A history of the secularization issue

The Role of the Theological Debate in the Emergence of the Paradigm
As noted in the first part of this chapter, in the early 1960s, the situation had come to a point where sociologists were living in an intellectual environment where all the elements of the paradigm were available, ready to be put into a theoretical framework. Retrospectively, it even seems as though these elements were begging for a theoretical framework: attempts in this direction - such as those by Acquaviva (1961), Birnbaum, and O'Dea - were increasingly common.

In this situation, the theological debate acted as a catalyst. First, it made secularization a popular issue. Second, it allowed for a more positive evaluation of the secularization process. And third, it offered a vision: the promise of an all-encompassing theory that would allow to organize a number of separate concerns into a unified framework. The new generation of scholars who had taken over form the ageing Catholic sociologists in America, and which was still fighting for supremacy in Europe, could only welcome a unifying theory giving greater consistency to the study of one of the most important problems in the sociology of religion. In this context, the significance of Dobbelaere and Lauwers' exclamation at the 1969 CISR is clear: "The sociologist should not ask himself what relevance church and religion have for the individual. He must question their social relevance. In this sense, problems concerning the sociology of religion now have shifted from participation to secularization" (Dobbelare and Lauwers, CISR 1969, p. 123).

Curiously, the same applies to the Catholic world. The positive evaluation contained in the theology of secularization could only be welcomed by by Catholic sociologists. As a matter of fact, there was a convergence between the point of view advocated by sociologists working in the functional framework (i.e., religion has become differentiated and specialized, not eliminated) and the theological point of view (religion has been purified). In the eyes of the Catholic sociologists, the functional view - which undergirds so much of the CISR paradigm - was much less reductionistic than other approaches. According to Goddijn²²⁶, the merits of functionalism are that it does not considers religion to be a dependent, but an independent variable (1958-59, p. 27). The new approach put forward by Parsons found a very positive echo among Catholic sociologists. Jean Labbens²²⁷, in a paper significantly entitled "Déchristianisation ou sécularisation?", stated: "What we notice is a change in the social structure which, underneath appearances, has affected the structure of the Church. It is a 'laicization', a 'secularization', not a 'dechristianization'. The distinction is important, for the difference between a sacred and a secular society is mainly a difference of structures" (Labbens 1964, p. 495).

In this saturated climate, a spark was sufficient to start the intellectual revolution. It is my contention that this spark was provided by Cox's Secular City (1965). What evidence do we have to support the assertion that the debate was transmitted from the theological to the sociological field?

Some sociologists have always been aware that the sociological debate had a theological origin. Thus for example, Roland Robertson states that "the sociological discussion about secularization is simply a response to a culmination and popularization in the 1960s of a long-drawn out debate within the confines of theological circles" (1971, p. 308). But how exactly was this theological controversy transmitted to the sociological field? After all, sociologists tend to be rather wary of the theological viewpoint. The sociologists I interviewed virtually unanimously discarded Cox's book - and sometimes, theologian's writings in general - as irrelevant. And even those who were very open to the theological viewpoint took pains to underscore that Cox was not a very serious nor consistent thinker. In France, secularization never became an important issue precisely because sociologist refused to engage into a debate they perceived as largely theological: "[Secularization theories] were badly camouflaged theological rafts" (Jean Séguy, interview). Some English-speaking sociologists²²⁸ had the same reaction. How, then, did sociology nevertheless come to explicitly formulate the secularization paradigm in reaction to a theological debate?

The transition between theology and sociology was made possible by a number of men who had both a theological and a sociological training or practice. Peter Berger was trained as a theologian; he discussed secular theology and referred to the Secular City in the last chapter of his Sacred Canopy (Berger 1967). Before writing this book, he had written exclusively theological papers devoted to Bultmann (Berger 1955) and to Bonhoeffer (Berger 1959). Indeed, the first use of the word secularization by Berger appeared in his analysis on Bonhoeffer (Berger 1955, p. 24; 1959, p. 450). But Berger was not alone in this situation. As early as 1951, Roger Mehl, a Protestant theologian as well as the founder and director of the Centre de sociologie du protestantisme (Strasbourg), presented an analysis of secularization in which moral and metaphysical preoccupations of theological origin were interwoven with a sociological analysis very close to the later CISR paradigm (Mehl 1951). Fiftenn years later, Mehl wrote a paper on the consequences of the social process of secularization for Christian faith. This discussion, which drew on Bultmann and Bonhoeffer, led him to the conclusion that secularization did not necessarily entail atheism, and that it opened a new freedom to theological thought and to faith (Mehl 1966, p. 77). Mehl's successor as head of the Strasbourg research center, Jean-Paul Willaime, discovered secularization theory through the works of theologians²²⁹. Larry Shiner, who was trained as a theologian²³⁰ and had written extensively on Gogarten (Shiner 1966) and on secular theology (Shiner 1965), produced the first sociological definitional paper on secularization²³¹ (Shiner 1967). Martin Marty, one of the editors of Christian Century as well as a writer influential in sociology of religion, produced numerous books in which the sociological and the theological dimensions are tightly intertwined (see for instance Marty 1964).

