (the alternatives are not as mutually exclusive as they first appear). Second—I know that the presence of Islam is a crucial factor that we ignore at our peril. Not only does it offer an additional choice, but it has become a catalyst of a much more profound change in the religious landscape of Europe. Finally, the combination of all these factors will increase rather than decrease the salience of religion in public, as well as private, debate—a tendency encouraged by the ever more obvious presence of religion in the modern world order. In this respect, the world is more likely to influence the religious life of Europe than the other way round.
34
Secularization and the Impotence of Individualized Religion Steve Bruce
T
he secularization paradigm combines two things: an assertion about changes in the presence and nature of religion, and a collection of related explanations of those changes. It is not a universally applicable scientific law, but a description and explanation of the past of European societies and their settler offspring. Contrary to often repeated caricatures, it is not a simple evolutionary model and does not imply a single uniform future—but it does suppose that there are “socio-logics” to societal changes. Some changes go together; others do not. For example, feudal societies can have effective state churches; culturally diverse liberal democracies cannot. And that is not an accident. As I show below, it can be explained by fundamental features of the latter sort of society. A full elaboration of the secularization paradigm with sufficient data to convince the open-minded (some people are beyond persuasion) needs at least a book and it took me three.1 All I can do here is offer a few illustrative facts, elaborate one part of the explanation, examine in some detail one alternative to the secularization paradigm, and request that the reader make the charitable assumption that I will have dealt with the obvious criticisms in other places.
1
See my books Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Choice and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
Steve Bruce has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen since 1991. He has written extensively on religion in the modern world and on the interaction of religion and politics. His most recent works in the sociology of religion are Fundamentalism (2001), God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (2002), and Politics and Religion (2003).
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Secularization In 1851 about half the population of Britain attended church regularly. Now it is about 8 percent. Statistical data on religious beliefs are available only for the last fifty or so years, but they show a similar trajectory to that of church attendance. There has been a steady decline in the popularity of orthodox Christian beliefs. On the existence of God, Britons now divide pretty equally between four positions: belief in a personal creator God, belief in “a higher power or life-force,” the wonderfully vague “there is something there,” and atheism or agnosticism. Baptism was once universal and so widely held to be essential that in the Middle Ages midwives were taught a simple formula to baptize babies thought unlikely to survive until the arrival of a priest. Now fewer than one-third of babies are baptized. In 1971 over two-thirds of weddings were religious; now it is less than one-third. There is no need to labor the point: anyone familiar with European societies will be aware of the drastic decline of organized religion. In Holland, the percentage of the adult population describing themselves as having no denomination rose from 14 percent in 1930 to 39 percent in 1997 and 42 percent in 2003.2 An overwhelming majority of Swedes (95 percent) seldom or never attend public worship, and Hamberg finds no evidence of revival in a situation that she describes as follows: the share of the population who adhere to Christian beliefs or who devote themselves to such traditional religious activities as prayer and church attendance declined in Sweden during the twentieth century…data indicate a decline not only in the prevalence of religious beliefs but also in the saliency of these beliefs.3 Even in the U.S., routinely held up as the great exception, churchgoing is now about 20 percent, down from about 50 percent in 1950. Equally important, those who still strongly associate with organized religion do so in a spirit markedly different than that of their grandparents. Most Christian churches have abandoned their supernatural focus, and the therapeutic benefits of faith (once firmly second place to placating God and ensuring salvation) are now advertised as the main point. The attitude of most believers has shifted: from being loyal followers to being selective consumers.
36
2
Nan Dirk De Graaf, Ariana Need, and Wout Ultee, “‘Losing My Religion’: A New and Comprehensive Explanation of Three Empirical Regularities Tested on Data for the Netherlands in 1998,” Patterns and Processes of Religious Change in Modern Industrial Societies—Europe and the United States, ed. Alasdair Crockett and Richard O’Leary (Lamenter: Edwin Millen, 1998) table 1.
3
Eva M. Hamberg, “Christendom in Decline: The Swedish Case,” The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf Astor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 47.
secularization and T he impotence of individualized religion / bruce
The explanation of the decline of religion is necessarily complex; the diagram I often use to illustrate the secularization paradigm has 21 boxes! I will mention here only a few of them. First, the idea that science displaces religion in a zero-sum contest to explain the world is largely a red herring. Contrary to the expectation of liberal theologians and advocates of the “higher criticism” in the 1890s, modern people seem quite capable of believing all sorts of twaddle (witness the popularity of alien abduction stories or theories of racial superiority). Insofar as science does impact faith, it is through technology (rightly or wrongly) giving us a sense that we are masters of our fate. Medieval peasants quite reasonably saw themselves as being of no significance in the eyes of either their worldly masters or their Creator God. Modern Western consumers think rather highly of themselves: they choose their microwaves, they choose their governments, and they choose which God to believe in and in what manner. Crucial to the marginalization of religion has been the combination of egalitarianism, individualism, and diversity. Any belief system is at its most plausible when it is entirely consensual. If everyone believes the same things, they are not beliefs; they are merely an accurate account of how things are. Using the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger drew our attention to the impact of the “pluralization of life-worlds” on the plausibility of religious belief systems: Our situation is characterized by a market of world views, simultaneously in competition with each other. In this situation the maintenance of certitudes that go much beyond the empirical necessities of the society and the individual to function is very difficult indeed. Inasmuch as religion essentially rests upon supernatural certitudes, the pluralistic situation is a secularizing one and, ipso facto, plunges religion into a crisis of credibility.4 Diversity, of course, need not provoke doubt. The first response to such a cognitive threat is usually martial: the deviants are murdered, expelled, or forcibly converted. This is where egalitarianism becomes relevant. In the modernizing industrial societies of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it became increasingly accepted that, despite obvious differences of birth, status, and talents, we were all in some sense much-of-a-muchness. People became reluctant to enforce religious conformity and ruling classes came to see social harmony as more important than religious orthodoxy. The Reformation insistence on the responsibilities of the individual gradually became a demand for the rights of the individual and rights gradually became separated from religious identities. Unless it is prepared to accept high levels of social conflict (and none were), the modernizing state, if it has to encompass diversity, must become increasingly religiously neutral. The public square is gradually evacuated. This not only removes formal state
4
Peter L. Berger, Facing Up to Modernity (Hammondsport: Penguin, 1979) 213.
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support for a particular religion; more importantly—and this is where Berger’s concern with “taken-for grantedness” is vital—it removes a whole range of opportunities for the religious tradition to be reinforced in day-to-day interaction. Where a community shares a common faith, big events such as births, deaths, and marriages can be glossed by the shared religion. The passing of the seasons can be similarly treated. And everyday conversation can reinforce the shared beliefs as people gloss even mundane matters such as the weather and crop yields in religious terms. The fragmentation of the religious culture into a range of competing alternatives drastically curtails the routine low-level social reinforcement of beliefs. When we can no longer be sure that those we meet share our faith, we tend to keep it to ourselves.
When we can no longer be sure that those we meet share our faith, we tend to keep it to ourselves.
At the societal level, the long-term result is a shift to evermore liberal and tolerant forms of religion and eventually to benign indifference. When all faiths are in some sense equally valid, parents lack an incentive to indoctrinate their children, and the environment proves stony ground for such seeds of faith as are planted.
In the terms of the classic typology of religious forms derived from Weber and Troeltsch, the church form of religion (with a single shared culture and institution providing a single plausibility structure for an entire society) becomes rare: it survives only in situations (Poland until 1990, Ireland until the 1960s) where the Church acts as a guarantor of national identity and integrity. And when that role becomes redundant, rates of adherence drop rapidly as the Church comes to be seen as just another pressure group. Here I will add a brief aside. Recent concern about Islamic fundamentalism in the West and about the reaction of some Western Muslims to such foreign policy matters as the war in Iraq and the Palestinian problem has led some commentators to consider that the church form of religion might enjoy a revival. The idea is that Islamic challenges to Western liberalism and secularity might stimulate a Christian revival, as Europeans with a nominal commitment to their previously dominant Christian traditions feel moved to explore their heritage faith and then acquire a real commitment to it. A revival of concerns about the public presence of one religion might encourage a revival in the more conventional sense. This seems a forlorn hope. Beyond the observation that those people who described themselves as “Christian” in England and Wales in the 2001 census is vastly greater than the number who ever trouble a Christian church, there is as yet no empirical evidence for revival. Insofar as fears of militant Islam are having any effect on secularization in Europe, it seems the opposite of that hoped for by church leaders. Because most Britons lack any acquaintance with Christianity (let alone a commitment to it) they see Islamic militancy not as proof that Islam is a bad religion, but as confirmation that any religion taken too seriously is a bad thing. To return to the typology of forms, the sect can survive if it can insulate itself from the wider society (possible in parts of the U.S., impossible in European societies), but this 38
secularization and T he impotence of individualized religion / bruce
comes at the cost of considerable sacrifice by its members. The denomination gradually declines because its members lack powerful incentives to indoctrinate their children. Which brings us to the cult. The term is often casually used to mean any small new religion we do not like. I use it to mean a diffuse, extremely tolerant form of religion that stresses private experience and grants to the individual the primary authority to decide what he or she will believe. This form of religion exists not in large formal organizations but in a milieu: a world of overlapping outlets and expressions through which individual consumers chart their own paths of preference. It is the future of this form of religion that I want to consider in the rest of this essay.
Diffuse Spirituality Many of the counters to the secularization paradigm are based on the belief that people are essentially religious. Religion is not seen as a social accomplishment (like, for example, speaking French) but as an expression of an innate biological need. The twin facts that we all die and that we can distinguish the self from the body cause us all to ask what the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate questions.” If it is the case that we all have a need for religion, then long-term secularization is impossible. If specific religions decline in popularity, then others must arise to fill the gap. For a brief time in the 1970s it looked as if a variety of usually Eastern-inspired new religious movements (NRMs) were going to fill the space left by the decline of the Christian churches, but it quickly became obvious that the scale was wrong. When the Moonies could never muster more than one thousand members in Britain and all the NRMs together did not come close to the numbers lost by the main churches in a month, hoping that these innovations could restore the religious capital of 1900 or 1950 was like setting a toy train engine to pull real freight wagons. A more plausible candidate is the highly personalized individualistic “New Age” spirituality of the cultic milieu. Regis Debray made the point elegantly in saying that the twilight of the gods was the “morning of the magicians.”5 The two are certainly related on the supply side. The decline of the Christian churches has negated their power to stigmatize alternatives as foreign and dangerous. In 2005, a serving naval officer managed to establish paganism as a legitimate religion that the British armed services should accommodate. As Partridge notes, there has been a vast increase in the range of spiritual revelations and therapies on offer in the West.6 But we should not confuse supply and demand measures. What matters for testing the secularization thesis is not the range of spiritual offerings being purveyed but the numbers who take them up and the spirit in which they do so.
5
Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary (London: Verso, 2004) 259.
6
Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Clark, 2004).
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Table 1. Experience and Salience of the New Age, Scotland 2001 Horoscopesa %
Divinationb %
Yoga or Meditation %
Alternative Medicinec %
Very important
1
2
3
5
Quite important
4
4
7
15
Not very important
21
13
9
20
Not at all important
15
11
4
5
Never tried
59
70
78
55
Note: Sample size for this table was 1,605. Percentage totals vary from 100 because of rounding. a Consulting horoscopes in newspapers and magazines. b Consulting a tarot card reader, fortune teller, or astrologer (excluding horoscopes in papers and magazines). c Alternative or complementary medicine such as herbal remedies, homeopathy, or aromatherapy.
