A history of the secularization issue

The institutionalization of the sociology of religion (1954-1964)
Before we turn to the presentation of the secularization paradigm, the final steps in the institutionalization of sociology of religion as a recognized sub-discipline must briefly be discussed²¹⁰. The institutionalization of the new discipline was theoretical first, and social only later. The main step toward the theoretical recognition of the discipline had in effect already been taken with the rise of functionalism. From the analysis of the textbooks, it appears that the 60s did not represent a significant improvement in the theoretical status of sociology of religion. 13 of the 27 textbooks published before 1968 included a chapter on

religion²¹¹, and 14 of the 22 texts published from this date included such a chapter²¹² - which is only a slight improvement. The institutionalization we are concerned with in this chapter is situated at the social level.

As a result of the theoretical developments, at the end of the 50s, sociologists of religion felt that their field of inquiry had become sufficiently important to be recognized as a sub-discipline. In order to achieve this, they had to impose themselves at the institutional level. One aspect of this struggle to achieve recognition is related by Norman Birnbaum, who played an active part in it: "For reasons not entirely clear, the Program Committee planning the Fourth World Congress of Sociology (Stresa, Italy, September of 1959) made no provision for discussion of the sociology of religion" (Birnbaum 1960, p. 111). In reaction to this exclusion, a group of sociologists of religion, led most notably by Birnbaum, Becker, and Desroche, "respectfully petition[ed] for a full recognized and implemented section on sociology of religion at succeeding congresses of the ISA" (1960, p. 112). It will come as no surprise to us that this institutionalization of the sociology of religion was inseparably linked to new theoretical developments; as a justification for the recognition of the status of sociology of religion, Birnbaum asserted that the sociology of religion must "move from sociographic emphases to theoretical analysis" (1960, p. 111). The demand of the sociologists of religion was fulfilled by the ISA and, ever since, this organization includes a Research Committee (n. 22) on religion.

In Europe, the Groupe de sociologie des religions (GSR), which had been created in Paris in October 1954, represented the first move toward an institutionalization of sociology of religion in a non-denominational framework. According to Poulat - one of the founding members - the phrase sociologie des religions, which was not common in French at this time, was deliberately chosen in order to break from the tradition of sociologie religieuse as it was embodied in the CISR (Poulat 1990, p. 19). In the next few years, interest in sociology of religion rose steadily: six conferences were held from 1959 onwards in the framework of the Centre de sociologie du protestantisme (Strasbourg), and other, more sporadic conferences²¹³, were also held (1990, pp. 23-24).

The progress in the institutionalization of the new sub-discipline can be traced fairly accurately by the founding of the five journals which, to this day, remain the only regularly published scientific journals entirely devoted to sociology of religion. The first, Social Compass, was launched in the Netherlands by the KASKI (Catholic Institute for Socio-Ecclesiastical Research), and first appeared in Dutch in 1953 under the title Sociaal Kompas. Very soon, it began publishing papers in other major languages, and from 1960 onwards, it published mainly in English and in French. In 1956, the French GSR started publishing the Archives de sociologie des religions (today: Archives de sciences sociales des religions). The next three journals were American. In 1959, the Religious Research Association²¹⁴ (RRA) started publishing the Review of Religious Research, and in 1961, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) launched the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Finally, in 1964, the ACSS changed the name of its journal, which had appeared since 1940, from American Catholic Sociological Review to Sociological Analysis. Thus in a mere decade, the new sub-discipline had been equipped with its five major journals. Even tough it still occupied a somewhat inferior status (Beckford 1985), sociology of religion had become an officially established and recognized sub-discipline within the academic world.
CHAPTER 11

THE ROLE OF THE THEOLOGICAL DEBATE
Most of the elements that account for the emergence of the CISR paradigm in the mid-60s have by now become familiar to the reader. We have successively discussed the emergence of the different exemplars, the rise of interest in religion as a subject matter, the rise of functionalism, and the intellectual revolution within the CISR. However, all these elements are not sufficient in themselves to explain the sudden popularity of the notion of secularization.

