thesis of secularization

Secularization theories in the twenty-first century: Ideas, evidence, and problems Presidential address – Karel Dobbelaere Conference

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• > Sacred and Secular
• > The Secularization Debate

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• SACRED AND SECULAR
• PART I UNDERSTANDING SECULARIZATION
• 1 The Secularization Debate
• 2 Measuring Secularization
• 3 Comparing Secularization Worldwide
• PART II CASE STUDIES OF RELIGION AND POLITICS
• PART III THE CONSEQUENCES OF SECULARIZATION
• CONCLUSIONS
• Appendix A Classifications of Types of Society
• Appendix B Concepts and Measures
• Appendix C Technical Note on the Freedom of Religion Scale
• Bibliography

1 - The Secularization Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2012

the seminal social thinkers of the nineteenth century – Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Émile 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. 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 the 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 ”.

During the last decade, however, this thesis of the slow and steady death of religion has come under growing criticism; indeed, secularization theory is currently experiencing the most sustained challenge in its long history.

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• The Secularization Debate
• Pippa Norris , Harvard University, Massachusetts , Ronald Inglehart , University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Book: Sacred and Secular
• Online publication: 05 September 2012
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791017.003

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The Secularisation Thesis

• Tags: Religious Decline , Secularization , Sociology of Religion
• April 16, 2012

What is the secularisation thesis? And how does it relate to the category of 'religion'? Join Linda Woodhead and David G. Robertson as they explore the development and ideas of the secularisation thesis. Share this podcast

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A transcript for this episode is available below . 

Linda Woodhead

David G. Robertson

About this episode.

The secularisation thesis—the idea that traditional religions are in terminal decline in the industrialised world—was perhaps the central debate in the sociology of religion in the second half of the 20th century. Scholars such as Steve Bruce, Rodney Stark, and Charles Taylor argued whether religion was becoming less important to individuals, or that only the authority of religions in the public sphere was declining. Data from the US and South America, however, began to challenge many of their basic assumptions. Professor Linda Woodhead joins us to discuss the background and legacy of the secularisation thesis. A transcription of this interview is also available as a PDF .

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Related Resources

The Changing Nature of Religion

Substantive Religion and the Functionalist Sacred

Responses to this episode, secularization: a look at individual level theories of religious change, the secularisation thesis [transcript], podcast transcript.

Podcast with Linda Woodhead  on the Secularisation Thesis (16 April 2012).  PDF .

Interviewed by David G. Robertson . Transcribed by Martin Lepage .

David Robertson: The secularisation thesis is probably the biggest central theme and certainly the most hotly debated in the sociology of religion, certainly since the 1960’s. Why is it so important and how has it changed? To talk to us today about this, we’ve got Professor Linda Woodhead, from the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. Perhaps, you could just begin at the beginning with where does the secularisation thesis come from? Where does it begin?

Linda Woodhead: Actually, the origins of secularisation theory are coterminous with the origins of sociology itself. It’s absolutely fundamental to the whole discipline and all the great fathers of sociology – Weber, Durkheim and Marx – believed and expounded some version of secularisation theory. At the very heart of the social sciences, this belief that, as societies modernized, religion will decline. And each had a different way of explaining that. For Weber, it was primarily about the rise of scientific knowledge and it was about the application of rational standards, bureaucratic standards, in life more generally. He thought that that way of thinking and reasoning disenchanted the world, it cast out the magical, the religious. Durkheim had a rather different explanation of why religion declines. He thought that religion binds societies together, and he particularly thought that religion binds small groups together, and they meet face to face and celebrate the sacred. He thought that as societies modernized and urbanized, those fundamental bonds are broken, and religion is broken in that process as people move to cities and are individualized more. And Marx thought, of course, that religion would die out once you get the perfect socialist communist State. He thought it was a symptom of all that was wrong with society, a way of coping with the oppressions and difficulties of society. Once we realised the perfect society, you won’t need religion. In different ways, all of those classical theories are evolutionary or they’re progressive.

DR: I was going to ask that. Are they strongly tied to this notion of the gradual perfection of society and the move out of the darkness and into the light?