In 2001, the Scottish Social Attitudes survey asked a representative sample if they had ever tried a variety of arguably New Age activities such as tarot cards, fortune telling, astrology, yoga or meditation, alternative medicines or therapies, and horoscopes; and if they had, how important were these in their lives.7 Table 1 summarizes the replies. Most Scots have not tried these things, particularly those that represent a significant commitment, and of those who have tried them, most do not think them very important. The questions are perhaps too blunt to make much of the answers, but there is a clear pattern that fits well with what colleagues at the University of Lancaster have found in their study of New Age providers and consumers in Kendal, a small town in the northwest of England.8 Led by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, the research team used a wide variety of techniques to identify everything (from organized yoga classes to one-to-one therapies) that could be seen as New Age activity, and through detailed interviewing and surveying compiled a reasonable estimate. They concluded that between one and two percent of the population are involved in the holistic milieu in a typical week. But it is worth looking more closely at the activities they survey. Table 2 summarizes the distribution of holistic milieu activities under nine headings.9
40
7
Steve Bruce and Tony Glendinning, “Religious Beliefs and Differences,” Devolution—Scottish Answers to Scottish Questions, ed. Catherine Bromley, John Curtice, Kerstin Hinds, and Alison Park (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003) 86–115.
8
Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
9
I am grateful to friend and collaborator David Voas, of the University of Manchester, for preparing these summaries of the Kendal data. The original data is publicly available at <www.kendalproject.org.uk>.
secularization and T he impotence of individualized religion / bruce
Table 2. Participation in the Holistic Milieu, Kendal 2000–02 Activity
%
Yoga and tai chi
45.5
Dancing, singing, art and craft
5.6
Massage, bodywork
13.9
Homeopathy
3.6
Counselling
3.5
Healing and complementary health groups
11.2
Reiki or spiritual healing
6.1
Specialized spiritual/religious groups
5.6
Miscellaneous one-to-one
5.0
It is hard not to be struck by how few activities listed are obviously spiritual. Over half of all involvement is in what most people would view as leisure or recreation: yoga, tai chi, dance, singing, art. Add in pampering (massage, bodywork) and you have covered nearly two-thirds. Not all the “healing and complementary health groups” are obviously spiritual or even unconventional; CancerCare, winner of the Queen’s Jubilee Award for Voluntary Service in the Community, is one of the larger ones. A fair proportion of the healing activities are based on distinctive beliefs, but even these (for example, homeopathy, reiki) seem pseudoscientific rather than necessarily spiritual. Fortunately, we do not have to argue about the nature of the activity or its significance for those involved because Heelas and Woodhead asked their respondents whether they saw their activities as spiritual. Only 51 percent of respondents saw their yoga classes as spiritual; for the massage category, the percentage spiritual was only 28 percent; for osteopathy only 10 percent; for “foot massage” (which involved typically 48 people) the figure was 25 percent. Only some 45 percent of those engaged in holistic milieu activities think of them as spiritual. Fewer than half of the respondents said that their participation had anything whatsoever to do with spiritual growth. In their defense of all this activity as a “spiritual revolution,” Heelas and Woodhead assert that “the figure we have arrived at for the holistic milieu…shows that Bruce…is wrong when he claims that ‘the number of people [in Britain] who have shown any interest in alternative religions is minute.’”10 It would be unproductive to argue over what is or is not “minute,” but the implications of their own work seem very clear. Taking New Age spirituality at its narrowest, it is trivial. In order to get over 1 percent
10 Heelas
and Woodhead 54–5.
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of the population, we need to encompass a variety of imported recreational activities, miscellaneous methods of relaxation, and diverse forms of alternative medicine, all practiced mainly by people who do not even pretend to see them as spiritual. Rather than seeing the New Age as compensating for a decline in Christianity, we should see it as an extension of the surgery, the clinic, the gym, or the beauty salon. It is primarily concerned with physical and psychological wellbeing.
The Future of the New Age To strengthen the proposition that what we are seeing is the decline of one form of religion rather than secularization per se, Heelas and Woodhead predict that the holistic milieu will double in size over the next forty to fifty years.11 This seems highly unlikely. They admit that at present holistic spirituality has a rather narrow socio-demographic appeal, and that the relevant section of the population (educated, middle-aged white women in people-orientated professions) may be approaching saturation point. Far from growing, it is not even clear that the holistic milieu can reproduce itself. Asked if their children were interested in the activity, two-thirds of respondents with offspring said “no.” Heelas is more struck by the fact that 32 percent said “yes,” but this level of transmission is disastrous.12 In a society where parents have only two children on average, 100 percent of them must be socialized into a practice for it to survive in the long term. Intergenerational transmission of Christian affiliation, attendance, and belief currently stands at about 50 percent, which is widely regarded as a major problem for churches.13 On the face of it the New Age has an even higher mountain to climb, not least because women with spiritual interests are more likely than average to be childless. In summary, an extremely detailed community study conducted by commentators sympathetic to New Age spirituality fails to convince us that this milieu comes close to providing a viable substitute for the decline of the Christian churches. Back to our toy train metaphor: the scale is wrong.
Self and Other Religions Not only is the New Age world very small, but there are good reasons to describe it as fragile. The weakness of community in the New Age is not an accident but an inevitable consequence of its solipsistic basis of authority. In the New Age, the self is the
11 Heelas
and Woodhead 137.
12 Paul
Heelas and Benjamin Seel, “An Ageing New Age?” Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures, ed. Grace Davie, Paul Heelas, and Linda Woodhead (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) 234.
13 David
Voas, “Intermarriage and the Demography of Secularization,” British Journal of Sociology 54.1 (2003): 83–108.
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final arbiter of truth and utility. If it works for you, it is true. There is no legitimate basis for imposing on others or even arguing. This makes any sort of concerted activity remarkably difficult. If two people disagree, there is no basis for settling the dispute. This explains why, for all the talk of counter-cultural and alternative community, New Age spirituality has not produced its alternative schools and communes. Although they do not appreciate the significance of their own examples (they want to describe New Agers as a “tribe”), Prince and Riches’s study of New Age in Glastonbury provides glaring examples of an inability to cooperate.14 In one example, a primary school collapsed because parents could not agree on how or what they wanted their children taught. In another, a small group of New Agers decided to meet regularly on Sunday mornings for some sort of collective act of “worship.” At the first meeting they talked about what they would do but could not agree. Fewer attended the second meeting and the initiative petered out. The Glastonbury ethnography raises an interesting genLeft to our own devices a eral problem that first occurred to me while lecturing to combination of sloth and students about the social reforms pioneered by British self-interest will always make evangelicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that sacrifice unlikely. the civilization of industrial society owes a great deal to committed Christians. The ending of slavery, limitations on the use of women and children in factories, controls on exploitation of workers, the construction of decent housing for workers, improvements in prisons, penny savings banks, mutual insurance, workers’ educational institutes, public schooling for the poor—all of these were the results of philanthropic activity by people who were driven by the related ideas that we could hardly expect the poor to be concerned about their souls when their bodies were sore oppressed and that a society that claimed to be Christian could not also be barbarous. Against that example, the social impact of New Agers seems trivial, and I take two points from the comparison. First, only a religion that has an authoritative reference point outside the individual is capable of providing a challenge to any status quo. Left to our own devices a combination of sloth and self-interest will always make sacrifice unlikely. Although New Agers are fond of talking of their revelations and therapies as life-changing, in practice mostly what changes is merely attitudes to their circumstances. The anxious repressed merchant banker who takes up yoga or meditation does not cease to be a banker; he may acquire a certain detachment from his work role and become a more contented holistic banker, but he continues in the mainstream. A very small number will “downsize.”
14 Ruth
Prince and David Riches, The New Age in Glastonbury: The Construction of Religious Movements (New York: Berghahn, 2000) 166–7, 176–8.
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They sell the expensive house in London and retreat to a cottage in Wales or Cumbria to make pottery and run weekend workshops in reiki healing. But the significance for the wider society is negligible. Worse, in many cases the change is no more than the acquisition of a new language to defend old patterns of behavior. Consider the example of sexual exploitation. In reading a number of accounts of Findhorn, Europe’s oldest New Age center, I am struck by how often male New Agers manage to seduce younger women by persuading them that getting in touch with their true feelings, discovering the angel within, coming into their power, or creating authentic relationships means having sex.15 To use the formal language of Max Weber, world-rejecting religion seems only possible if there is a shared external authoritative source of revelation: the God who punishes those who step out of line. If the only source of authority is the self—as in the classic New Age slogan, “to your own self be true”—any new perspective or revelation is more likely to be assimilated to our current circumstances than to provoke change. Second, whereas the Victorian evangelical movement was more than the sum of its parts because it was made up of individuals who were bound together by a shared faith, the New Age movement is always less than the sum of its parts because even the highly motivated and genuinely counter-cultural core is not united by common beliefs and values. Or to be more precise, it is united only in highly abstract operating and epistemological principles such as, “No one has the right to tell anyone else what to do.” My purpose here is not to criticize New Age spirituality (though that is hard to resist); it is to explain why it fails to resist co-option and bastardization. Since the 1960s elements of the entire world’s religious repertoire have been imported to Britain, but instead of secular Britons being transformed by Chinese necromancy, Native American sweat lodges, and Hindu notions of karma, the innovations have been stripped of their religious content.16 In its original context, feng sui is a serious matter of relating to the spirits of the dead. In Britain, it is a decorating style. Yoga is no longer a spiritual discipline; it is an exercise program. Meditation is not about attaining enlightenment; it is about relaxing. And ayur vedic medicine is just another cosmetics line from the Body Shop chain.
Conclusion I have concentrated on New Age spirituality because it encourages us to move part of the secularization debate forward. In Britain the Christian churches have shrunk to a point where reproduction is threatened, the major non-Christian religions brought to
15 Steve
Bruce, “Good Intentions and Bad Sociology: New Age Authenticity and Social Roles,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 13.1 (1998): 23–36.
16 Bruce,
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God Is Dead, 118–39.
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Britain by migrants since 1945 have not recruited beyond their original ethnic bases, and 1970s NRMs have failed to make any headway. We now have a society that is very largely secular, not just in the formal operations of major social institutions but also in popular culture. We are in a historically novel position. Over the next thirty or so years, we may be able to see if societies are religious because people are religious, or vice versa. If it is the case that people are in some sense enduringly interested in the religious and the spiritual (and thus our current secularity is temporary), then we should soon see evidence for this. New Age spirituality would seem to be a strong candidate for the future of religion because its individualistic consumerist ethos fits well with the spirit of the age. What is needed is serious research directed to assessing the spread, significance, and impact of alternative forms of spirituality. To date, little work has gone beyond being impressed by the growth of the supply of spiritual innovations. Such work as has attempted to measure demand suggests that alternative spiritualities will not refute the secularization paradigm.