As we will see, the suddenness of the popularity of this theme cannot be understood without the theological debate around the theses put forward by a number of "secular theologians". Without the interest and the passions aroused by this debate, it is doubtful whether secularization would ever have so suddenly become a fashionable topic.

Secular Theology
To gain a better understanding of the ultimate transformation in the secularization issue, we must now offer a brief survey of the developments that took place in Protestant theology from the XIX^th century to the 1960s. As we will see, these developments brought about no less than a Copernician revolution - or, in Kuhnian terms, a change of paradigm - in the evaluation of the impact of modernity on religion. The ultimate consequence of this revolution was a change of polarity: Secularization was no longer viewed as a sad decline from the Golden Age of Christianity, but as the final realization of its long repressed potentialities.

The characteristic which most readily distinguishes modern Protestant theology from previous theological thinking is a continuing effort to come to terms with the intellectual developments which originated at the time of the Enlightenment. It will hardly be necessary to linger at great length on this point. Suffice it to say that the credibility of the Christian world-view appeared severely shaken by the new confidence in the powers of reason which characterized this period. Alasdair Heron summarizes the challenges these developments posed to traditional theology under five headings: 1) the challenge to the authority of the Bible arising from the new scientific understanding of the universe on the one hand, and from scholarly developments in the study of biblical documents on the other; 2) the increasing questioning of the possibility of miracles arising from the better understanding of the regularities in the natural order, which led to conceptions such as those of the deists, who conceived of God as a necessary but remote "First Cause" of the Universe, which was unlikely to upset the natural order to intervene directly in specific, individual occurrences; 3) the development of the idea of a "natural religion" (from Rousseau's "civic religion" to Robespierre's "Supreme Being"), which led to a distinction between the "genuine" core of religion and the inauthentic traditions which went along with it in Christianity; 4) the limits set to reason by philosophers such as Hume and Kant, who reduced the sphere of the knowable to the empirical, thus putting an end to a long tradition in Christianity which held that the existence of God could be proven rationally; 5) the growing awareness of the huge cultural gap separating us from the biblical times, which led to a questioning of the relevance of history - and particularly of the history told in the Bible - for authentic religious belief by thinkers like Lessing (Heron 1980, pp. 4-21).

The first theologian to bring a convincing answer to these multiple challenges was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the founder of modern Protestant theology. It is not necessary, in the framework of this analysis, to go into an elaborate discussion of Schleiermacher's work. It will suffice, for our purposes, to note that he re-stated the meaning of Christian convictions by accepting the critiques set forth by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, but only in order to better sidestep them. Schleiermacher asserted that Christian faith had nothing to do with knowledge, nor with ethics, which were both much too deeply marked by man's finitude. Instead, Schleiermacher contended, faith had its roots at a level that lay deeper than knowledge or ethics, and which he sought to circumscribe as "consciousness", "modification of Feeling" and "immediate awareness". In his view, the ground of religious experience was provided by the "consciousness of being absolutely dependant or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God" (Schleiermacher, quoted in Heron 1980, p. 25). Thus, man is placed by Schleiermacher at the periphery - which implies that what he knows or what he does cannot be taken as a standard - and God at the center. Religious experience is this awareness of our own finitude, and at the same time of the infinity of God, on which we depend.

Schleiermacher thus provides us with a first example of the ways in which a theological explanation can be rescued from criticisms which seem to destroy its very foundations, by moving, as it were, these foundations to another point. Heron in effect states that "[...] Schleiermacher offers to religious language a new foundation and point of reference, one with inbuilt defences against the attacks of the Enlightenment" (1980, p. 27).

Although Schleiermacher did not have many followers during his lifetime, he inaugurated a very important tradition in protestant theology (1980, p. 31). I will skip some steps in the developments which ensued directly or indirectly from his work - most notably Riltsch and Liberal Theology, Hegel and some of his followers, and Kierkegaard - to come to what is most directly relevant for our purpose.