LW: They are really, and that’s a kind of, in a way, a blind spot of classical secularisation theory, in modern forms, that they didn’t really, perhaps… they weren’t sociological enough about their own background and presuppositions. This early crop of the classical theories, are all bound up with Nation-States developing, growing, extending their power and with their new elites, including academic elites, like the sociologists establishing their status. There was a kind of implicit optimism that the way that European society is developing is at the cutting edge of social evolution. So all societies are going to follow, so eventually everyone will become secular like we are. That’s never quite said, but that really does lie behind this theory. That we are not just talking about the tie of religion and particularities of here and now, we’re talking about an inevitable, inextricable process that everyone is destined to go through.

DR: That’s a critique of the narrative of modernization and westernisation anyway, that this is inevitable and even desirable motif. Maybe we can move on to the… I don’t want to call them the classical theorists, but the most famous describers of the secularisation thesis in the simple form that we know it.

LW: You could say that those classical sociologists, Weber, Durkheim, Marx, are sort of phase one of secularisation. And then there’s been a phase two. Phase two came in the wake of the Second World War, really. It was really flourishing in the 1970’s, and around about then. Again, it was very much European. In the UK, one of the chief figures was Brian Wilson, of Oxford University. (5:00) He fully endorsed secularisation theory, he gave it thoughts of new twists and explanations and interpretations. He particularly emphasised that secularisation is about the decline in the social significance of religion. He didn’t deny that some people were still religious, but he said “what’s changed, is that religion doesn’t have the same status in society. For example, politicians don’t have to refer to it anymore. They go on and do their business according to their own logic, they don’t take any notice of religion, whereas before the political ruler and religious elites would have to be in compensation with each other. He talked about that in every sphere, how religion ceases to be a point of reference in the public life.

DR: Perhaps you could clarify that, that sounds like the first development of the secularisation thesis, isn’t it? It’s one of the explanations for it, that it’s not that religion is going to completely disappear from society, rather it moves out of public sphere and into the private sphere.

LW: Yes. He thought that was that. You could still be devoutly religious, but it will affect you in your private life rather than when you go to work, or when you’re being a politician or wherever that might be.

DR: It’s not a disappearance of religion, it’s just a radical change in its function?

LW: Yes, the sociological term is social differentiation. The different spheres of society become autonomous. In law, you don’t refer to religion anymore, and in politics, likewise, and in education likewise. All these things become autonomous and they run according to rational secular standards, not by reference to religion. Wilson thinks he sees that happening very clearly in the UK and gives lots of examples of that process in various spheres.

DR: Were there any other interpretations of the secularisation thesis?

LW: There were lots of clarifications at that time. There was another very important contribution by a European, a Belgian sociologist, called Karel Dobbelaere, and he made what’s become really well used in his account, is a distinction between three levels of secularisation. He talks about secularisation at the societal level, the meta level of society; secularisation at the organisational level, and he’s thinking in part of religious organisation themselves declining, like the churches having fewer members or attenders; and then thirdly, secularisation at the personal level, where fewer people believe or their lives are less guided by religion. He says : “Don’t just talk about secularisation. What sort are you meaning, or what level of society? The macro level, the meso level or the micro level?” And he thought that it could happen at different rates in different parts. That’s quite compatible with Wilson’s theory, really. It’s another clarification of secularisation theory. But the most important current exponent, still in post, is, of course, in Scotland, and that’s Steve Bruce at Aberdeen University, who’s probably the most important defender of secularisation theory now, even though it’s waned very very much, it’s very much fallen out of favour in the last ten or fifteen years. Steve is a true believer still in secularisation theory and defends it very very strongly. He combines really particularly Durkheim and Marx. He thinks that it is about individualisation, the Durkheimian theory that societies break down and we don’t need that bond anymore, and he thinks it’s about rationalisation, the more Weberian account and he restates it, but in those quite classical terms, and he accumulates a lot of data, and the data mainly has to do with Churches in Europe. So it’s about the demonstrable decline in the number of people who are members, attenders, who had their child baptised, who have a Christian wedding. There are lots of statistics that support his case, that he regularly cites.

DR: That’s a weakness of secularisation thesis, isn’t it? That it’s based on a very strict model of what religion is, on an institutionalised Church model of religion. And it wouldn’t really translate to less institutionalised forms of religion, say New Age.