The direct influence of the theological debate on sociologists who became discussants of secularization can be traced accurately in some cases. Thus for example, Andrew Greeley directly exchanged views with Harvey Cox in The Secular City Debate (Callahan 1966, pp. 101-26). Robertson cited Cox in his Sociologists and Secularization (Robertson 1971, p. 306). In their reader on secularization, Acquaviva and Guizzardi presented texts by theologians, among whom we find Cox (Acquaviva and Guizzardi 1973, pp. 201-92). Daniel Bell - who entered the secularization "debate" in the early 70s (see chap. 13) - discussed secular theology (Bell 1971). In his book on secularization theory, Elio Roggero also discussed secular theology (Roggero 1979, pp. 57-58). Robert Bellah himself declared having been deeply influenced by Tillich (Bellah 1970, p. xv). Moreover, Harvey Cox himself published an article in Social Compass²³² (Cox 1968), and Callahan's Secular City Debate was reviewed in 1968 in the Review of Religious Research. Finally, at least one of the carriers of the CISR paradigm, Richard Fenn - who was trained as a theologian - was very directly influenced by secular theology. The parallel he himself sees between secular theology and sociological secularization theory again illustrates their elective affinity: "When I left seminary, I read two authors both of whom made a terrific impact on me. One was Bultmann, and the other was Bonhoeffer [...]. And I really decided that Bonhoeffer was right. You have to live in this world as though God were dead. God is being pushed to the margins. And this translates into sociological propositions about the peripheral nature of religious movements and organizations"²³³.

Finally, the role played by editors in the breaking up of the sociological controversy must be brought to light. In my interviews, I discovered that Bryan Wilson's Religion in Secular Society (1966) corresponded to a request by Watts (publisher of the Rationalist Press Association)²³⁴. Thomas Luckmann's paper in the Kölner Zeitschrift (1960) was requested by an editor of this journal²³⁵; his 1963 book in German was written upon the suggestion of one of Luckmann's mentors, who was also an editor²³⁶. Cox's Secular City originated as a series of conferences for the National Student Christian Federation (Cox 1965, p. xi). In other words, the first secularization theories were produced as a response to a demand coming from editors, who were aware of the fact that, thanks to the ongoing theological debate, religion had become a fashionable matter for discussion among a wider public. Thus, some of the most important contributions in this field appear to be almost accidental²³⁷, and are less a result of an immanent development of sociology than of an external solicitation.

Sociologists reacted quickly to the stimulation coming from the theological debate: in September 1966, at the 6^th World Congress of Sociology, the Committee on the Sociology of Religion (which, as we have seen in chapter 10, had been formed at the 1959 conference) devoted its first session to the problem of "religion and social change". Secularization was mentioned explicitly in at least three of the seven papers read at this meeting. In his account of this session, Jean Séguy (not a proponent of secularization theory by any means) tells us that the discussion turned mainly around the question of "sacralisation, dessacralisation, sécularisation" (Séguy 1967, p. 302). Peter Berger, who was probably writing the Sacred Canopy by that time, was himself present at that conference.

The links between the theological and the sociological debate are thus quite clear. Although all the exemplars had been set forth quite unambiguously for a number of years, it is the theological debate that allowed these elements to be shaped into a vigorous and successful new paradigm. To the study of this paradigm, we can now turn.

CHAPTER 12

THE CISR PARADIGM
This chapter will be devoted to a detailed presentation of the CISR paradigm, as it can be found in the writings of Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Bryan Wilson, David Martin, Richard Fenn, Karel Dobbelaere, Talcott Parsons, and Robert Bellah. These eight writers are those we identified in chapter 3 as the carriers - active or passive - of the CISR paradigm. As the most systematic and complete exposition of the paradigm can be found in the works of Berger and of Wilson, we will devote more time to their writings than to most others.