One of the main underlying motifs of all the theological thinking which we will expose is a distinction between the "authentic" and the "inauthentic" in a religious tradition. We have already seen that motif at work in Schleiermacher's thought when, in answer to the attacks of the philosophers, he asserted that religion was not a form of knowledge, but something that lies at a further depth. This basic motif will become very important when we will assess the impact of the theological secularization theories on sociology: if secularization does nothing but peel off the inauthentic crust of religion, it leads to a purification, not to a decline. Rather than attempting to expose the main theological systems of twentieth-century protestant theology - which would be impossible - I will therefore trace this recurrent motif.

The first very important theologian to take up this motif in the twentieth century was Karl Barth (1886-1968), who made a distinction between "religion" and "faith". To understand this distinction, it is necessary to say a few words on Barth's conception of God. The main point which must be emphasized for our purposes is that God is of a totally different nature than man. God is definitely beyond our human understanding. "God is God, not man writ large: and he cannot be spoken simply by speaking of ourselves in a louder voice" (Heron 1980, p. 76, emphasis in original). Religion, then - man's spiritual depth and moral awareness - is a form of idolatry, for in it, man is not preoccupied with God, but with his "own secret divinity" (1980, p. 79). Faith, on the other hand, is man's response to the "Word of God" - that is, to God's unpredictable and ineffable invitation to be his children. In Heron's words, the Word of God "cannot be trapped in the net of our thoughts and expressions. Instead, it flashes across between them, coming 'vertically from above', and leaving behind only the marks of its passing, much as lightning scorches the earth where it strikes" (1980, p. 77). "Religion is man's striving after God [...], and when man finds his God he inevitably wants to use God for his own purposes. Christian faith, however, is God's creation, called into being through the Incarnate Word. Faith stays in judgment on every form of religion including Christianity" (Shiner 1965, p. 279).

Although there are very important differences between Schleiermacher and Barth from a theological point of view²¹⁵, both of them discard some part of what was defined as religion, to reduce it to that part which they conceived as most essential. However, it should be noted that Barth's position derived from a completely opposed origin than Schleiermacher's. Whereas the latter made his distinction to answer the devastating challenges brought about by modernity while valuing them positively, Barth's attack on religion was motivated by a rejection of this modernity, which had by then taken such horrendous expression as the First World War (Heron 1980, p. 69), and with which the Church came to be identified when a group of intellectuals, many of whom were theologians, publicly supported the Kaiser's war policy (1980, p. 75). Thus, Barth's distinction cannot be considered as directly seminal in the genesis of the CISR paradigm. However, there is an indirect relationship, insofar as one other very important German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), considered his own work as a way to carry further Barth's attacks on religion (1980, pp. 96, 152).

Bonhoeffer advocated a "religionless Christianity" and a "worldly holiness" (1980, p. 154). In his view, "holiness" had nothing to do with the restricted, the mystical and the pious, but must be understood in a thoroughly worldly, secular fashion (1980, p. 154). For if religion is considered as a kind of "other-worldliness", God is separated off from the real life of the world. Instead, Bonhoeffer contended, there are not two levels of reality, one "sacred", the other "secular", and God is not a remote entity to which man turns only when he is helpless. "The gospel [...] must speak to men where they are strong, not only where they are weak" (1980, pp. 154-55). Therefore, it is important to live in the world "as if God himself was not given", and to take over responsibility in the secular world (1980, p. 155). Bonhoeffer valued the secular world extremely positively. He considered it as a liberation of man, and he coined the phrase describing the modern world "a world come of age"²¹⁶.

One other very important theologian for the genesis of the positive evaluation of secularization is Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), who was a New Testament scholar. What struck him most in his researches was that the New Testament was anchored in the world-view of a pre-scientific culture, extremely remote from ours, and that any literal reading of the scriptures was therefore totally untenable (Bultmann et al. 1953, pp. 1-5). According to Bultmann, "the world-view of the New Testament writers was 'mythical' in the sense that they thought of the universe as containing heaven above, the underworld below, and our earth in between, and believed the course of human life to be governed by supernatural forces of good and evil" (1980, p. 103). Therefore, Bultmann maintained, it is necessary to "demythologize" the New Testament, that is, to discover the real functions of the mythical events in it.