LW: That’s a very good point, and Steve Bruce would reply to you, because he is criticised for that point, by saying New Age isn’t really a religion. He would say it’s just what he calls it, cults. It’s the kind of… like an entropy, (10:00) when religion get less and less and less important to people and New Age is just the very end of that process. It doesn’t really matter to them, it doesn’t have a big effect on their lives, they don’t give a lot of money to it, they’re not really committed, it’s just a sort of privatised leisure pursuit. That’s how he tries to explain new forms of spirituality’s growth. Is that convincing from your point of view?

DR: Not convincing to me, but I can follow his argument. We could get into a big debate about whether or not… you could argue that something like New Age is a different form, a more individualised rather than an institutionalised model of religion, for instance, in which case secularisation would be a change in the form of religion, which would go along with an individualised privatisation model.

LW: But you could say, in criticism of someone like Steve Bruce, you wouldn’t, say you’re looking up modern communications, you wouldn’t get the statistics for how many people send telegrams from 1950 to 2012, and say, “Well, it’s completely declined, so people don’t use instant messaging anymore”. You’d look at what new forms have taken its place, so why just look at the churches? Of course some forms of religions grown declined over time, because religion is constantly transforming. So why say that’s the only true religion and nothing else counts? And I personally think that’s a major weakness of the secularisation theory, which is only… if we’re looking at something very specific, the decline of particular sorts of European Church that had close connections with the State, and they have declined their question. They generalized from that very particular story to religion as a whole.

DR: Which is a perfect link to the second major weaknesses, I think, of the secularisation thesis, which is, it’s very culturally and geographically specific.

LW: That’s a great point and that brings us to the USA, because you’ll notice that all the theorists I’ve been talking about are European. And Europe is in many ways the most secular part of the globe. America never produced secularisation theory in a significant way partly because, even though America was as modernised as Europe, it didn’t suffer the same decline of religion, even of church going or congregation, they have different kinds of churches in the States of course. So Americans didn’t really believe in it, in the way Europeans did.

DR: It was never really accepted?

LW: It didn’t have the same theoretical importance. It was accepted by many social scientists, but in the study of religion, there aren’t great theorist of it who contributed new developments. And since the 1980’s, the most important critics of secularisation theory have been Americans in the sociology of religion. First, Peter Berger and then Jose Casanova. Berger’s particularly interesting because he was a secularisation theorist. So his career has spanned right from the 1960s through to today, for much of that carrier, he went along with the European secularisation theorists. But his interpretation was different. He thought religion declines because it becomes less plausible when there’s not just one worldview. So if you’re a Christian and you just live in a Christian village near a Christian town, you’re going to believe it. But it becomes less plausible when you meet an Hindu and a Buddhist. That was his theory of why it declined in modern societies. But then he had a complete conversion, he changed his mind in the 1990’s, and he said… I brought a quote, it’s a good one. He said :

“My point is that the assumption that we live in a secularised world is false. The world today, with some exceptions, is as furiously religious as ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists, loosely labeled secularisation theory, is essentially mistaken. In my early work, I contributed to this literature. I was in good company. Most sociologists of religion had similar views and we had good reasons for upholding them. Some of the writing we produced still stand up. Although the term ‘secularisation theory’ refers to works from the 50’s and 60’s, the key idea can be traced right back to the Enlightenment. The idea is simple. Modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals. And it’s precisely this key idea that turned out to be wrong.”

So a very strong change of mind, in his part.

DR: It’s rare to see a scholar doing that.

LW: It’s very rare and it’s particularly interesting. Then Jose Casanova had developed a very sophisticated theory of public religion which accepts that there’s differentiation, but it thinks religion continues to a public and not just a private role and he shows that (15:00) in relation to Poland and Spain and several other countries.

DR: Poland is a very good example. It’s obviously… the figures in Britain alone since the arrival of the Poles here shown a huge growth in church attendances. I think it was Casanova, I might be wrong, who argued that it was because the Church wasn’t identified with the controlling power but the Church was rather a revolutionary… that’s a bit strong, but… of the people, and that the Church hasn’t gone into decline in Poland as it has here. And where the Church is still seen as, perhaps, I think, cultural hegemony. I think those statistics have a very interesting thing to say about secularization.

