Secularization

By Alan Wolfe
Atlantic Monthly, March 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Many areas of the world are experiencing a decline in religious belief and practice. And where religions are flourishing, they are also generally evolving. The answer to the question of which religion will dominate the future may well be none.

Until relatively recently, most social theorists believed that as societies became more modern, religion would lose its capacity to inspire. Industrialization would substitute the rational pursuit of self-interest for blind submission to authority. Science would undermine belief in miracles. Democracy would encourage the separation of church and state. Gender equality would undermine patriarchy clerical authority.

Last October, the Pew Global Attitudes Project plotted 44 countries according to per capita gross domestic product and intensity of religious belief, gauged by the responses to several questions about faith (a rendition of the Pew data appears above).

Toward the right edge of the graph and at the very bottom lies western Europe, where God, if not dead, has only a faint pulse. Islam is increasingly prevalent in countries such as France and Great Britain, and one can also detect a slight uptick in Christian religiosity across much of the Continent in the past decade or so. But the region’s last significant pockets of concentrated religiosity are collapsing.

Eastern Europe lies to the left of western Europe on the graph. But most of the countries of eastern Europe are not very different from them in religious terms. And increasing prosperity in eastern Europe may lower religiosity even more. The first European states to fully embrace secularism did so over hundreds of years. The last holdouts appear to be making the shift in a generation.

The Asian countries surveyed are scattered around the graph, but they follow the graph’s basic pattern. Among the so-called Asian Tigers, only South Korea is known for religiosity. And even there, it has been leveling off in recent years. Japan, the richest nation in Asia, is alongside the godless countries of western Europe.

The Middle East is the region of greatest concern to many Americans when it comes to religious fervor, for the religion in question is Islam. Despite its oil, the Middle East is still relatively poor and only recently urbanized. No one doubts that to arrive there is to pass through the doors of devotion. But the Middle East is a huge area. The notion that Islamic fundamentalism will sweep the entire region is simply not realistic.

In Africa the predictions of an old-fashioned, broad-based religious revival may come closest to the mark. Much of the commentary on religion’s muscle in Africa, and the consequent potential for clashing civilizations, centers on Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country. Africa is indeed in the throes of a great awakening.

The United States stands, nearly alone, as the only country in the world, apart from Kuwait, that is both wealthy and religious. Americans are not only more religious than Europeans; they are more religious than the citizens of some Latin American countries. If proof is needed that religion will remain a dominant force in history for a long time to come, the fact that the world’s most affluent society is also well up among the faithful would seem to provide it.

But American religiosity is as shallow as it is broad. Americans know relatively little about the histories, the theological controversies, or even the sacred texts of their chosen faiths. Recent decades have witnessed the seemingly inexorable advance of secular ideals. Not only are atheist manifestos selling in large numbers, but the percentage of those who express no religious preference to pollsters doubled between 1990 and 2001, to 15 percent.

The most important religious phenomenon in the United States, however, concerns the creation and spread of a free religious marketplace. The key precondition for this sort of marketplace is the presence of rudimentary secular values. Secularism is not the opposite of belief, nonbelief is. Indeed, secularism has Christian roots. Religion’s priority of belief and secularism’s commitment to individual rights complement each other.

So what happens to religions that find themselves with many competitors? Consider what is occurring within the growing American evangelical movement. American evangelicalism is becoming less hostile to liberal ideas such as tolerance and pluralism. Most of the religious revivals we are seeing throughout the world today complement secular developments. They are more likely to encourage moderation than fanaticism.

As religious leaders recognize that they are more likely to swell their ranks through persuasion than through coercion, they find themselves accepting such secular ideas as free will and individual autonomy. And even religions that are culturally dominant and closely linked with the state must worry about holding on to the allegiance of the young.

One can see intimations of a pluralistic, American-style religious revival around the world. Secularly influenced forms of Islamic revivalism are exceptionally influential among the ambitious and upwardly mobile Muslims who will be leading their countries in the future.

The pattern is similar virtually everywhere we look. Latin Americans are leaving Catholicism because they want the sense of personal empowerment that Pentecostal forms of worship can provide. Even in Nigeria, there are signs of accommodation.

Religious peace will be the single most important consequence of the secular underpinning of today’s religious growth. All religions tend to be protective of their traditions and rituals, but all religions also change depending upon the cultural practices of the societies in which they are based.

The world will never be rid of fanaticism. But fanaticism should not be confused with religious intensity. And religious leaders prone to fanaticism are likely to find that the price will be a greatly diminished hold on the future. Historians may one day look back on the next few decades as the era when secularization took over the world.
 

AR  Seems a reasonable analysis, but I wouldn't bet on the inevitability of human reasonableness.