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Challenging Secularization Theory: The Growth of “New Age” Spiritualities of Life Paul Heelas
O
f the various meanings which have come to be associated with the term “spirituality,” one is readily identifiable. Spirituality is taken to be life itself—the “life force” or “energy” that sustains life in this world, and what lies at the heart of subjective life—the core of what it is to be truly alive. It is part and parcel with authentic ways of being—as when one hears that “spirituality is love, love is spirituality.” “New Age” spiritualities of life—or contemporary spiritualities of life—can be distinguished from theistic spiritualities. Whereas New Age spiritualities are experienced as emanating from the depths of life within the here-and-now, the spirituality of the Holy Spirit, the spirituality of obeying the will of God, or the spirituality of experiencing the God-head itself are understood as emanating from the transcendental realm to serve life in this world. Take away the theistic God of religious tradition, and there is little left of Christianity (or theistic traditions); take away the God of theism, and New Age spiritualities of life remain virtually intact. The key words of New Age spiritualities are “experience” and “practice.” Rather than attaching importance to the beliefs, doctrines, and ethical injunctions of theistic traditions, importance is attached to experiencing the heart of life. Practices are taken to facilitate the inner quest. Drawn from many sources, most especially the spiritual “traditions” of the East, activities range from yoga (the most popular) to spiritual massage (also popular), from reiki to spiritual forms of the Alexander Technique. Enabling spiritual seekers to make contact with their inner depths, seekers experience spirituality
Paul Heelas is Professor in Religion and Modernity in the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster University. Being a classic “baby boomer” (born 1946) and having lived through the 60s whilst at University, he is especially interested in tracing how inner life spiritualities have developed and changed—a topic which is explored in his forthcoming volume, Spiritualities of Life: From the Romantics to Wellbeing Culture.
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flowing through other aspects of their personal lives—their bodies, their emotions, their relationships. To draw on a term that has acquired wide currency, namely “mindbody-spirit,” this is therefore mind-body-spirit spirituality.
The Growth of New Age Spiritualities in the West Concluding his discussion of religion and “alternative” spirituality in Britain, Steve Bruce writes that “in so far as we can measure any aspect of religious interest, belief or action and can compare 1995 with 1895, the only description for the change between the two points is ‘decline.’”1 Accordingly, secularization theory can be applied to explain decline “across the board.” But there is at least one major problem with the across-theboard application of secularization theory. Whether it be the beliefs and interests of individuals, specialized associational activities, institutional cultures or widely available cultural provisions such as books, New Age spiritualities of life have grown. Evidence is provided by the growth of the “holistic milieu,” namely associational activities, of a group or one-to-one variety, run by mind-body-spirit practitioners, which take place within their own self-contained contexts rather than within and with reference to broader institutional contexts like schools or businesses. From October 2000 to June 2002 I was part of a research team studying spirituality and religion in the market town and regional center of Kendal, a gateway to the Lake District of England. A primary aim of the Kendal Project was to establish whether the holistic milieu of the town and immediate environs (population 37,150) had grown, and if so, to what extent. By way of several methods, including use of British Telecom Archives of the Cumbria and North Lancashire Yellow Pages running back to 1969, we established that there were virtually no holistic, mind-body-spirit activities in 1970. At the time of our research, however, there were 126 separate activities provided by 95 spiritual practitioners—41 practitioners served 63 different groups and 63 practitioners worked with individual clients (9 practitioners served both groups and individual clients). Including the practitioners, 600 people were involved with mind-body-spirit activities during a typical week, amounting to 1.6 percent of the total population of Kendal and the immediate environs.2 Even in the Glastonbury of 1970, there were very few holistic milieu activities of the kind found today. However, there are very good reasons to suppose that over 900,000 inhabitants of Great Britain are now active on a weekly basis in the holistic milieu of
1
Steve Bruce, “Religion in Britain at the Close of the 20th Century: A Challenge to the Silver Lining Perspective,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 11.3 (1996): 273.
2
For more on the Kendal Project, and on some of the data that follow in this essay, see Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). See also <www.kendalproject.org.uk>.
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the nation—a not inconsiderable figure. Yoga, with around 400,000 participants, is of greater numerical significance than the regular participants of Methodist congregations (372,600) or Pentecostal churches (216,400); the number of holistic milieu practitioners (146,000) is considerably in excess of National Health Service general practitioners (37,352). In the U.S., the holistic milieu of the nation has grown from being tiny in 1970 (an obvious exception being the San Francisco Bay area) to between 2.5 and 8 percent of the total population. A poll carried out by the Harris Interactive Service Bureau in 2003 found that 7 percent of U.S. adults, or 15 million people, practice yoga—an increase of 28.5 percent from the previous year. Not all practice yoga in associational milieu settings, but many do. Additional evidence is provided by the growth of complementary and alternative forms of “medicine” (CAM), which are often provided by mind-body-spirit practitioners. According to David Eisenberg, et al., for example, survey research suggests a “47.3% increase in total visits to alternative medicine practitioners, from 427 million in 1990 to 629 million in 1997, thereby exceeding total visits to all US primary care physicians.”3 Turning to evidence of growth within mainstream institutions, all the schools of England and Wales are legally required to attend to the spiritual development of their pupils. As defined by Ofsted (the government’s inspection agency), “spiritual development” relates “to that aspect of inner life through which pupils acquire insights into their personal existence which are of enduring worth…a non-material dimension to life,” it being explicitly stated that “‘spiritual’ is not synonymous with religious.”4 Given that Ofsted visits schools to judge the quality of provisions for spiritual education, it is not surprising to find evidence that inner life spirituality is becoming more significant within the mainstream educational system. Many primary schools now provide yoga and tai chi for their pupils (and parents); some have special areas where pupils can go for creative, calming, and holistic therapies. Within another sphere of public services, the National Health Service, government charters and plans state that nurses must attend to “the spiritual needs” of their patients. Although this includes attending to the “spiritual needs” of theistic believers, it is clear that patients and their nurses are increasingly concerned with holistic, mind-body-spirit spirituality. And so are doctors. By 2001, almost half of the general practices in England were providing access to CAM activities, with almost one-third of activities being provided “in-house” by doctors themselves or their staff. Regarding the U.S., much the same picture is to be found, one indicator being that some 10 percent of hospitals now provide alternative forms of healing, often with a spiritual orientation.5
48
3
David M. Eisenberg, et al., “Trends in Alternative Medicine Use in the United States, 1990–1997,” Journal of the American Medical Association 280.18 (11 November 1998): 1,569.
4
Cited in Heelas and Woodhead 71–2.
5
Evidence is provided by Paul Heelas, “Nursing Spirituality,” Spirituality and Health International (forthcoming): 1–16.
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Holistic spirituality is also a growing presence within the heartlands of capitalism. According to Douglas Hicks in his study of current interest in religion and spirituality in U.S. companies, “along with a new public Christian evangelicalism, New Age language fundamentally shapes discussions of contemporary workplace spirituality.”6 Indeed, surveying the evidence provided by the numerous companies which have incorporated “the sacred,” it can be argued that inner life spirituality has become more significant than Christianity, with many employees (especially in larger companies) participating in trainings, courses, and seminars that aim to release and optimize the resources that lie within—including what spiritual “energy,” “wisdom,” and “creativity” have to offer. In terms of the numerical significance of inner life beliefs Holistic spirituality is also a among the general population, the best evidence to date is growing presence within the provided by Eileen Barker. Drawing on the 1998 Religious heartlands of capitalism. and Moral Pluralism (RAMP) survey of eleven European countries, she reports that 29 percent agree with the statement, “I believe that God is something within each person, rather than something out there,” with an additional 15 percent agreeing with the statement, “I believe in an impersonal spirit or life force.”7 In the U.S., the importance of inner life spirituality is indicated by George Gallup and Timothy Jones’s finding that “almost a third of our survey defined spirituality with no reference to…a higher authority,” a typical response being that spirituality is “the essence of my personal being.”8 Although comparison is not made easier by virtue of the fact that survey questions have tended to change over the years, it is safe to say that the picture of Europe and Britain over time adds up to one of growth. In sum, with no (significant) indices of decline, we can reverse Bruce’s assessment to conclude that “the only description for…change…is ‘growth.’”
The “Symptom of Secularization” Defense Faced with evidence of growth, across-the-board secularization theorists have adopted the strategy of arguing that expansion is more apparent than real. The argument is that a great deal of holistic mind-body-spirit spirituality is part of the very process of secularization itself. As David Voas and Steve Bruce make the point, “Unconventional spiri-
6
Douglas A. Hicks, Religion and the Workplace: Pluralism, Spirituality, Leadership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 31.
7
Eileen Barker, “The Church without and the God within: Religiosity and/or Spirituality?” Religion and Patterns of Social Transformation, ed. D. M. Jerolimov, S. Zrinscak and I. Borowik (Zagreb: Institute for Social Research, 2004) 38.
8
George Gallup, Jr., and Timothy Jones, The Next American Spirituality (Colorado Springs: Chariot Victor, 2000) 49.
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tuality is a symptom of secularisation, not a durable counterforce to it.”9 Compared to the “real thing”—religious tradition—New Age spiritualities of life are impoverished, vague, attenuated, and quasi-spiritual, if not secular. To discuss this defense in connection with the Kendal Project, Voas and Bruce draw attention to the finding that nearly half of the respondents to the questionnaire sent to all the participants of the holistic milieu did not consider their activities to be of spiritual significance. Although all the practitioners might have been providing activities that they understood to be spiritual, a considerable number of group members or one-to-one clients understood homeopathy or osteopathy, for example, as devoid of spirituality. However, Voas and Bruce do not take into account the finding that 82 percent of all respondents agreed with the statement that “some sort of spirit or life force pervades all that lives,” with 73 percent agreeing that there is “subtle energy (or energy channels) in the body.” Furthermore, 71 percent rated “spirituality” between 6 and 10 on a scale from 1 (not at all important) to 10 (very important), with 38 percent selecting 10. The milieu is thus by no means secular as the understanding of activities by some participants might lead one to suppose; Voas and Bruce themselves write that questionnaire responses are “extraordinarily high on unconventional beliefs.”10 As for elsewhere in Britain, Suzanne Hasselle-Newcombe’s study of the Iyengar Yoga Jubilee Convention held at Crystal Palace, London, during 2002 finds much the same picture: 83 percent of questionnaire respondents “describe themselves as having a spiritual life” whilst 47 percent have a “‘spiritual’ interest in their practice.”11 The extent to which the holistic milieu differs from the secular is seen in the criticisms directed at CAM by scientific researchers. To mention just one critic, Raymond Tallis, a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, writes that acupuncturists require one to believe ideas about illness for which there is no evidence, other than the sacred texts of Chinese medicine: that there are patterns of energy flow (Qi) throughout the body that are essential for health; that disease is due to disruptions of this flow; and that acupuncture corrects the disruptions and suggests that such practitioners use “untested medicines invested with the magic of antiquity and the subversive charm of irrationality.”12 From the perspective of critics
9
David Voas and Steve Bruce, “The Spiritual Revolution: Another False Dawn for the Sacred,” A Sociology of Spirituality, ed. Kieran Flanagan and Peter Jupp (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).
10 Voas
and Bruce.
11 Suzanne
Hasselle-Newcombe, “Spirituality and ‘Mystical Religion’ in Contemporary Society: A Case Study of British Practitioners of the Iyengar Method of Yoga,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 20.3 (2005): 312.