LW: Yes, so the difficulty is to explain why the differential rates of secularization. Actually, I was going to come to the other kind of key figure who’s really the stand out figure in this whole story. He’s the one person who saw all this a long time before anyone else, long before Casanova or Berger, and that was David Martin, who’s an English sociologist of religion, still alive, retired now. In 1965, he wrote an essay criticizing secularization theory, and then in the late 1970’s, he wrote the famous book called A General Theory of Secularization. He didn’t completely throw it overboard, but he tried to refine it, and his point was just what you said. That it depends what role religion has in a particular society and what relationship it has to reactionary and revolutionary political power. So in a country like France, where all forces of liberalization and democracy who have opposed by the Catholic Church, you get a very very strong secularism. Because all progressive people want to overthrow this reactionary force. But, going across the Atlantic to America, where the churches were a force of democracy and liberation from colonial British rule, then religion becomes identified with those positive forces and it’s a very religious place. And he thinks he can do similar analyses across the world. So he rejected the general theory, an undifferentiated theory, long before anyone else. I think he gets sometimes slightly irritated today when everyone says “Oh, it’s a really great new theory!” He thinks “I was saying that forty years ago.”

DR: But it’s interesting that that’s, in that case, what we’re talking about really is a radical de-traditionalisation, particularly in Northern Europe. It’s a challenging of power bases and the decentralisation of power, and epistemological power as well, and in institutions rather than the other interpretation about the logic of religion not making sense.

LW: Yes, no, you’ve put it really raw, because the kind of general progressivist theories make it seem like it’s just a neutral historical process that inevitably happens, whereas people like David Martin say “No, look at the power relations here, there are power struggles going on. And what role is religion playing in relations to those struggles.” And I think that’s a much more interesting and convincing way of looking at it. And my own little contribution to this story in relation to the UK would be that a really important part of why secularisation theory was so powerfully developed here in the post-war period, was because of the welfare state settlement. The welfare state became a secular utopian kind of quasi-religious project. People really believed in the realization of a fairer and more just and equal society, symbolised by the National Health Service, which is a kind of sacred icon and the envy of the world. The doctor and the GP became like the parish priest, a trust-worthy father figure in the community. So you had a kind of secular faith.

DR: The NHS as sacred canopy then.

LW: In many ways, it was sacred. If you look at Harold Shipman, the murderer, the reason he killed so many people was that no one would believe that a doctor could behave like that, a bit like child abuse in churches. So there was such an alternative secular faith, such hope for that model, that religion became less important. Actually the churches played a big role, they threw in a lot with the welfare state (20:00) and tried to contribute to it. And that’s part of why there was the sense you didn’t need religion anymore. We found the right way to organise society. And as we lost a bit faith in that vision, people turned to religion again to find meaning and models of more just social order and so on. We’ve seen some pockets of interesting revival like the ones that you look at in Europe.

DR: So where does this allude to secularisation thesis? Is it still relevant to the study of religion?

LW: We can’t ever get rid of it, because it’s so engraved, for over a century, that everything we do is shaken by it. The questions we ask on questionnaires, the data we gather, the whole way we look at the world, it’s very hard to get rid of that framework, even if it’s not the most interesting framework anymore. But I think where it leaves us is, that we no longer think that it’s a purely descriptive neutral theory. We can see now that it belonged in a particular place and a particular time and it was ideological. It was a kind of faith in its own right, it supported a vision of Europe at the cutting edge of history of the secular Nation-State starting to take over a new role in society and so on. It was bound up with those very particular conditions, and in those conditions, it made a lot of sense of what was happening. But it’s not universally applicable timeless ahistorical theory.

DR: What I’m going to take away from this today is it’s a very good example of how we as scholars allow our ideologies or the ideologies of the culture that maybe we are not aware of to affect whole theories. When I started studying religions, the secularisation thesis was still essential part of what you learned and, yet, once you look at it, it kind of dissolves away, there was nothing really ever there.

LW: And people believed in it, that’s the right word.

DR: And argued furiously about it.

LW: And wrote passionately about it, because it stood for a certain vision of how society should be. It wasn’t just about interpreting the facts. It was always a bit more than that.

DR: That’s a perfect place to end, it’s absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much, Professor.

LW: My Pleasure.

DR: Thanks.

Citation Info: Woodhead, Linda, and David G. Robertson. 2012. “The Secularisation Thesis.” The Religious Studies Project (Podcast Transcript) . 16 April 2012. Transcribed by Martin Lepage. Version 1.2, 25 September 2015. Available at: https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/podcast-linda-woodhead-on-the-secularisation-thesis/

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Secularization

Introduction, classical works.