Two modes of presentation of the paradigm will be interwoven in the following pages: a historical, and a systematical-theoretical account. The basic structure will be dictated by the chronological order. The two most important early systematic statements of secularization theory are found in Wilson's Religion in Secular Society (1966) and in Berger's Sacred Canopy (1967). Berger's theory will be presented first, because it was developed gradually from the early 60s, whereas Wilson's 1966 statement on secularization was his very first²³⁸. These early statements - which must also include Luckmann's Invisible Religion (1963 in German, 1967 in English) - represent the paradigm in its nascent state, before any scholarly community vindicated it. The 1971 intellectual revolution in the CISR (see chap. 10) marks the beginning of the mature period, in which the paradigm was vindicated much more explicitly, as is evident from the title of certain books: Toward a Theory of Secularization (Fenn 1978); A General Theory of Secularization (Martin 1978). These developments culminated in Dobbelaere's trend report, Secularization: A Multi-Dimensional Concept (1981). It is only at this late stage that the views of Parsons and Bellah, the two authors we will analyze last, were firmly integrated into the paradigm.

Although the general structure of the chapter will be determined by this historical pattern, the systematic aspect of the paradigm will not be neglected. In order to allow the structure of the paradigm to appear clearly, the exemplars will be marked off graphically from the rest of the text. This, however, will be done without interrupting the logic of the presentation, which will be based on the intrinsic logic of each theory. In effect, another of my aims will be to offer as coherent as possible a picture of the theory developed by each author. As the thought of most secularization theorists has evolved over time, this poses some problems. In the following presentation, I will generally rely on what seems to me to be the most systematic account given, at any time, by a theorist. Thus for instance, Berger's most systematic and coherent account is found in an early piece of writing (Berger 1967), whereas Martin's most systematic view is only to be found in a later book (Martin 1978). Another problem is that, whereas some theories are presented in a rather systematic and concise form, others are notoriously unsystematic. Wilson's theory, most notably, is scattered in a number of different writings in which the secularization problem is, every time, enmeshed in the particular problematic he happens to address.

For the sake of clarity and concision, I have, in some cases, had to "reconstruct" the theories - without, hopefully, my falling prey to criticisms of "presentism"²³⁹. All the theories have thus been spread out, as it were, on a common diachronic scheme. After all, even though some authors try to avoid giving this impression, secularization theory always implies a fairly simple linear model. There has to be, first, what I have chosen to call an initial situation* as regards the position of religion in society. The original event which causes this initial situation to come to an end is designated as a rupture*. This rupture* then unfolds in a process* of transformation - which can be unilinear or dialectical, immanent to the logic of history or accidental. Finally, this process* results in a given present situation*, which may - or may not - be considered definitive and irreversible. It must be stressed that this general framework - initial situation*, rupture*, process*, present situation* - must not be construed as the analysis of a historical process. Most secularization theories are more systematical-deductive than historical, and the present account is much too sketchy to present any historical accuracy anyway. The framework I propose is noting more than the systematic spreading out of these theories on a common diachronical dimension.

The CISR paradigm having thus been presented, we will discuss more briefly in the next chapter some of the marginal or more recent contributions made by other theorists in - or "against" - this framework. The emphasis will be on an assessment of the degree of novelty of these different contributions. In other words, we will assess claims of originality made by different authors, thus trying to determine to what extent they have been able to transcend the paradigm.

Finally, I would like to make a technical remark. In the two following chapters, all the statements regarding the theories presented must be attributed to the authors of these theories, except in the cases where I clearly intervene myself in the text (i.e., "this author does not define religion, but the way he uses this term clearly indicates that..."). And, as in the remainder of this study, whenever I use one of my own analytical categories - be it one of the exemplars or one of the diachronic categories outlined above - when this category is not used by the author, it will be followed by an asterisk (i.e., initial situation*).