12 Raymond Tallis,
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Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents (London: Atlantic, 2004) 129, 133.
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like Tallis, a chasm exists between the explanations and procedures of orthodox medicine and CAM—a chasm that reveals the extent to which beliefs like “subtle energy (or energy channels) in the body” deviate from the secular world of science. It is true that some of those participating in the holistic milieu of Britain (as elsewhere) are simply doing yoga for stress relief (for example). It is also true that a smallish minority (probably in the order of 20 percent) do not acknowledge belief in inner spirituality or spiritual energy. The fact remains, though, that the great majority of participants accept spirituality, and those who do not sometimes accept the existence of scientifically untenable states of affairs, such as the operation of non-material, invisible chakras.13 Generally speaking, the holistic milieu activities of Western countries are not the “last gasp” of the sacred sought out by those who are happy to make do with the impoverished. Without going into detail here, the growth of the milieu attests to its vitality—a vitality which owes a considerable amount to the fact that the milieu (in any particular locality and beyond) works by way of shared, mutually confirmed, “cultural” values, expectations, key terms (like “spiritual energy” or “life force”), and key experiences (like “harmony,” “inner healing,” or “holistic wellbeing”).14
Explaining Growth With secularization theory very much dwelling on the decline of religious tradition in “Western” settings, the challenge is to develop alternative explanations—explanations that specifically attend to the growth of New Age spiritualities of life. The development of the assumptions, beliefs, and values of the autonomous self during modernity is pivotal. The argument is basically simple. Whatever the reasons for this development—which are multiple—the autonomous self has to have what Lionel Trilling refers to as “internal space.”15 To be autonomous the self must act on the basis of what belongs to itself. Appropriate subjectivities, taking place within internal “space” and which can only be experienced by the self, are required for the self to be able to consider itself able to exercise control, make judgments, act on the world, express itself, and grow whilst being true to itself. Much of the content of the autonomous self of Western societies is (relatively) secular: the “mind” itself; “will” and the ability to exercise “will power”; being “imaginative” and “creative”; regulating one’s “emotions” to
13 See
Paul Heelas, “The Holistic Milieu and Spirituality: Reflections on Voas and Bruce,” A Sociology of Spirituality, ed. Kieran Flanagan and Peter Jupp (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).
14 See
Paul Heelas, “The Infirmity Debate: On the Viability of New Age Spiritualities of Life,” Journal of Contemporary Religion (forthcoming).
15 Lionel
Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1974) 24. For a brilliant analysis of the muting of “inner space” in a culture where individual autonomy is equally muted, see Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961).
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exercise authority; calling one’s “intuition,” “experience,” or one’s sense of what “feels right” into play to make decisions; being “authentic,” honest about oneself, emotionally “intelligent” in dealing with malfunctioning relationships. However, given the value ascribed to being autonomous, an effective way of informing, articulating, or emphasizing autonomy is by locating the “sacred”—with its powers—within the subjectivities of the self. And indeed a considerable body of evidence shows that autonomous selves are much more likely than conformist selves to hold inner life, spiritual beliefs.16 As the sociocultural order becomes increasingly restrictive, people increasingly come to value their freedom. The becomes increasingly “ideology” of autonomy, which is certainly deeply rooted in “Western cultures,” comes to the fore precisely when it restrictive, people increasingly is most threatened. The fact that people are “determined” come to value their freedom. to be free—maybe in one sense of the word (in line with Foucault), but certainly in the sense of their own self-determination—counters the Foucault-inspired objection that “autonomy” is subverted by implicit regulatory or constructivist processes.
As the sociocultural order
Another question arises in relation to the argument I have outlined: surely it is perfectly possible to be autonomous without buttressing the exercise of freedom by way of inner spirituality? Given that this question has to be answered in the affirmative, we then have to ask: why do some people, but not others, believe in the sacred within? Unfortunately, critical, detailed evidence has yet to be provided. Other than those participating in holistic milieu activities, we know very little about the gender, occupational, age, educational, etc. profiles, or the values and worldviews of those in the population at large who believe in the sacred within, and not “simply” in being autonomous. Neither do we have a clear idea of the number of people who do not go to church (or other places of worship) on a regular basis, who value autonomy, but who continue to believe that the sacred is primarily located in the transcendental realm. I strongly suspect, however, that an ingredient which has to be added to the autonomy argument lies with the role played by the mysteries of life. In 1841 Feuerbach wrote that “Man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in himself.”17 What he called “religion,” Feuerbach argued, is increasingly found within our consciousness—our consciousness of our infinite, mysterious nature. Scientific advance since the time of Feuerbach has done nothing to dispel the inexplicable nature of consciousness and life. Indeed, as Einstein was fond of observing, scientific progress highlights the unknown. Whether it be life or the universe, there must be something more that is way
16 See Heelas and Woodhead 113–23; see, in particular, the pioneering research carried out by S. Houtman
and D. P. Mascini, “Why Do Churches Become Empty, While New Age Grows?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41.3 (2002): 455–73.
17 Ludwig
52
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: Harper, 1957) 13–4.
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beyond our ken as mere partially evolved mortals. And the more you think about it, the more mysterious it becomes. The irreducibility of the great mysteries… Especially with the decline of belief in the transcendental world since the time of Feuerbach, if the sacred is to be located in this world (and where else can it go?) it will be in the realm of the mysterious: the realm that exists beyond the mere materialities of the secular world—a realm that can be experienced but not grasped by the mind. In Durkheimian fashion, the “sacred” is quite naturally associated with the most important, ultimate of cultural values. Hence, it is the interior home for many of the “free spirits” who value the autonomous way of being. The “sacred” also quite naturally dwells with the mysterious. Hence the probability that it has its interior home with those who are most aware of the unfathomable, inexplicable depths of life (or, as with Einstein and other preeminent scientists, the universe). I predict that research will show that those whose self-reflexivity about life has been stimulated by college or university education (especially in the humanities and social sciences), then exercised by careers in personcentered jobs (most obviously hospices) where “meaning and purpose” issues come to the fore, will be most aware of the mysteries of life. Such people, who almost certainly value autonomy, are therefore the most likely to hold beliefs of the kind reported by Eileen Barker; or to participate in holistic milieu activities to explore the significance of their lives by plumbing the depths of “life” affirming life. Just as the powers, capacities, and value of the inner life mean a great deal to the autonomous self, so the question of what it means to be alive means a great deal to those who adhere to the ethic of humanity. Assessing the significance of the “religion of humanity,” as he called it, Durkheim claimed that the ethic has become a fact, it has penetrated our institutions and our mores, it has blended with our whole life, and if, truly, we had to give it up, we would have to recast our whole moral organization at the same stroke.18 Durkheim’s claim is even more justified today, at least in “the West.” Fuelling the value of freedom by way of the importance attached to the value of “respecting the other,” and the associated institutionalization of human rights, the core value of the ethic in fact lies with life itself. The basic assumption of the ethic is that life itself—what we all share by virtue of the life of humanity—lies beyond “difference” (ethnic, gendered, national, etc.). Other values—for example equality and respecting the other—flow from this. Acknowledging that no one human being is the same as another, freedom is valued as providing the opportunity for people to “live out” their humanity in their own way—so long as life itself (and the freedoms of others) is not (unnecessarily) at stake. In short,
18 Emile
Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society, ed. Robert Bellah (London: The University of Chicago Press 1973) 46–7.
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the ultimate value assigned to life itself by the dominant ethic of “the West,” and in many other parts of the world, means that it is not surprising that Durkheim called it the “religion” of humanity. Neither is it surprising that so many today explicitly locate the sacred within the depths of this shared life. (Recall the key Kendal Project finding that 82 percent of questionnaire respondents agreed with the statement that “some sort of spirit or life force pervades all that lives.”) Whatever the precise role played by the “secular” ethic of humanity in explaining the growth of inner life spirituality, there is undoubtedly an extremely close match between the two. That they share the theme of there being a universal core to life, expressing or “manifesting” itself through the unique life experiences of particular individuals by way of the (relative) freedom which they are accorded, undoubtedly shows that the “secular” ethic has played an important role in providing assumptions for, and in lending plausibility to, the explicitly sacralized rendering of the ethic in contemporary spirituality of life circles today. Whereas the ethic of humanity is grounded in “life in general,” the development of the autonomous self is more about “life in particular”: the unique life of the experiences of each person. With the development of the autonomous self, subjective life—so vital an aspect of the self-understanding of the autonomous agent—becomes an increasing focus of attention and concern. Catering to subjective life, fuelling it, perhaps constituting particular elements, subjective wellbeing culture has thus become a vehicle for a range of careers, adding up to one of the largest (if not the largest) employment sectors of contemporary modernity. And the culture of subjective wellbeing has played a major role in the growth of inner life spirituality. All cultures are bound up with the wellbeing (or not) of their denizens. Subjective wellbeing culture is marked out by the explicit (often highly elaborated) attention that is paid to subjective life. One sees this, for example, in the difference between the car ad that provides the objective facts (fuel consumption, number of cylinders, etc.) and the one that declares “Experience the Difference” or “The Drive of Your Life,” with only a photograph. Clearly, you might be pleased about the fuel consumption figure—but the fact remains that the life of experience is not explicitly addressed in objective, impersonal provisions of this variety. Those working within subjective wellbeing culture seek to align their provisions and activities with the elementary “logic” of enhancing the quality of subjective life. Given that the subjective life of any particular individual is unique, provisions or activities are personalized or individualized as much as possible (or are left intentionally vague so as to be inclusive and open to personal interpretation). The key is to enable people to “be themselves” (where the unique comes in) “only better” (which is where the enhancement of quality comes in)—a two-fold aim which is frequently advanced by encouraging people to go “deeper” into their experiences to develop their qualities and circumvent their limitations (and for those who regard life as unfathomable, there is plenty of scope for 54
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going “deeper”). From child-centered or “independent” education, to manager-centered “soft capitalism,” to patient-centered nursing, to guest-centered spas and hotels, to the more individuated health and fitness clubs, to customer-centered shop floor assistants, to “person”-centered call center operatives, to viewer-centered “reality TV” shows, to reader-“engaging” or “life-provoking” autobiographies and women’s magazines, to advertising, to client-centered therapists, to life-skill coaches: Provisions and services offer a provisions and services offer a wide range of ways of being yourself only better. The child-centered primary school wide range of ways of being teacher works in the spirit of Rousseau to cultivate the paryourself only better. ticular abilities or “gifts” of individual children and to help particular children to develop their own “well-rounded” personalities; the therapist at the spa endeavors to work with her guest to facilitate the best possible experiences; those producing “reality TV” shows aim to provide as many opportunities as possible for the individual viewer to learn from the “personalities,” both how to avoid ill-being and how to be happy and successful as a person. What has all this got to do with the growth of New Age spiritualities of life? Within the ranks of those supplying the provisions of purchasing culture, any good market researcher will be aware of the inner life beliefs of the kind reported by Eileen Barker. Market researchers will know that the sales of newspapers (like the Daily Mail) or (women’s) magazines like O The Oprah Magazine benefit from the inclusion of articles catering to the hopes of those with beliefs of this variety; market researchers will know that “spiritual” products sold in health and beauty shops are likely to appeal to those who think that holistic spirituality might well improve their quality of life. And in turn, the widespread presence of spiritually “significant” provisions—not least the many books housed under the “self-improvement,” “health and fitness,” and (of course) the “mind-body-spirit” categories in the wellbeing zones of major bookstores—could well be serving to contribute to the increase in the number of people who believe in inner spirituality, perhaps even influencing the “I definitely believe in something” camp. “Capitalizing” on widespread beliefs in what lies within and what this realm has to offer, many of the provisions and activities of subjective wellbeing culture have introduced holistic, mind-body-spirit themes. Sometimes these are well-developed; sometimes they provide a “taste”; sometimes they take the form of allusions to inner life spirituality and hints of what it promises. Relative to context, inner life spirituality is thriving. It adds to the “better” or “more” of more secular forms of subjective wellbeing culture by offering an additional means to the end of the “more.” Working from within the heart of the person, to flow through her or his personal life, it does not distract from the unique—the “I am what I am” anchorage of so much of modern culture.19
19 Whether
or not people are “taken in” by the advertising (etc.) of much of subjective wellbeing is not my concern here. What matters is that they have the opportunity to be “taken in to” their subjectivities.