• General Overviews
• Recent Criticisms of Secularization Theory
• Problems of Definition
• Genealogical Use of the Term
• Secularization Theories
• Long-Term Arguments
• Secularization in the Historiography on the 19th and 20th Centuries
• Comparative Studies
• Secularization in Western Europe
• Secularization in Eastern Europe
• The Exceptional Case: The United States
• Secularization outside Europe and the United States: The Example of Asia
• Alternatives to Secularization Theory

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Secularization by Detlef Pollack LAST REVIEWED: 29 October 2013 LAST MODIFIED: 29 October 2013 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756384-0073

Secularization theory was once the dominant sociological pattern of interpretation to describe and explain religious change in the modern period. The classic figures of sociology drew on the assumptions of secularization theory to work out the defining features of modern societies and the conditions necessary for the emergence of the modern. Since then, though, secularization theory has clearly lost validity in the historical and social sciences. To characterize religious change in the modern period, scholars are talking more and more in terms not of the decline of religion, but of the deprivatization of the religious (José Casanova), of the return of the Gods (Friedrich Wilhelm Graf), of the reenchantment of the world (Ulrich Beck), or, simply, of desecularization (Peter L. Berger). At the same time, though, there are still vocal supporters of secularization theory who defend it partly in revised form and partly through drawing on the classics (Bryan Wilson, Karel Dobbelaere, Steve Bruce, Pippa Norris) (cf. “Secularization Theory” below). The ongoing conflict concerning the validity of secularization theory has been the central point of controversy in the sociology of religion for decades now and has had a major impact both on empirical analyses and theoretical work.

The assumptions of secularization theory were a major component in the classical approaches of sociology. Works from the classic figures of sociology—from Comte 1875–1877 , through Durkheim 2008 (originally 1893), Tönnies 2001 (originally 1887), Weber 1980 (originally 1920), Parsons 1966 , and Berger 1967 , to Luhmann 1977 —assumed a sharp break between traditional and modern societies, so that we can, indeed, claim without exaggeration that sociology emerged as an academic discipline to deal scientifically with the political, economic, and social processes of upheaval in the 19th century. If the classic figures of sociology argued from the perspective of secularization theory, then they did so partly because they saw in the marginalization of religion a central feature of these processes of upheaval, but also because the decline of religion illustrated and reflected particularly well the full drama of these processes.

Berger, Peter L. 1967. The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion . New York: Doubleday.

In contrast to his later work, Berger’s early work adopts positions representing secularization theory, and these had a great influence on debates in the sociology of religion. On the one hand, the early Berger traces secularization back to the increasing pluralization of the religious field. With the pluralization of religious offerings, religious practices and beliefs have lost their status as taken-for-granted certainties and are exposed to mutual contestation and relativization. On the other hand, Berger holds long-term processes responsible for secularization, such as the rationalization that has been effective since ancient Judaism, as well as the erosive effects of industrialization and mechanization. Republished as recently as 1990 (New York: Anchor).

Comte, Auguste. 1875–1877. System of positive polity . 4 vols. Translated by J. H. Bridges, Frederick Harrison, E. S. Beesly, R. Congreve, and H. D. Hutton. Books for College Libraries. London: Longmans, Green.

In this work, Comte developed his now-well-known “law of three stages,” according to which human history passes through three phases. In the “theological” or “fictitious” phase, we write in an attempt to explain our environment, the causes of the phenomena of higher beings that surround us and that act much like ourselves. In the “metaphysical” phase, we draw not on fictitious, but on abstract, entities to explain things. In the “positive” phase, we understand phenomena in the way that they really are. The development of the human spirit is therefore characterized by the steady elimination of all excesses of fantasy and the increasing dominance of the mind. Originally published in 1851–1854; republished as recently as 2001 (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes).

Durkheim, Émile. 1995. The elementary forms of the religious life . Translated and introduced by Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press.

In contrast, the late Durkheim shows that every society, including the modern, has a religious dimension. Not only are almost all major institutions of society born from religion, but also the most-important aspects of collective life are, actually, nothing but different aspects of religious life—precisely because the idea of society is the soul of religion. Therefore, when man worships God in a religious cult, then society is worshipping itself in him. Originally published in 1912 (New York: Macmillan).