Thus, in Bultmann, we find the same motif at work again: he asserted that what was important about the Gospel was not its form, but its message, which must be re-discovered beneath the layers of mythological thinking. Where Schleiermacher had jettisoned metaphysics and ethics, where Barth had discarded "religion", Bultmann contended that we must do away with myth. However, the same cannot be said with respect to Bonhoeffer. Whereas Bultmann, as Barth and Schleiermacher had done before him, salvaged the Christian explanation by reducing its scope and, as it were, concentrating it, Bonhoeffer definitely expanded it. God, which had become extremely remote in Barth's approach, was seen by Bonhoeffer as pervading every aspect of secular life. Both of these movements are important: on the one hand, religion goes through a process of purification, but on the other hand, elements which originated in religion come to pervade every aspect of secular life (generalization*). The combination of these two processes can best be read as a reorganization of the forces of religion in society.

But we still have to deal with the theologian which most explicitly set forth a secularization theory: Friedrich Gogarten (1887-1967). In his writings, we will find not only some elements which were later to be incorporated into sociological secularization theories, but a complete analysis of the roots and consequences of secularization. What does Gogarten mean by secularization? It is important to distinguish two meanings in his writings (Gogarten 1953, pp. 137-38). First, Gogarten uses secularization in the ordinary sense of "the separation of originally Christian ideas and experiences from their divine ground and their transformation into purely human phenomena" (Shiner 1966, p. 35). Gogarten does not value this evolution positively. The other sense of secularization is the one which really originated in the Christian tradition. This second type of secularization, Gogarten contends, is the logical outcome of the fact that God turned the world over to man. Not only is this secularization compatible with Christian faith, but its very origin is Christian. It has actually been brought about largely because of Christianity, in the sense that Christian faith desacralized the world. This desacralization of the world results in a transition from a mythical to a historical relationship to the world (Gogarten 1953, pp. 99-117). Whereas pre-Christian man established a "mystical" relationship to the world, in which a cosmos determined and secured human life through its spiritual powers (Shiner 1966, p. 27), Christian man was from the beginning potentially "mature", which led him to entertain a relationship of responsibility for the world (Gogarten 1953, pp. 24-34). The world no longer encompasses man; in the sphere of ethics, for instance, man is no longer accountable to a given reality, but fashions the normative arrangements himself, and is responsible for his decisions. Theologically, Gogarten grounds his contention on elements such as Paul's phrase: "all is permitted". "No matter how minor the external occasion on which Paul spoke the phrase 'all is permitted' it remains one of the most powerful words ever spoken. Because it opens up a fully new relation of man to the world, the face of the world has been fundamentally changed" (Gogarten 1953, p. 94).

However, these two types of secularization are historically linked: it is only with the Enlightenment (1966, p. 36) that the Christian leap into history, which had been delayed by the influence of the Hellenistic philosophy on Christian faith - with its a-historical, metaphysical world-view²¹⁷ - came to fruition. Even today, the Church does not fully recognize the independence of man which arises logically from the gospel.

In spite of this historical connection, Gogarten contends that the two processes must be distinguished. Although it is very important that man be free from "any limits imposed from outside on his own conscience", this independence "must be united with an awareness of the mystery of man in the world" (1966, p. 166). If not, if man is no longer open to the divine mystery, the positive evaluation becomes negative, and this evolution is called "secularism" (1966, p. 166). This distinction is very important. The process of autonomization of man is valued positively, but only up to a point. As long as man conceives of his independence as a responsibility for the world, while agreeing to remain a receiver over against God, Gogarten calls this independence Selbstständigkeit, and the process is referred to as secularization. But if man refuses any determination beyond himself, if he wants to be unabhängig²¹⁸ (1966, p. 42, n. 25), then Gogarten speaks of secularism. This distinction, as we will see later on, will turn out to be very fruitful, in that it will enable Christians to accept secularization without appearing to give in to the secular world.