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The assumptions and values of subjective wellbeing culture—the importance of subjective life; the positive, “can do” way it is envisaged; the theme of exercising autonomy to develop, express, and celebrate who you really are—are writ large in the holistic milieu. Accordingly, expectations aroused by subjective wellbeing culture can serve to direct people to the specialized zone of the milieu itself. Here, they can engage in associational, face-to-face activities to go “deeper” into what is to be found in other areas of the culture. One reads about yoga and wellbeing in a popular magazine; one decides to “work out” whilst watching a yoga DVD; one gets interested, buys a book or two, and reads about chakras, energy flows, and what yoga has to do with the purpose of life; one gets older and starts thinking about one’s health and what one’s life is all about; one exercises one’s autonomy to find out what works best; one finally settles with a tai chi group; one “realizes” things about oneself that one had not known before. Or again: a primary school teacher feels that she should really do something to prepare for the upcoming Ofsted inspection; she introduces “stilling” sessions; she experiences the effects for herself and observes the results in the classroom; she decides to join a meditation group. Many of the participants of the holistic milieu work, or have worked, in person-centered, wellbeing professions—nursing, education, counseling, therapy, HRD, and so on. Many become active in the holistic milieu because they have been unable to fulfill their holistic, person-centered, subjective wellbeing concerns within the workplace. Take the National Health Service hospital nurses as an example: on the one hand, governmental policies direct them to respond to the “spiritual needs” of their patients; on the other, they are terribly busy working to comply with scientific and bureaucratic procedures. A number of nurses whom I interviewed were seriously interested in “growth” by way of working closely with others and with what holistic spirituality has to offer, but got so frustrated with the “iron cage” of the ward that they simply left or went part-time, to liberate themselves by becoming practitioners in the holistic milieu.20
20 For
more on the role played by subjective wellbeing culture, including wellbeing-oriented professions such as nursing, see Heelas and Woodhead. If space permitted, consideration could also be paid to other growth factors, including the roles played by increasing prosperity; the increase of enrollment in college and higher education; the self-reported efficacy of holistic activities in enhancing the quality of life; the ways in which “humanistic” spirituality provides a useful way of appealing to “the same” in the increasingly multicultural environment of many schools and hospitals (for example); the ways in which inner life spirituality lends itself to serving the interests of the managerial sector (in particular) of mainstream businesses; the decline of belief in “human” existence in heaven, meaning that increasing value is attached to living a fulfilling, experience-laden life in the here-and-now; the widespread loss, at least in Britain, of knowledge of Christian beliefs, opening up the “space” for spiritualities that, until recently, were widely regarded as deviant; the ways in which the “empiricism” of holistic spiritualities of life—the test of “what works in my experience”—suits the ethos of consumer culture pragmatism; the celebratory, celebrity factor; and, somewhat conversely, the ways in which the egalitarianism of inner life spirituality suits the democratic, anti-deferential ethos that is widely in evidence today.
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Conclusion The across-the-board claim—that both religion and “alternative spirituality” are in decline—is clearly wrong. A great deal of evidence might show that regular church attendance is falling in many countries (including the U.S.), but virtually all indices show that New Age spiritualities of life are growing, most especially the activities of the holistic milieu, activities and beliefs within mainstream institutions, and personal beliefs. Designed to explain decline, pluralization, and structural differentiation theories, for example, might well help explain why theistic beliefs among the general population are becoming less popular (the first theory) and why public institutions have generally lost most of the theistic significance that they might have had in the past (the second). But does secularization theory have anything to offer with regard to explaining the growth of holistic spiritualities of life? Since explanations of decline can hardly explain growth, the short answer to this ill-explored question is “no.”21 However, the longer answer is that certain sociocultural developments are associated with both decline and growth. Consider the process of pluralization. On the one hand, the increasing awareness of different religions probably contributes to loss of faith in tradition. (Why should one be right when they all claim to be true?) On the other, the same increase almost certainly contributes to the growth of humanistic, inner life spirituality (for example, to handle the problem of difference in multicultural public institutions, one finds the sacred within the common ground of humanity). Or consider the development of the autonomous self. In The Spiritual Revolution, Linda Woodhead and I argue that the subjectivization thesis serves to offer a particular explanation of growth, another for decline.22 Basically, the argument is that the “turn” to the autonomous self and its subjectivities—which Charles Taylor calls “the massive subjective turn of modern culture”—favors those forms of spirituality which resource one’s subjectivities and treats them as a fundamental source of significance, and undermines those forms of religion which do not.23 Experienced as the heart of life and flowing through the unique experiences that comprise personal life, holistic spirituality can appeal to the increasing number of free spirits in the culture—people who exercise their autonomy by trusting their own experience to find ways of “deepening,” thereby “elevating,” the quality of their subjective lives, their intimate relationships, their sense of fulfillment and authenticity—without sacrificing their uniqueness and sense
21 This is not to deny that secularization theorists have done a great deal to illuminate the nature of moder-
nity, thereby contributing to other explanations.
22 See
Heelas and Woodhead for further discussion.
23 Charles Taylor,
The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) 26.
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of authority. At the same time, however, the subjectivization thesis offers a particular explanation of decline. As the assumptions, beliefs, and values of the autonomous self oriented toward the subjective life become more widespread in Western cultures, there are progressively fewer traditionalists, conformists, or conservatives who are willing to remain with places of religious worship, let alone to start attending. And autonomous selves are unlikely to participate in forms of worship that require living by an order of things not of their own making, rather than by something from within their own (not dependent) life. Bearing on both growth and decline, the development of the autonomous self and the associated subjective turn of modernity provide a general explanation of change. The fact remains, though, that the particular ways in which growth and decline are explained are by no means the same. The adverse impact of the autonomous, unique, subjectively oriented mode of selfhood on theistic tradition is one thing; the positive impact on New Age spiritualities of life another. Secularization theory is not so much challenged as put in its place—a place where it serves to complement explanations of growth.
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In Search of Certainties: The Paradoxes of Religiosity in Societies of High Modernity Danièle Hervieu-Léger
T
he “rational disenchantment” characteristic of modern societies does not mark the end of religion. It has not caused the disappearance of the need to believe—far from it. This assertion—which nowadays would sound selfevident—formed the starting point, thirty years ago, of a theoretical revival in the sociology of religions. It paved the way for a major re-evaluation of the secularization process, a task still far from complete. One point has now been established, however: it has become clear that belief proliferates in proportion to the uncertainty caused by the pace of change in all areas of social life. But we also know that it sits less and less easily within the dogmatic frameworks offered by institutional religions. In societies that have adopted the autonomy of individuals as a principle, individuals create, in an increasingly independent manner, the small systems of belief that fit their own aspirations and experiences. I propose to review, in broad outline, a number of elements of “religious modernity,” deliberately choosing examples drawn from the European religious scene, which, as we know, is substantially different from that of the United States. The first thing that can be observed is the unpredictable diversity of these individual compositions of belief, which may include elements borrowed from a wide variety of symbolic resources. Today, individuals write their own little belief narratives using words and symbols that have “escaped” the constellations of meaning in which a given tradition had set them over the centuries. Regularly practicing French, Belgian, or Italian Catholics, actively integrated in a parish community, state their belief in reincarnation. Norwegian or Danish
Danièle Hervieu-Léger holds academic degrees in political science, law, and sociology. Professor (Directrice d’Études) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), she was elected President of the EHESS in 2004. She is also Chief Editor of the Archives des Sciences Sociales de Religions. Among her sixteen books is Religion as a Chain of Memory (2000).
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Lutherans affiliated with their national church advocate, in accordance with spiritual ecology, a religion in harmony with nature, which they see as an all-encompassing whole where the human has a place but does not possess any particular privileges over any other living organism. Jews claim to find in Buddhist meditation the authentic meaning of their relationship to the Torah. Believers of all origins assert composite religious identities, in which are crystallized the successive and cumulated stages of their personal spiritual search. At the same time, the organized structure of the belief systems authenticated by religious institutions is weakening: surveys on the beliefs of French people show that the vast majority of those who state a commitment to Catholicism no longer associate a belief in sin with the idea of possible damnation. Belief in a paradise after death holds out, but it is out-distanced—among practicing Catholics—by belief in reincarnation. The concept of hell is in the process of disappearing. More surprisingly, it seems that essentials of Christological belief are held only feebly by believers who nevertheless proclaim themselves “Christians.” Endless examples could be cited of this dual tendency towards the individualization and subjectivization of beliefs, on the one hand, and deregulation of the organized systems of religious belief, on the other. Seen from this angle, religious modernity means the individualized dissemination of convictions and the collapse of the religious codes that organized shared certainties within believing communities.
To Each His “Own” Truth: The Primacy of Authenticity The direct effect of this expressive individualism in the spiritual and religious sphere is to call into question, in the eyes of the believers themselves, the institutions’ claim to bear witness to “the true faith.” Thus, during a national survey on the beliefs of Catholics and Protestants carried out in Switzerland, only 2 percent of people questioned agreed with the following statement: “All religions are respectable, but only mine is true.”1 This down-toning of religious orthodoxies massively affects the younger generations and is apparent increasingly early. A survey carried out in France in 1998 shows that 6 percent of the population questioned, and only 4 percent of 18- to 29year-olds, think that their religion is the only true one.2 This putting into perspective of the orthodoxies upheld by institutions is part of a deeper movement in which the governing systems of truth are being displaced. Legitimization of belief is moving from religious authorities, guarantors of the truth of belief, to individuals themselves, who are responsible for the authenticity of their own spiritual approach. What gives value to
1
Roland J. Campiche, et al., Croire en Suisse(s) (Lausanne et Genève: L’Age d’Homme, 1992).
2 Yves Lambert, “Un paysage religieux en profonde évolution,”
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994) 123–62.