Durkheim, Émile. 2008. The division of labor in society . Translated by Wilfred D. Halls. New York: Free Press.

The early Durkheim assumes an increasing loss of function of religion in the course of social evolution. While religion at the beginning of history extended to everything social, the political, economic, and scientific functions have gradually separated themselves from the religious function and have taken on an increasingly secular character. For Durkheim, it becomes problematic how the integration of society once guaranteed by religion can be ensured by modern society. First, Durkheim points out that the exchange between the functions made necessary by functional differentiation can itself provide social solidarity. Second, to solve the problem, Durkheim also draws on moral ideas, such as the cult of the individual uniting society. Originally published in French as De la division du travail social in 1893 (Paris: F. Alcan).

Luhmann, Niklas. 1977. Funktion der Religion . Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Luhmann argues that, through the conversion of the primary form of social differentiation that accompanies the formation of modern society from stratification to functional differentiation, the possibilities and the need to provide socially binding semantics and structures decline. For religion, that means on the personal level that what someone believes becomes a matter of personal choice. On the social level , it means that it is no longer values and norms binding the whole of society that guarantee social integration. On the world pictorial-cognitive level , it means the widening of the horizon of the socially ascertainable, so that religious forms of meaning increasingly lose their plausibility. Reprinted as recently as 2009.

Parsons, Talcott. 1966. Religion in a modern pluralistic society. Review of Religious Research 7.3: 125–146.

DOI: 10.2307/3509920

Parsons argues that Christian values become diffuse, and therefore generalized, in modern society, and that a rejection of traditional religious organizations, a retreat of the religious into the private sphere, and an increasing laicization of the population have come about due to the emancipation of the “societal system” from religion (p. 145). Available online for purchase or by subscription.

Tönnies, Ferdinand. 2001. Community and civil society . Edited by José Harris. Translated by José Harris and Margaret Hollis. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Tönnies examines the tense relationship between community and society, which he treats as opposites. He understands the history of society as a development from straightforward forms of community, formed by coherence and direct interaction, to market-driven society. His distinction between community and society was very influential, being picked up by, for example, Talcott Parsons in his notion of pattern variables, and by Bryan Wilson in his identification of the differences between modern and premodern societies. Originally published in German as Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft in 1887 (Leipzig: Fues).

Weber, Max. 1980. Religious rejections of the world and their directions. In From Max Weber: Essays in sociology . Edited and translated by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 323–359. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

The decline in the social significance of religion in modern societies leads Weber to differentiate between the various spheres of value that compete with religious behavior, and to deal with processes of demystification and rationalization. Weber notes, however, not only a decline in the importance of religion in the modern world, but also, accompanying its marginalization, a transformation of religion from the rational power that it once was to the “irrational or anti-rational power par excellence .” At the same time, Weber emphasizes the religious roots of the rise of the modern bourgeois world. Originally published in 1920.

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3 big numbers that tell the story of secularization in America

Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies, Pitzer College

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Phil Zuckerman is affiliated with Humanist Global Charity

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About six months ago, Americans’ belief in God hit an all-time low.

According to a 2022 Gallup survey , the percentage of people who believe in God has dropped from 98% in the 1950s to 81% today; among Americans under 30, it is down to an unprecedented 68%.

Up close, the trend looks even more dramatic. Only about half of Americans believe in “God as described in the Bible,” while about a quarter believe in a “higher power or spiritual force,” according to a Pew poll. Just one-third of Generation Z say they believe in God without a doubt .

Congregational membership , too, is at an all-time low. In 2021 Gallup found that, for the first time ever, fewer than half of Americans – 47% – were members of a church, synagogue or mosque.

Yet another crucial measure of institutional religion in the U.S., the percentage of people identifying as religious, is also at a low: About 1 in 5 adults now say they have no religious affiliation, up from 1 in 50 in 1960.

In short, when it comes to three key realms of religious life – belief, behavior and belonging – all are lower than they have ever been in American history.

What’s going on? In my view, it’s clear: secularization.

However, despite these seemingly unambiguous numbers, debate about whether secularization really is happening has persisted. Indeed, for several decades now, many academics have continued to doubt its trajectory, especially in the United States.