We can now turn to a presentation of the different theories. We will start with the earliest of them, that of Luckmann. However, as Luckmann and Berger collaborated very intensely in the very years during which they produced their respective theories, an assessment of their common contribution, mainly to the sociology of knowledge, is in order first.
The genesis of Berger and Luckmann's sociology of knowledge
Berger and Luckmann met each other in Manhattan, at the New School for Social Research. Both of them had recently immigrated from Europe. Peter L. Berger, born in Austria in 1929, arrived in New York shortly after the end of World War II, at the age of seventeen. He received his M.A. in 1950 from the New School for Social Research, and his Ph.D. in 1954, from the same school. He also spent one year at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, but eventually decided to abandon studies for the ministry²⁴⁰. In his first paper²⁴¹ (Berger 1954), published in the journal of the New School for Social Research, he proposed a new approach to the sect-church typology - a classical problem, if there ever was one, in the sociology of religion. In this early paper, he already complained that "the study of sectarianism has been characterized, like so much else in the scientific study of religion, by a mass of empirical data with little or no theoretical orientation" (1954, p. 467). The new definition of the sect and of the church he proposed was inspired by Carl Mayer, his teacher at the New School, and was consonant with Weber's idea of "routinization". It was based on the idea of the degree of worldliness* of a religious organization: "The social groupings that are religiously based can be understood as forming themselves around the location of the sacred. The area near the sacred is that which is specifically religious; outside lies the world, in the religious sense of the word. [...] Imagine a figure of concentric circles, the innermost designating the location of the spirit; the next circle is that of the sect, the next is the circle of the church, and beyond that is the world" (1954, p. 475). One year later, Berger published a paper analyzing the works of Bultmann, Gogarten, Bonhoeffer, and Barth. Their theology, Berger argued, reflected the fact that, in the modern world, Protestantism had "its back to the wall". It is in this context that the word "secularization" appeared for the first time in Berger's writings, in the presentation of Bonhoeffer's theory: "The Christian must cease to deplore the secularization of western civilization, which only means that modern man has come of age" (1955, p. 24). As noted above, (see chap. 11), Berger's interest in theology confirms the existence of the links between the theological and the sociological debates on secularization.

Thomas Luckmann was born in Yugoslavia, near the Austrian border, in 1927. He studied in Vienna from 1945 to 1948, then left for the United States. He received his M.A. from the New School for Social Research in 1953, and his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1956 - two years after Berger²⁴². Carl Mayer, Berger's teacher, had a very important research project on the development of religion in post-war Germany. As Berger was drafted into the army, he was unable to take this position, and Luckmann was offered the job. Luckmann explains: "I was not interested in religion; I was not interested in Germany, which I did not know. But I was interested in having a job" (in Ferreux 1988, p. 41). The fact that he carried out his first empirical research on the subject of religion was thus rather accidental. This study provided him with material for his dissertation. On the basis of this dissertation, he then published his two first papers on religion in Germany in 1957 and 1959²⁴³. In 1960, the editor of the Kölner Zeitschritf²⁴⁴ asked Luckmann to review the recent literature on sociology of religion. Luckmann took this opportunity to criticize the naively empirical character of these studies. In his conclusion, he announced the theme of his Invisible Religion: "The question with which sociology of religion will increasingly have to concern itself will not be the - historically central - problematic of 'secularization' [...] and its structural preconditions, which led to the preemption of certain relations of meaning, to the loss of reality of whole layers of symbolic reality and to the privatization of traditional churchliness. The central sociological question will have to be, What are the relations of meaning of the symbolic reality which obtains now, or will obtain, How is the internal structure of its thematic created, and In what sense does it continue a Christian thematic"²⁴⁵.

The year he published this article, Luckmann became assistant professor at the New School. In the meantime, Berger had become associate professor at the Hartford Seminary Foundation (Connecticut). In 1961, he published his first book: The Noise of Solemn Assemblies - an essay in which he reflected on his own, and on many of his coreligionists' malaise. It was a rather anticlerical analysis the religious establishment, which was denounced by Berger as not living up to true Christian commitment. Here again, we find evidence of the links between the sociological debate and the preoccupations of the churches.

Some of the elements of Berger's later secularization theory are adumbrated in this work. First, Berger stresses the importance of the industrial revolution: "The most important fact in the world today is not some particular ideological alignment but the transforming power of the industrial revolution" (Berger 1961a, p. 18). Second, he introduces the idea of secularization, mainly with reference to Herberg (see chap. 10). Reflecting on Herberg's paradox (how can a religious establishment exist in the midst of a highly secular society? [Berger 1961, p. 34]), he offers a solution of his own - which is not, in its essence, different from Herberg's: "The paradox resolves itself in a simple proposition: The social irrelevance of the religious establishment is its functionality. If organized religion in this society were highly relevant to the major social institutions, it would not be functional in the way it now is. It is functional precisely to the degree in which it is passive rather than active, acted upon rather than acting" (1961, p. 103). Also contained in this book is a rather caricatural prefiguration of the idea of privatization*: "When our typical church member leaves suburbia in the morning, he leaves behind him the person that played with the children, mowed the lawn, chatted with the neighbors - and went to church. His actions now become dominated by a radically different logic - the logic of business, industry, politics, or whatever other sector of public life the individual is related to. In this second life of his the church is totally absent. What the church has said to him might conceivably have bearing on his private life. But it is quite irrelevant to his involvement in public life" (1961, p. 37). Finally, again following Herberg, Berger presents American religion as radically worldly: "Perhaps the most striking characteristic of [Herberg's] 'common faith' is its intense this-worldliness. [...] Today, the supernatural has receded into a remote hinterland of consciousness [...]. Indeed, if religion were to be identified with some sort of preoccupation with the supernatural, then what is said and done in most of our churches can hardly be given that name at all" (1961, p. 42).