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the believer’s search, not only in his own eyes but also in the eyes of those with whom he dialogues, and before whom he testifies, is his sincerity and his personal commitment. The endeavor to conform to truths formatted by religious authorities has become completely secondary. This trend is also confirmed by Wade Clark Roof ’s studies in the United States on the religiosity of baby-boomers.3 Religious authorities themselves are contributing to this movement, by giving greater weight to the quality of personal spiritual experiences than to the strict orthodoxy of statements of belief. This tendency to consider that, in spiritual and religious matters, there is no truth other than that which is personal, and personally appropriated to oneself, is not a characteristic only of “floating” spiritual seekers, whose search for belief now has few links, if any, with claims of belonging to a particular community. It is also active within the domain of institutional religions, profoundly calling into question the hierarchical structures through which they underpin their authority in the field of truth. Of course, one could demonstrate that these mechanisms for bringing the faith of believers into conformity have never, historically speaking, functioned in a pure and perfect manner. But the novelty here is the rejection in strictly spiritual terms (in the name of faith itself ) of an institutional means of authenticating religious truth, which for centuries had represented both the support for the unquestioned universal validity of the major religions and the basis for the denominational definitions that identify different churches.
An Increasingly Broad “Symbol Market” Does the increasingly “do-it-yourself ” nature of individual beliefs mean we have entered into an era of spiritual fragmentation and radical change in perspective on shared certainties? Things are not so simple. It is true that contemporary belief systems are cobbled together from the resources available and accessible within a vast market of symbols. But the extreme dissemination of the little narratives produced by the individualization of belief must not be mistaken for a completely chaotic shattering of beliefs. Individuals freely assemble their personal “belief solution,” but they do so using symbol resources whose availability remains confined within certain limits. The first of these are related to the cultural environment; the second to the access that each person has to these resources. Reuse of elements taken from different sources is, up to a point, guided by the way the social environment represents and interprets the different contributing traditions. Thus, French Buddhism, currently being reinvented with great success, is propagated by a series of clichés that derive—somewhat distantly from the historical Buddhist tradition—from the assumed (and somewhat arguable!) closeness of Buddhism to flexibility in moral matters and to conciliatory openness towards 3
Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); and Spiritual Marketplace: Babyboomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
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other traditions that appeal to the modern individual. Obviously it is within the social classes most directly affected by the issues pertaining to this modern culture of the individual that this Buddhism revisited finds its main field for expansion. Furthermore, in this game of individualized belief composition, individuals display varied do-it-yourself skills, corresponding to differentiated social aptitudes. A Furthermore, in this forty-year-old graduate from a renowned university who lives in central Berlin and spends one-third of his time on business game of individualized trips will not cobble ideas together in the same way as a thirtybelief composition, year-old woman just arrived from the Caribbean who works as a cleaner. It is impossible to grasp the social logic of spiriindividuals display varied tual do-it-yourself composition without taking into account do-it-yourself skills… both the social conditions of an individual’s access to symbol resources of unequal availability and the cultural conditions of the use of these resources. It is true that relaxation of institutional control over belief favors individualistic dispersion of beliefs. But one should not overlook the fact that this dispersion still falls within a mechanism of social and cultural restrictions, the resonance of which remains extremely important. However, there is no doubt that the pool of symbol resources upon which individuals today are liable to draw in order to make their little personal belief system is undergoing considerable expansion in all societies of high modernity. This is a consequence of the general increase of cultural awareness linked to schooling and the development of communication, to the professional and geographical mobility that brings individuals into contact with a diversified range of cultural worlds during the course of their lives, and so on. I wish to retain two elements whose combination sheds some light on the increasing eclecticism characteristic of the belief productions of individuals. The first is the weakening of the family structures of religious transmission, which used to link an individual at an early age to a legacy of symbolic possessions that he inherited and that it was his role to pass on, in his turn, to the next generation. One of the characteristics of the contemporary religious scene is that religious identities are no longer inherited, or at any rate are less and less so. This breakdown of transmission is the result of a sequence of events that fall within the historical process of secularization. The pace of social and economic change, geographical and job mobility, and cultural transformations has dissolved the structures of plausibility in which inherited religious identities were formed. Competition from the spheres of belief and the normative systems to which they correspond in a pluralist society has contributed on a large scale to weakening the prescriptive power of religious references transmitted within the family. More recently, the “imperative to pass on the faith” has itself undergone the backlash of an individualization of belief that places individual choice at the forefront in religious matters. It is considered self-evident by increasing numbers of people in our societies that each individual must choose for him- or herself the lineage of belief with which he or she identifies: the intervention of parents, even assuming it were legitimate, no longer plays more than a subsidiary role. 62
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Furthermore, at the same time as a weakening of cultural and symbolic footholds formerly guaranteed by the early integration of individuals into a given religious tradition (a situation commonly described in terms of the ebb or disappearance of “religious culture” among the younger generations), the ready availability, with no special access code, of multifarious symbol stocks has expanded quite phenomenally. The profusion of religious sites on the internet offers a perfect illustration of this great bazaar of meanings in which individuals move around and take what they want. Alongside this explosion of virtual religion, the proliferation of published matter on religious topics, television, films, and the mainstream press all contribute to putting at everyone’s disposal information that—however partial or superficial it may be—broadens the “known religious landscape” of individuals. Two out of three French teenagers born into Catholic families have never been to mass or Sunday school. But they will without a doubt have seen movies such as Little Buddha, Seven Years in Tibet, or Witness. They will have made contact, through the intermediary of films, with the world of Jewish festivals or Ramadan, or with the themes of New Age trends and spiritual ecology. And their first exposure to the Gospels might well have been a successful popular musical. They will thus have discovered, albeit in the most anecdotal and unreliable fashion, the existence of diverse cultural, religious, and spiritual worlds that would, of course, have been unknown to their grandparents. In Europe much is made of the dangers, perhaps even the impending “cultural catastrophe,” entailed by such a chaotic spraying around of references to traditions known only fragmentarily. The fact remains that individuals build their capacity for spiritual and religious composition from this kaleidoscope of disparate data, almost invariably dislocated from the symbolic syntax that made it readable. It is better to attempt to reason on the basis of this situation than to vainly regret the time when early religious or ideological socialization enabled long-lasting stabilization of compact identities, clearly distinguishable from one another and socially identifiable.
The Greater the Individualization of Belief, the Greater Its Degree of Homogenization Does this fragmentation of personal religious structures imply that it is becoming impossible, in our societies, to share common beliefs? Or, in other words, does it imply that religious belief no longer plays any part in the working out of common worlds that bind individuals together? Things are somewhat more complex. The rejection of institutional approval of belief and the broadening of the stock of references and symbols made available for use and reuse by individuals does not only signify the fragmentation of small systems of belief. At the same time, the liberalization of the symbol market gives room to a paradoxical tendency towards the standardization of these small narratives: a standardization that makes possible—in a context of general cultural globalization—their arrangement into networks on a worldwide scale. This proclivity for standardization is a very precise response to the mechanisms of a symbol economy increasingly in alignment with the general laws of the market. 63
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The economic logic of the standardization of products on offer for mass consumption has asserted itself, along with the liberalization of competition, in all areas of production, from the manufacture of goods to artistic production. It is also applicable in the field of symbol production. Although it is often a dubious procedure to resort to economic categories when examining religious phenomena, it is justifiable to make use of them here in a non-analogous manner. Standardization as a production procedure, in this area as in all others, is the direct consequence of the process of liberalization, itself made possible by the abolition of the institutional monopoly of truth. A good indicator of the logic of symbol production standardization in the Christian world can be found in charismatic Catholic territory, as well as in evangelical Protestant territory (especially Pentecostal), in the remarkable increase in adherence to a “minimum creed,” which can be summed up as follows: “God loves you, Jesus saves, and you can be healed.” Theological clarification of this “creed” is not required and its practical effectiveness is meant to be experienced personally by each believer. This “doctrinal reduction” is linked to the expansion within this movement of an emotional religiosity that explicitly preaches putting the intellectual mind on the back burner and promotes the value of emotional experience of the presence of the Spirit. This theological minimalism—which reduces the relation with transcendence to the mere emotional and personalized closeness experienced with the divine being—allows the efficient adaptation of the content of exhortation to the demands of modern individualism for self-fulfillment and personal realization. This “religiosity reduced to affect” is not, however, as is too often suggested, the recent product of an assumed “postmodernity.” It represents one of the culminations of the long process by which modernists have learned to think of themselves as beings endowed with an inner life and to think of their presence in the world no longer in a context of the order of things or of divine will, but rather of a search for happiness and wellbeing. Charles Taylor, in the broad panorama that he proposes of this process, traces it back to Saint Augustine and Descartes and follows it up right through to the present day.4 From the point of view of the history of spirituality, a major stage—after the Reformation and the radical assertion of religious individualism—can be identified in the great spiritual movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the invention of a “friendly God.” It must be noted, incidentally, that this emotional internalizing of the divine coincides chronologically with the relegation of the deists’ Great Clock-Maker to a distant heaven from which he refrains from intervening in the history of Men. But this spiritual dynamic obviously underwent new development with the coming of a “psychological modernity” (as Jean Baudrillard says5) and the highly contemporary reign of concern for the self. Faith as an operator of individual realization is (with various modulations)
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4
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Les sources du moi (Paris: Seuil, 1998).
5
Jean Baudrillard, “Modernité,” Encyclopædia Universalis, vol.11 (Paris: Encyclopædia Universalis, 1980).
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the central motif of modern religiosity. Frequent reference to the convergence of different individualized spiritual quests (following the pattern of “we are all saying and seeking the same thing,” “we are expressing the different aspects of a common truth in a variety of forms,” etc.) allows the idea of a “common core belief ” to be authenticated. But the content of this belief is thinning while at the same time being strengthened by the personal benefits that each individual is supposed to gain from it. This is the precise pivotal point of the standardization of spiritual goods as a production process and of the phenomenon of marginal differentiation, which represents its counterpart, as a consumer process. At the time when all the products on offer for consumption conform to a small number of common standard types, the individual consumer of these goods needs to be able to find in them the answer to individual expectations, recognized as such in their unshakeable distinctiveness. These dialectics, of the standardization of goods put into circulation and of the ultra-personalization of their forms of presentation to believers, is one of the major traits of the new spiritual currents unfurling inside and outside the main churches. This dual movement of standardization and personalization (present in all fields of consumption) here corresponds to a rational concept of privatizing access to symbol goods, which is being progressively substituted for a collective rationale, or a semi-collective one—which corresponds to the institutional and family transmission of religious identities.