‘The sacred shall disappear’

Secularization is the process whereby religiosity weakens or fades in society. Peter Berger , a sociologist of religion, defined it as the process that removes institutionalized religion’s domination over a culture, and a situation where more and more people make sense of their lives without traditional religious interpretations.

As Berger noted, one key aspect of secularization is societal: Organized religion loses its overarching public power. Welfare of the poor and sick, for example, is no longer overseen by religious orders, but is largely the responsibility of state bureaucracies.

But secularization is also about families and individuals: Fewer people believe in supernatural claims, attend worship services or follow religious teachings. For instance, more and more Americans are choosing to get married in secular settings , and record low numbers are wanting to have religious funerals.

Secularization in industrializing societies had been anticipated by many European thinkers in the 19th century, including the likes of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber , two of the founders of sociology. Weber spoke of the “disenchantment” of the world: the idea that increasing scientific knowledge would replace supernatural explanations.

For decades afterward, social scientists who study religion took secularization in industrialized societies more or less for granted. Some assumed that religion’s disappearance from many societies was all but certain – such as C. Wright Mills , who proclaimed in 1959 that “the sacred shall disappear altogether except, possibly, in the private realm.”

Not so fast

Not everyone was so sure. In the decades after Mills’ dire prognostication, many sociologists began to voice skepticism about secularization’s inevitability. As they observed developments like the rise of Pentecostalism throughout much of Latin America and the momentum of the religious right in the U.S., debate took off about the extent of secularization , and even whether it was happening at all.

Other critics pointed out that sociologists of secularization tended to focus on wealthy, Western countries with Christian heritages, and that their theories did not always translate well to other settings. Even a question like “Are you religious?” can mean something different , especially in non-monotheistic religions or religions where “belief” is not as central as it is in Christianity.

The most notable critic of secularization was sociologist Rodney Stark , who, in the 1980s, insisted that secularization theory was a sham. Stark was so sure that religion was as strong as ever that he wrote the very idea of secularization ought to be carried off to “the graveyard of failed theories.”

Secularization cannot occur, Stark argued, because religion addresses certain human needs and fears that are fundamental, universal and unchanging . He viewed religions in diverse societies like companies in an economy: If a religion appears anemic, it is only because its “firms” aren’t marketing themselves well enough. Once they improve their outreach, messaging and branding – or if other, more innovative religious entrepreneurs step up – religious life continues as usual , or even increases.

As recently as 2015, Stark wrote that religion in the U.S. has actually strengthened, arguing that Americans simply aren’t responding to pollsters much anymore, and therefore results were unreliable. He also noted that only a small slice of people identify as atheists : fewer than 5% in most nations.

Latest data

In our 2023 book, “ Beyond Doubt ,” however, religion and secularism scholars Isabella Kasselstrand , Ryan Cragun and I argue that religious faith, participation and identification are unambiguously weaker than they have ever been.

This is not only true in the U.S, but many parts of the world, as seen in surveys of people in countries such as Scotland , South Korea, Chile and Canada.

Our book lays out data on declines in religion in areas that have traditionally been home to many different faiths. In 2013, for example, 10% of Libyans and 13% of Tunisians said that they had no religion. By 2019, those numbers had more than doubled . Declines in belief in God are apparent in countries from Denmark and Singapore to Malaysia and Turkey.

But why? In our analysis, the transition from a traditional, rural, nonindustrial society to an urban, industrial or post-industrial society is a key part of the answer – along the lines of the first sociologists’ predictions . As these changes take place, religion is more likely to become unyoked from other aspects of society, such as education and government. Additionally, there is an increase in the amount of religious diversity in a given society, and there tend to be changes in the family, with parents granting their children more freedom regarding religious choices.

In nearly every society that we examined that has experienced these concomitant phenomena, secularization has occurred – often in spades. Of course, compared to most other wealthy countries, the U.S. is quite religious . Fifty-five percent of Americans, for example, say they pray daily, compared to an average of 22% of Europeans.

Still, we argue that the latest numbers regarding religious belief, behavior and belonging in the U.S. paint a clear portrait of secularization. Beyond the more universal factors, other developments that have been detrimental to religion include a strong reaction against the political power of the religious right, and anger at the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal .

The consequences of religion’s weakening are unclear. But while its meaning for America remains an open question, whether secularization is happening is not.

• Agnosticism
• Supernatural
• Pentecostalism
• Religiosity
• Religion and society

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