So far, so good. But how did these theological discussions come to affect sociology? Surely, very few sociologists, especially in the anglo-saxon world, were familiar with these developments. They were expressed in a very intricate language and in an alien intellectual setting for one thing, and, with the exception of Tillich's work (which we have not discussed because it did not contribute any radically new idea to the matter for discussion here, but which participates in the same tendency), the whole discussion took place in Germany, and few of these works had been translated at the beginning of the 60s.

The moment this high-level squabble broke out into the public sphere can be traced very accurately to march 1963, when the Londoner Student Christian Movement Press published a little book written by the bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson: Honest to God (Edwards 1963, p. 7). This book, wrote its editor the same year, "[...] appears to have sold more quickly than any new book of serious theology in the history of the world. Already over 350,000 copies are in print in Britain, America and Australia, and it is also being published in German, French, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, Italian and Japanese" (1963, p. 7). The bishop's book found a very large echo in the press, on the radio and even on television. Reviewers from the Birmingham Post (1963, p. 87), the Observer (1963, p. 91), the Daily Herald, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Church Times, the Sunday Times (1963, p. 127), The Times (1963, p. 98), the Sunday Telegraph (1963, p. 95), to name just the most well-known newspapers, fiercely discussed the book. In three months, the bishop received over one thousand letters (1963, p. 9).

But what was the book about? Readers familiar with the theologians' writings could find nothing new in it, nor did they consider it a very good book (see for instance Heron 1980, p. 152). In fact, it simply popularized the views aired years before by some of the theologians whose works we have just discussed: mainly Bonhoeffer, Bultmann and Tillich. The book contended that we must get rid of the mythological view of the three-decker universe (Robinson 1963, p. 11), and accept instead that God is not "up there", nor even "out there", but that he is what Tillich calls "ultimate reality"²¹⁹, or "the ground of our being" (1963, p. 29).

So why the sudden public uproar? For one thing, the book had been written by a bishop. A good many people were scandalized by the very idea that this high personage could express such deep doubts about his faith (Edwards 1963, p. 40). As one letter to the bishop nicely put it: "if the parsons say everything they have taught us is wrong, how can they be right as to what they tell us now?" (1963, p. 49). For another thing, the book had been advertised very efficiently. One week before the appearance of the book, the author had written a short summary in the Oberver, a London newspaper, under a somewhat provocative headline: "Our Image of God must Go"²²⁰. Thirdly, the book appeared at a time when the Church of England, as all other major denominations over the western world, faced a widespread crisis of legitimacy. Finally, for most readers, who were not familiar with the theologian's writings, what the bishop said really was new.

But this first book was soon to be followed by a second one, by the same editor, just a few months later. The book, by Paul Van Buren, bore the title The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (Van Buren 1963). A much more difficult reading, it was nevertheless considered a kind of rejoinder to the original manifesto, and the two books are often referred to together (see for instance Mascall 1965, p. viii).

These two books, however, do not bear directly on the secularization debate. Their preoccupations are much more with the theological problems linked to the emergence of modernity than with the relationship between the modern world and theology as such. In other words, these books are very theological, and not sociological at all, even if the recasting of theology which they advocated did have implicit consequences for a sociological understanding of religion. Furthermore, they draw much more on Bonhoeffer and Bultmann than on Gogarten, whose problematic, as we have seen, is the one which bears most directly on secularization. But these books were very important in creating a new climate, in which the meaning of Christian faith became a topic of public discussion. It is in the new atmosphere and the environment of general interest aroused by these two books that Harvey Cox's Secular City²²¹, which relied much more on Gogarten, and which we take to have had a much more direct impact on sociology²²², appeared.