The Greater the Homogenization of Belief, the Greater the Migration among Believers This homogenization of belief clearly encourages the migration of believers, who define and modulate spiritual courses that pay less and less heed to denominational and community boundaries. Such approaches bring the field of spirituality into contact with that of therapy, psychology, or personal and professional performance management. They depict a “pilgrim-like” form of religiosity, one that is willful, individual, and mobile; not, or only slightly, subject to norms; one that is modifiable and external to the routines governing the daily lives of the individuals concerned. Here we should stress the fluidity brought to these spiritual journeys by the standardization of supply, which enables seekers of meaning to find anew, in various forms, shared themes directly associated with typically modern individual requirements, especially regarding each individual’s right to satisfy his subjectivity. Two other factors encourage wider-ranging movements of believers beyond their community bases, or even away from their native religious soil. The first is the movement of religious innovation stemming from migration itself, and which in return reinforces the homogenization effect. Believers move around and borrow from the various banks of resources available, weaving their own tapestry of meanings along the way. At the same time, it is possible to group together these individual 65
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belief productions on the basis of the play of mutual authentication that occurs within peer networks, where individuals come to seek essential confirmation of their own productions of meaning. These conglomerates produce new syntheses of belief that, drawing on the various sources that nourish them, create new bridges between different religious worlds. These bridges are actually (thematic or practical) structures of transposition from one religious sphere to another, transpositions that, in turn, help to make believers more mobile. In this way, one can observe the appearance of “converters” that, by their very polysemy, make it possible to connect networks of meaning rooted in different religious traditions. In this context, one may emphasize the place held by the question of reincarnation—freely reinterpreted, in highly un-Buddhist terms—as the boon of another chance to lead a successful life and avoid the dead-ends and failures of one’s initial path. Another “topical converter” of the utmost importance is the idea of healing, which establishes communication between the traditional religious worlds (where healing connects with the prospect of salvation, which it both heralds and anticipates) and the modern rediscovery of the centrality of the body in the process of self-construction. But there are also “practical converters,” which make possible transpositions from one experiential context to another, and from one symbolic world to another: the spread of meditation techniques (calling upon a variety of different cultural and religious traditions) also constitutes a good reference point for analyzing these migration phenomena. The second factor triggering believer migrations is the mass development of communications that enable the worldwide exchanges through which believers obtain confirmation of their own syntheses of belief. The multiplication of religious sites on the internet and the lively activity of “discussion forums” on spiritual topics are, as has already been pointed out, the first sign of this. Exploration of the implications of this phenomena are only just beginning, not only from the standpoint of the standardization of means of expression defined by the “web” (communication styles, the conventions of “netiquette,” etc.), but also from the standpoint of the effects of abstraction and virtualization or the disembodying effect of the phenomenon on the relationship between individuals communicating by this means. This abstraction also furthers the homogenization of forms of religious expression, since it makes radically less remarkable a relationship of dialogue requiring, under the governing system of religious modernity, mutual authentication of belief.
The More Individual Believers Migrate, the Greater Their Need for “Community Niches”: The Paradox of Rejoining a Community The most striking paradox of this situation is this: the more beliefs circulate, the less they determine tangible affiliations and the more they further a desire for community liable to evolve into intensive forms of religious socialization. The extreme acceleration of the circulation of beliefs, in particular via the media, stretches the connection between belief and belonging almost to the breaking point. The belief choices of indi66
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viduals are more and more dissociated from the processes of socialization that ensure the introduction, however limited, of individuals into tangible groups. The bond that one chooses to preserve with some kind of spiritual family is now supported by no more than, one could almost say, minimal references, shared on a worldwide scale. One may call to mind the prodigious sales of Paulho Coelho’s books—translated into every language with millions of copies sold—or the media success of the Dalai Lama’s works. In these extreme conditions, this tendency towards global circulation of props to belief—which is both fragmented to the extreme and yet standardized, within networks more and more distended or even virtual—tends to submerge the exchanges between individuals that are necessary for the mutual authentication (and therefore a minimum of stabilization) of beliefs. The whole paradox of religious modernity lies in the fact There can be no subject that the extreme fluidity of beliefs, which bears witness to without the ability to “speak.” the emancipation of individuals from the tutelage of the great institutions of meaning, rarely provides the “minima And this ability implies of certainty” that they need in order to create their perthe confrontation with an sonal identities, as believers called upon to assume their autonomy in all areas. These same individuals claim the otherness… right to direct their spiritual course themselves and give precedence to the authenticity of this personal quest over any form of compulsory conformity to the “truths” of which religious institutions claim to be the guardians. But for all this they have not eradicated the need to dialogue with others and to testify to their experiences. In fact they continue to seek, by means of such communication, a “sharing of certainties,” which does not challenge the individualization of belief process—quite the contrary, in fact. In order to understand that this trend towards individualization does not in any way contradict the search for a community where one can declare one’s personal search, it must be remembered that the need for subjectivization cannot really be met just through personalized consumption of increasingly standardized symbol goods. For it has the more fundamental aim of making meaning of individual experience. It thus requires the construction of a narrative, an operation that is itself inseparable from an “ability to speak” that makes up the subject’s own identity. There can be no subject without the ability to “speak.” And this ability implies the confrontation with an otherness, outside of which no language—and hence no recognition—is possible. However, it is the action of recognition that, through interaction and dialogue, makes possible the grounding of meanings individually produced and their introduction into social life. In other words, there is no possible rendering of spiritual experience as a narrative unless the individual, at some point, meets another individual able to confirm it for him: “What has meaning for you also has meaning for me.” If this narration is performed according to a religious mode, it requires the existence of a means of authentication of belief, by which an individual’s subjective and objective connection to a particular lineage of belief can be constructed. Invoking the continuity of a lineage received 67
T he H edgehog R eview / S pring & S U mmer 0 6
from the past, and qualified to set a course for the future, constitutes the structural axis of any “religious identity.” If, in the contemporary context of fluidity of belief, the paths of religious identification follow unpredictable and continually amendable courses, they nevertheless still come across as the construction of an imaginary positioning system of individuals within a symbolic genealogy. It is this construction that ensures the integration of successive and fragmented experiences of the present into a duration endowed with a meaning. And yet, what is happening today? The collapse, or at any rate the weakening, of the great institutional governing systems of truth leaves individuals, to some extent, at a loss. If truth is no longer imposed from outside, if the burden of conducting one’s own search for certainties comes back to each individual, then if he or she is to endure the psychological and social cost of the operation, he or she must have sufficient access to symbol resources, to cultural references, to circles of dialogue that enable him or her to operate and ground his or her personal composition of meaning more firmly through contact with others. If these means are denied him or her, efforts to obtain authentication of belief may then move towards other ways, far more structured, of joining religious communities in which the sense of security of a shared code of meaning may be found and vouched for collectively. A call to recreate a community of shared truth may thus arise, paradoxically, at the very breaking point of tangible socio-religious links. At this extreme limit, a need to define a “base-platform of certainty” may arise, within closed spaces where intense sharing of a common objective truth, vouched for by the word of a charismatic leader and/or the sense of fellowship of being among kindred spirits, may bring individuals together. Taken to this extreme, this idea of finding reassurance within a community may lead to a group closing in upon itself and falling back on “bunker values” or “refuge identities,” rendered as impermeable as possible to communication with the outside world. Individualization, which dissolves inherited cultural identities, then leads, as the other side of the coin, to the constitution, activation, and even invention of small community identities, which are compact, substantial, and compensatory. This paradox falls within the contemporary proliferation of “cults,” as well as the strengthening of traditionalist and fundamentalist trends within the great religious traditions. This dubious component of religious modernity is not only a subject “worth thinking about” for sociologists; it is also a crucial political issue for society as a whole, and a challenge for democracy.
68
Sellers or Buyers in Religious Markets? The Supply and Demand of Religion1 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
S
ince the September 2001 terrorist attacks and their aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq, public interest in religious pluralism has grown tremendously, and the debate about secularization theory and its recent critiques have become increasingly relevant to contemporary concerns. The religious landscapes in both Europe and the U.S. are increasingly diverse in different ways, but the overall trend on both sides of the Atlantic is toward greater secularization and a multiplicity of different approaches to religion. This diversity reflects centuries-old differences among Protestant and Catholic churches, Orthodox Christians, and long-established Jewish groups, combined with growing multiculturalism from immigrant populations adhering to Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other faiths, as well as those adhering to none. Many observers suggest that New Age spiritualities may also play a role, including the development of more individualized practices outside organized religion. Secular Western societies have experienced the influx of migrants and political refugees drawn from traditional cultures and developing societies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, which has highlighted contrasts over divergent religious values and beliefs. Some traditional
1
This essay is adapted from Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Pippa Norris is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In May 2006 she begins a two-year term as the new Director of the Democratic Governance Group at the United Nations Development Program in New York. Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political Science and Program Director at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He helped found the Eurobarometer surveys and directs the World Values surveys. He has also served as a consultant to the U.S. State Department and the European Union.
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political conflicts between religious communities have become more muted, notably among Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. At the same time, new forms of identity politics appear to have become more salient.2 We are seeing a landscape in Western societies that is becoming both more secular and more diverse. The idea of secularization has a long and distinguished history in the social sciences, with many seminal thinkers arguing that religiosity was declining throughout Western societies. The seminal social thinkers of the nineteenth century—Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud—all believed that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the advent of industrial society.3 They were far from alone; ever since the Age of the Enlightenment, leading figures in philosophy, anthropology, and psychology have postulated that theological superstitions, symbolic liturgical rituals, and sacred practices are the product of a past that will be outgrown in the modern era. The death of religion was the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century; indeed, it has been regarded as the master model of sociological inquiry, where secularization was ranked with bureaucratization, rationalization, and urbanization as the key historical revolutions transforming medieval agrarian societies into modern industrial nations. As C. Wright Mills summarized this process: Once the world was filled with the sacred—in thought, practice, and institutional form. After the Reformation and the Renaissance, the forces of modernization swept across the globe and secularization, a corollary historical process, loosened the dominance of the sacred. In due course, the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.4 During the last decade, however, this thesis of the slow and steady death of religion has come under growing criticism; secularization theory is currently experiencing the most sustained challenge in its long history. Critics point to multiple indicators of religious health and vitality today, ranging from the continued popularity of churchgoing in the United States to the emergence of New Age spirituality in Western Europe, the growth in fundamentalist movements and religious parties in the Muslim world, the evangelical revival sweeping through Latin America, and the upsurge of ethno-religious conflict in international affairs.5 After reviewing these developments, Peter L. Berger, one of the foremost advocates of secularization during the 1960s, recanted his earlier claims:
70
2
Some examples are the assassination of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands and the bombings by foreign or indigenous Muslim groups causing mass casualities in Madrid and London.
3
See Steve Bruce, ed., Religion and Modernization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 170–94; Alan Aldridge, Religion in the Contemporary World (Cambridge: Polity, 2000) chapter 4.
4
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) 32–3.
5
“Fundamentalist” is here used in a neutral way to refer to those with an absolute conviction in the fundamental principles of their faith, to the extent that they will not accept the validity of any other beliefs.
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
The world today, with some exceptions...is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled “secularization theory” is essentially mistaken.6 In a fierce critique, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke suggest it is time to bury the secularization thesis: “After nearly three centuries of utterly failed prophesies and misrepresentations of both present and past, it seems time to carry the secularization doctrine to the graveyard of failed theories, and there to whisper ‘requiescat in pace.’”7 Were Comte, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx completely misled in their beliefs about religious decline in industrialized societies? Was the predominant sociological view during the twentieth century totally misguided? Has the debate been settled? We think not. Talk of burying the secularization theory is premature. The critique relies too heavily on selected anomalies and focuses too heavily on the United States (which happens to be a striking deviant case) rather than comparing systematic evidence across a broad range of rich and poor societies.8 We need to move beyond studies of Catholic and Protestant church attendance in Europe (where attendance is falling) and the United States (where attendance remains stable) if we are to understand broader trends in religious vitality in churches, mosques, shrines, synagogues, and temples around the globe. There is no question that the traditional secularization thesis needs updating. This study develops a revised version of secularization theory that emphasizes the extent to which people have a sense of existential security—that is, the feeling that survival is secure enough that it can be taken for granted. We build on key elements of traditional sociological accounts while revising others. We believe that the importance of religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially those living in poorer nations, facing personal survival-threatening risks. We argue that feelings of vulnerability to physical, societal, and personal risks are a key factor driving religiosity, and we demonstrate that the process of secularization—a systematic erosion of religious practices, values, and beliefs—has occurred most clearly among the most prosperous social sectors living in affluent and secure post-industrial nations.