In retrospect, and although it created quite a stir, it appears that Berger's book did not contain any original insights. It was mainly a synthesis of common sociological knowledge on religion in America. The upshot of this synthesis was that religion subserved too many useful functions - psychological as well as social - to be truly consonant with Christian faith. Religion, in short, represented the "O.K. world": "In this social-psychological constellation, religion becomes an essential element of what we might call the 'O.K. world'. The religious institution becomes to the individual a guarantee that the world is as it should be" (1961, p. 93).

In 1963, Berger published a paper in which he developed a precise account of the market analysis of ecumenicity he was to present in his Sacred Canopy. As this analysis will be presented in detail later on, we will not discuss it here.

With this general background on Berger and on Luckmann's early works and biographies in mind, we can now turn to an assessment of their common contribution to the sociology of knowledge and to the sociology of religion. As noted above (see chap. 10), this contribution acted as a very efficient stimulus for the new generation of scholars, notably within the CISR. Berger and Luckmann have written three papers (1963, 1964, 1966b) and one book (1966a) together. The first paper must be understood as a stepping stone in the construction of the book, which was projected as early as 1962²⁴⁶. It consists in a remarkably programmatic statement on the relation between the sociology of religion and the sociology of knowledge. The article starts on the note set by Luckmann's 1960 paper. First, the authors point to the enormous effort of data-gathering by European Catholic sociologists. They deplore the "narrowly sociographic" orientation of this type of research and the "enormous discrepancy between this latter-day sociology of religion and the place that religion occupied in classical sociological theory" (Berger and Luckmann 1963, p. 419). They then relate this situation to the subordinate place of the sociology of religion in contemporary sociology, and suggest that, if this discipline is ever to regain its position, practitioners must break with the "ecclesiastically oriented definition of religion", and build instead an approach based on a sound sociological theory (1963, p. 420). Religion, they argue, must be considered a universal tool for the building and maintenance of universes of meaning - and these universes, obviously, can best be analyzed by a sociology of knowledge broadened to encompass, not only highly intellectual schemes, but also the type of knowledge used in daily life.

Berger and Luckmann's 1963 proposal really makes sense only if it is seen against a historical background, which the authors take for granted: secularization. "If it is correct to speak of contemporary society as increasingly secularized (and we think that this is correct), one is thereby saying that the sociologically crucial legitimations [without which no society can exist] are to be found outside the area of institutionally specialized religion" (1963, p. 423). In other words, to the extent that secularization as a decline of institutional religion - as described by Catholic sociologists - is regarded by Berger and Luckmann as evident, they are led to the conclusion that the study of religion, if it wants to regain importance, must transcend the study of this declining institution to study other manifestations of religion. Precisely because secularization has happened, the sociology of religion must be redefined in a broader sociology of knowledge perspective. The parallels of this type of reasoning with that employed in secular theology (see chap. 11) are evident: In both cases, as a result of secularization, religion is no longer to be sought where our fathers sought for it - which, however, does not mean that we can no longer find it.

The next two papers are less important for our purposes. The second (Berger and Luckmann 1964) presents more of an offshoot of Luckmann's first book, published the previous year. The authors establish a connection between the looseness of the social structure of modern societies and the problems of personal identity encountered by the individuals. In this context - and as an example of the application of the broader approach they advocate - social mobility is considered a "secularized version of a key feature of the Protestant ethic" (1964, p. 339). The third paper (Berger and Luckmann 1966b) seems to be much more influenced by Berger. It contains a brief, but precise, sketch of the analysis of pluralism developed one year later in the Sacred Canopy. It also contains the first definition, and application, of the notion of secularization: "The global historical force producing pluralism is [...] secularization, by which we mean the progressive autonomization of societal sectors from the domination of religious meanings and institutions" (1966b, p. 74). This cooperative work finally led to The Social Construction of Reality (1966), which is too well-known a work to need presentation²⁴⁷.