Harvey Cox's book was another best-seller. "Within a short time", wrote its editor, "The Secular City had gone into multiple printings". Christian Century acclaimed it as "Protestantism's most discussed book [in 1965]" (Callahan 1966, p. 1). Harvey Cox relies very heavily on Gogarten and on Bonhoeffer. Like Gogarten, he evaluates secularization very positively. Like Gogarten, he makes a distinction between secularization and secularism (Cox 1965, pp. 16-18). His main concern is with the consequences of modernity for Christianity. The general argument is quite simple. Two processes are, according to Cox, closely interconnected: secularization and urbanization. By secularization, Cox refers to "the collapse of traditional religion, [...] the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-religious understandings of itself, [...] the breaking of all supernatural myths and sacred symbols [...]" (1965, pp. 1-2). Urbanization, on the other hand, is what sociologists usually call modernization, in the sense of a transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft: "Urbanization means a structure of common life in which the diversity and the disintegration of tradition are paramount. It means an impersonality in which functional relationships multiply. It means that a degree of tolerance and anonymity replace traditional moral sanctions and long-term acquaintanceships. The urban center is the place of human control, of rational planning, of bureaucratic organization - and the urban center is not just in Washington, London, New York, and Peking. It is everywhere" (1965, p. 4).

Thus, not only does Cox borrow from Gogarten and Bonhoeffer, he also borrows from sociology. Indeed, many of the categories he uses are nothing but a re-naming of commonly used sociological concepts. In Cox's vocabulary, modernization is translated into urbanization, social structure into the shape of the secular city, and culture into its style (1965, p. 5). Indeed, Cox appears to be very much at home in sociology: In a very sharp discussion with Andrew Greeley (himself a sociologist) which followed the publication of his book, he quite rightly chastized Greeley for his simplistic account of some theoretical developments in sociology²²³ (in Callahan 1966, pp. 113-20). Cox thus brings together two very different intellectual traditions, and blends them into a single analysis. In this way, the process of secularization which has been described and analyzed by sociologists is interpreted, and valued positively, through Bonhoeffer's conception of "man's coming of age". In Cox's analysis, secularization and urbanization always go hand in hand, and the very irresistibility of this evolution is interpreted as constituting the logical outcome of Christianity.

But one further aspect of Cox's approach must be stressed here. Cox, taking up Gogarten's notion that secularization is the logical outcome of Christian faith, develops it in a much more sociological fashion: "There are three pivotal elements in biblical faith which have each given rise to one aspect of secularization. Thus, the disenchantment of nature begins with the Creation, the desacralization of politics with the Exodus, and the deconsecration of values with the Sinai Covenant" (Cox 1965, p. 15). These are not theological statements. Although the labels given by Cox to these processes are biblical, he does not interpret them theologically - unlike Gogarten, whose interpretation of Paul's "all is permitted" is theological - but sociologically, as can be seen for instance in the way he explains the importance he attaches to the Exodus: "There had no doubt been similar escapes before, but the Exodus of the Hebrews [...] became the central event around which the Hebrews organized their whole perception of reality" (1965, p. 22).

The disenchantment of nature²²⁴ is rooted in the Creation because at this moment, nature was separated from God - the sun and moon became creations of God - and man from nature - the kinship system of the Hebrews is historical, not cosmological (1965, p. 20). The desacralization of politics is linked to the Exodus because is was "an act of insurrection against a duly constituted monarch, a pharao whose relationship to the sun/god Re constituted his claim to political sovereignty" (1965, p. 22). Finally, the deconsecration of values is related to the Sinai Covenant in that the commandment against idolatry designates the gods as human projections, thereby relativizing all the values, much like the social sciences do today (1965, p. 28).

Finally, many of the elements which will become important in the CISR paradigm are set forth by Cox. Thus, we can read that religion has been "privatized" (1965, p. 2), that a very important step in the process which led to secularization is the emergence of "a group of self-conscious religious specialists" (1965, p. 8), and that one important element of this evolution is "rationalization"²²⁵ (1965, p. 11).