6
See Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999) 2. Compare this statement with the arguments in Berger’s The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967).
7
Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 79.
8
For example, Roger Finke claims that “the vibrancy and growth of American religious institutions presents the most open defiance of the secularization model” (Finke, “An Unsecular America,” in Bruce 148).
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T he H edgehog R eview / S pring & S U mmer 0 6
Secularization is a tendency, not an iron law. One can easily think of striking exceptions, such as Osama bin Laden who is (or was) extremely rich and fanatically religious. But when we go beyond anecdotal evidence, we find that the overwhelming bulk of evidence points in the opposite direction: people who experience ego-tropic risks during their formative years (posing direct threats to themselves and their families) or sociotropic risks (threatening their community) tend to be far more religious than those who grow up under safer, more comfortable, and more predictable conditions. In relatively secure societies, the remnants of religion have not died away, but the importance and vitality of religion, its ever-present influence on how people live their daily lives, has gradually eroded. The strongest challenge to secularization theory arises from American observers who commonly point out that claims of steadily diminishing congregations in Western Europe are sharply at odds with U.S. trends, at least until the early 1990s.9 Here we focus upon how we can best explain “American exceptionalism.” 10 We first describe systematic and consistent evidence establishing the variations in religiosity among postindustrial nations, in particular contrasts between the U.S. and Western Europe. We focus on similar post-industrial nations, all affluent countries and established democracies, most (but not all) sharing a cultural heritage of Christendom (although the critical cleavage dividing Catholic and Protestant Europe remains), and all being service-sector knowledge economies with broadly similar levels of education and affluence.11 This “most-similar” comparative framework narrows down, or even eliminates, some of the multiple factors that could be causing variations in religious behavior, allowing us to compare like with like. We examine whether the United States is indeed “exceptional” among rich nations in the vitality of its spiritual life, as the conventional wisdom has long suggested, or whether, as Berger proposes, Western Europe is “exceptional” in its secularization.12 On this basis, we then consider systematic evidence to test alternative “supply” and “demand” explanations of variations in religiosity. Religious market theory postulates that intense competition between rival denominations (supply) generates a ferment of activity, explaining the vitality of churchgoing. We compare evidence supporting this account with the theory of secure secularization, based on the idea that societal modernization, human development, and economic inequality drive the popular
9
Berger, Desecularization; Andrew M. Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2003).
10 Further
discussion of our larger project can be found in Norris and Inglehart.
11 Post-industrial
nation-states are defined as those assigned a Human Development Index score over .900 by the UN Development Report. These countries have a mean per capita GDP of $29,585.
12 Berger,
Desecularization. See also discussions of American cultural exceptionalism in Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955); Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of Canada and the United States (New York: Routledge, 1990); Graham K. Wilson, Only in America? The Politics of the United States in Comparative Perspective (Chatham: Chatham Publishers, 1998).
72
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
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'SFRVFODZPGQSBZFS Figure 1. Religious behavior in post-industrial societies. Mean frequency of attendance at religious services per society is based on responses to the question “Apart from weddings, funerals and christenings, about how often do you attend religious services these days? More than once a week (7), once a week (6), once a month (5), only on special holidays (4), once a year (3), less often (2), never or practically never (1).” Mean frequency of prayer is based on “How often do you pray to God outside of religious services? Every day (7), more than once a week (6), once a week (5), at least once a month (4), several times a year (3), less often (2), never (1).” (World Values Survey, pooled 1981–2001.)
demand for religion. The conclusions consider the broader implications of the findings for the role of faith in politics, and for divisions in the predominant cultures found in Europe and the United States.
Comparing Religiosity in Post-Industrial Nations We can start by considering the cross-national evidence for how the indicators of religiosity apply to post-industrial nations. Figure 1 shows the basic pattern of religious behavior, highlighting substantial contrasts between the cluster of countries that prove by far the most religious in this comparison, including the United States, Ireland, and Italy. At the other extreme, the most secular nations include France, Denmark, and Britain. There is a fairly similar pattern across both indicators of religious behavior, suggesting that both collective and individual forms of participation are fairly consistent in each society. Therefore, although religion in the United States is distinctive among rich nations, it would still be misleading to refer to American “exceptionalism” (as so many do), as though it were a deviant case from all other post-industrial nations. 73
T he H edgehog R eview / S pring & S U mmer 0 6
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Figure 2. Religious participation in Europe. Mean frequency of attendance at religious services is based on responses to the question “Apart from weddings, funerals and christenings, about how often do you attend religious services these days? More than once a week (7), once a week (6), once a month (5), only on special holidays (4), once a year (3), less often (2), never or practically never (1).” (World Values Survey, pooled 1981–2001.)
The marked contrasts within Europe are illustrated further in Figure 2, mapping secular Northern Europe compared with the persistence of more regular churchgoing habits in Southern Europe, as well as differences within Central and Eastern Europe. The “North-South” religious gap within the European Union is, admittedly, a puzzle that cannot be explained by the process of societal development alone, since these are all rich nations. More plausible explanations include the contemporary strength of religiosity in Protestant and Catholic cultures, as well as societal differences in economic equality.
74
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
Trends in Secularization in Western Europe One reason for these cross-national variations could be that most post-industrial societies have experienced a significant erosion of religiosity during the post-war era, but that these trends have occurred from different starting points, in a path-dependent fashion, due to the historic legacy of the religious institutions and cultures within each country. Where the church is today could depend in large part upon where it started out. Evidence in Western Europe consistently and unequivocally shows two things: traditional religious beliefs and involvement in institutionalized religion, first, vary considerably from one country to another; and, second, have steadily declined throughout Western Europe, particularly since the 1960s. Studies have often reported that many Western Europeans have ceased to be regular churchgoers today outside of special occasions such as Christmas and Easter, weddings and funerals, a pattern especially evident among the young. Jagodzinski and Dobbelaere, for example, compared the proportion of regular (weekly) churchgoers in seven European countries from 1970 to 1991, based on the Eurobarometer surveys, and documented a dramatic decrease in congregations during this period in the states under comparison. Overall levels of church disengagement had advanced furthest in France, Britain, and the Netherlands. “Although the timing and pace differ from one country to the next,” the authors concluded, “the general tendency is quite stable: in the long run, the percentage of unaffiliated is increasing.”13 Numerous studies provide a wealth of evidence confirming similar patterns of declining religiosity found in many other post-industrial nations.14 Trends in recent decades illustrate the consistency of the secularization process irrespective of the particular indicator or survey that is selected. Figure 3 illustrates the erosion of regular church attendance that has occurred throughout Western Europe since the early 1970s. The fall is steepest and most significant in many Catholic societies, notably Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain. To conclude, as Greeley does, that religion is “still relatively unchanged” in the traditional Catholic nations of Europe seems a triumph of hope over experience, and sharply
13 Wolfgang
Jagodzinski and Karel Dobbelaere, “Secularization and Church Religiosity,” The Impact of Values, ed. Jan W. van Deth and Elinor Scarbrough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 105.
14 R.
Currie, A. D. Gilbert, and L. Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Sabino Samele Acquaviva, The Decline of the Sacred in Industrial Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979); Sheena Ashford and Noel Timms, What Europe Thinks: A Study of Western European Values (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1992); Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); F. Höllinger, Volksreligion und Herrschaftskirche. Die Würzeln Religiösen Verhaltens in Westlichen Gesellschaften (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1996); L. Voye, “Secularization in a Context of Advanced Modernity,” Sociology of Religion 60.3 (1999): 275–88; Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) chapter 3. For a challenge to this view, however, see Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, “A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the ‘Secularization’ of Europe,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33 (1985): 230–52.
75
T he H edgehog R eview / S pring & S U mmer 0 6
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Figure 3. Religious participation in Western Europe, 1970–2000. Graphs represent percentage of the population in each society who said they attended a religious service “at least once a week” and the regression line of the trend. (The Mannheim Eurobarometer Trend File 1970–99.)
at odds with the evidence.15 Marked contrasts in the strength of churchgoing habits remain clear, as between contemporary rates of religious participation in Ireland and Denmark. Nevertheless, all the trends point consistently downward. Moreover, the erosion of religiosity is not exclusive to Western European nations; regular churchgoing also dropped during the last two decades in affluent Anglo-American nations such as Canada and Australia.16
15 Greeley
xi.
16 See Reginald W. Bibby, “The State of Collective Religiosity in Canada: An Empirical Analysis,” Canadian
Review of Sociology and Anthropology 16.1 (1979): table 3, which shows that in Canada church attendance fell from 67 percent in 1946 to 35 percent in 1978; Hans Mol, The Faith of Australians (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985); Ian McAllister, “Religious Change and Secularization: The Transmission of Religious Values in Australia,” Sociological Analysis 49.3 (1998): 249–63.
76
S ellers or bu y ers in religious markets ? / norris & inglehart
Table 1. Belief in God, 1947–2001 Nation
1947a
1968b
Sweden
80
Netherlands
80
Australia
95
Norway
84
Denmark
80
1975c
1981d
1990d
1995d
2001d
Changee
βf
Sig.g
60
52
38
48
46
-33.6
-.675
**
79
64
61
58
-22.0
-.463
*
75
-19.9
-.379
**
-18.9
-.473
**
80 73
Britain
77
Greece
96
W. Germany
81
Belgium Finland
83
83
France
66
73
Canada
95
76
79 68
58
53
59
62
-17.9
-.387
*
73
72
61
-16.5
-.461
*
84
-12.3
-.364
69
-12.0
-.305
n/s
67
-11.2
-.487
n/s
72
-10.8
-.296
n/s
72
68
63
78
76
65 61
56
-10.1
-.263
n/s
89
91
85
88
-7.2
-.387
n/s
Japan
38
39
85
U.S.
94
Brazil
96
98
73
57
98
Italy
71
59
India Austria
65
72
84
Switzerland
75
77
77
-7.2
-.277
n/s
93
94
-4.0
-.231
n/s
37
44
35
-3.0
-.016
n/s
78
83
-1.9
-.097
n/s
88
-0.1
.039
n/s
94
0.4
-.027
n/s
3.0
.056
n/s
88
82
82
94
96
93
94
98
99
Source: Gallup polls from Lee Sigelman, “Review of the Polls: Multination Surveys of Religious Beliefs,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 16.3 (1977): 289–94. Note: Figures indicate the percentage of the public who express belief in God. a Gallup Opinion Index “Do you, personally, believe in God?” Yes/No/Don’t Know. b Gallup Opinion Index “Do you believe in God?” Yes/No/Don’t Know. c Gallup Opinion Index “Do you believe in God or a universal spirit?” Yes/No/Don’t Know. d World Values Survey/European Values Survey “Do you believe in God?” Yes/No/Don’t Know. e The difference between the first and the last observation in the series. In the OLS regression models, year is regressed on the series. f The unstandardized β summarizes the slope of the line. g The statistical significance of the change in the time-series. N/s = not significant, *p
