"Secularization and De-Secularization" (original) (raw)

The Debate on Secularization and Religion. What Is Left?

There is a common view in the field of sociology, particularly, and social sciences, in general, that the world, as we know it, is a secular world and the role of religion in the public space is therefore minimal. This view has been challenged by a few sociologists of religion that pretended to see in the appearance of new religiosities and spiritualities, in the late 1970s and 1980s, a reawakening of the reality of the sacred and belief, now bound for the personal sphere and aside from the institutional functioning of churches and main denominations. Some of them have even talked about the privatization of religion and the disenchantment of the world, exhibiting mixed feelings of revivalism and nostalgia. They consider the thesis of secularization elaborated by important figures of sociology, like Max Weber, Durkheim and Marx, historically rooted and discredited by recent events in America and Great Britain and by the evolution of former atheist societies such as Russia and Eastern Europe. Modern sociologists of religion that subscribe to the thesis of secularization of the world, like Bryan Wilson, Steve Bruce and Charles Taylor, reformulated their initial outline of the model. These changes have not convinced those who shield themselves in the essentiality of religion in human society. The debate has somehow become frozen, in the two camps, around previous arguments. This essay looks to portray the evolution of the secularization thesis, taking in consideration other contributions beyond those originated in the English-speaking world. The Secularization Paradigm It was common, during the 1970s, to state that the Western world was more and more secularized and that only a few people recognized themselves as religious and pious.

Varieties of Secularization Theories and Their Indispensable Core

In the social sciences, a new discourse on religion in modern societies has established itself. It is no longer the master narrative that religion is waning in significance that dominates the perspectives in the social sciences. The new key words are “deprivatization of the religious” (Jose Casanova), “return of the gods” (Friedrich Wilhelm Graf), “re- ´ enchantment of the world” (Ulrich Beck)—or, quite simply, desecularization (Peter L. Berger). Insights of the sociological classics into the strained relationship between religion and modernity are regarded as no longer valid. Instead of speaking of the decline of religion in modern societies, of a strict contrast between modernity and tradition, scholars nowadays emphasize the blurring boundaries between tradition and modernity and the resurgence of religion in modern societies. Obviously, the logic of reversal governs this new way of thinking: Criticizing the secularization theory has become a new master narrative itself and often has a great deal to do with scaremongering. That’s why what is required first is as precise a reconstruction as possible of what secularization theory is actually saying. The article in its first part provides a reconstruction of the propositional content of secularization theory. The second step will then be to elaborate the various meanings of the concept of secularization. The third part finally deals with the criticisms of secularization theory and discusses the extent to which they are justified or not. Keywords: causal mechanisms, modernity, religion, secularization, social differentiation

Secularization: An Academic Truism or a Dubious Hypothesis?

MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 2008

Recent studies have been challenging and complicating our understanding of secularization, but most scholars assume that secularization is well underway. In this essay, I briefly examine the conflicting versions of secularization in three books. I ultimately try to show why it is naive to think that secularization has begun to take hold in the West. I specifically show how Nietzsche was fully aware of the fact that religion was becoming more dominant in the political sphere by the late nineteenth century and how he predicted that it would become horribly dangerous by the twentieth century. To clarify my point, I focus on the Nazis' version of Christianity, which Nietzsche defined with stunning precision.

Secularization: The Decline of the Supernatural Realm

RELIGIONS, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hkmNQsVINk&t=200s http://sekulerlesme.com/ How to define and measure secularization is among the most fervent discussions in the literature on the sociology of religion. The perception of secularization only in terms of change in the social prestige and influence of religion has confined the discussion on secularization to a narrower perspective, both theoretically and empirically. This paper argues that the supernatural realm (of which religion is a part), rather than religion itself, should be at the center of discussions on secularization. Since the term " supernatural realm " is used as an all-embracing concept, the decline in the social prestige and influence of religion-like structures, folk beliefs, magic and so forth are also considered part of the discussions on secularization. This is because Abrahamic or official religions are not the only supernatural entities that have noticeable effects on the daily lives of individuals. The paper also maintains that to hold a discussion on secularization in a comprehensive manner, academic works require " a defined period of time and place " rather a single timeframe because secularization is not the description of a situation but the definition of a process. If secularization is defined as such, the frequency of prayers, the rates of going to church, or changes in the number of believers will not be primal in measuring secularization because of how the supernatural reflects itself on daily practices might be different in different societies or belief systems. Thus, the definition put forward in this paper, based on the supernatural realm, will enhance the understanding not only of radical secularization processes in modern Western Europe (and its offshoots) but also of the secularization processes of modernizing non-Western countries.

A Crisis of Paradigms: Secularization Theory and Its Recent Opponents

It is ironic that debates over the validity of the secularization thesis have been a central focus in the sociology of religion in recent decades, considering the fact that the theory remained unchallenged by almost every leading figure in the study of religion prior to the 1960s and achieved “a truly paradigmatic status within the modern social sciences.” As religious belief and practice have continued to flourish despite global modernization, however, the central tenets of the previously uncontested thesis began to be questioned, leading many sociologists to declare secularization as a myth put forward by their European counterparts. This has prompted lively debate between researchers who continue to defend the inevitability of modern secularization and those who claim that religiosity will survive and flourish in the midst of global modernity. The following paper seeks to investigate and critically examine the different paradigms with which various scholars have approached the questions of modernization, secularization, and global religion.

Conclusion: A New Approach to Secularization

Springer eBooks, 2022

In the first chapter of this book, I picked up two ideas from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age and ran with them. The first idea was that analyses of secularization should be pitched on the level of unarticulated assumptions underpinning collective practices and technologies. This, I suggested, untethers the process of secularization from the question of people's conscious beliefs, articulated experiences, or preferred identity markers. The second idea was that secularity denotes a specific kind of time mediated on this level; in other words, that secularity is one kind of time that makes certain technological collective practices make sense. This untethers secularity from the concept of 'religion'. Contemporary historiographies of the secular are more or less stuck in a conceptual blind alley debating identity markers and religion's 'others'. In this book, I have tried to show that these two elements of Taylor's thesis, when pragmatically developed and combined with recent theoretical and historiographical turns, offer a possible way out. Of course, many historians are interested in the development of 'religion', or concerned with affirming certain groups' self-identification as 'secular' in the 'nonreligious' sense. I expect some of them might find the idea of removing these questions entirely from histories of secularization a little controversial. Of course, the ways that people articulate their experience of having 'beliefs' and 'non-beliefs' or being 'religious' or 'nonreligious' are important simply because so many are socially and politically