Secularism in retreat.

• Author: Berger, Peter L.

A few years ago the first volume coming out of the Fundamentalism Project landed on my desk. The Fundamentalism Project was generously funded by the MacArthur Foundation and chaired by Martin Marty, the distinguished church historian at the University of Chicago. While a number of very reputable scholars took part in it, and although the published results are of generally excellent quality, my contemplation of this first volume evoked in me what has been called an Aha! experience.

Now, the book was very big. Sitting there on my desk, massively, it was of the "book-weapon" type, the kind with which one could do serious injury. So I asked myself: Why would the MacArthur Foundation pay out several million dollars to support an international study of religious fundamentalists? Two answers came to mind. The first was obvious and not very interesting: The MacArthur Foundation is a very progressive outfit; it understands fundamentalists to be anti-progressive; the Project, then, was a matter of knowing one's enemies. The second was a more interesting answer: So-called fundamentalism was assumed to be a strange, difficult-to-understand phenomenon; the purpose of the Project was to delve into this alien world and make it more understandable.

But here came another question: Who finds this world strange, and to whom must it be made understandable? The answer to that question was easy: people to whom the officials of the MacArthur Foundation normally talk, such as professors at American elite universities. And with this came the Aha! experience: The concern that must have led to this Project was based on an upside-down perception of the world. The notion here was that so-called fundamentalism (which, when all is said and done, usually refers to any sort of passionate religious movement) is a rare, hard-to-explain thing. But in fact it is not rare at all, neither if one looks at history, nor if one looks around the contemporary world. On the contrary, what is rare is people who think otherwise. Put simply: The difficult-to-understand phenomenon is not Iranian mullahs but American university professors. (Would it, perhaps, be worth a multi-million-dollar project to try to explain the latter group?)

The point of this little story is that the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false: The world today, with some exceptions attended to below, is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature written by historians and social scientists over the course of the 1950s and '60s, loosely labeled as "secularization theory", was essentially mistaken. In my early work I contributed to this literature and was in good company so doing - most sociologists of religion had similar views. There were good reasons for holding these views at the time, and some of these writings still stand up. But the core premise does not.

The key idea of secularization theory is simple and can be traced to the Enlightenment: Modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals. It is precisely this key idea that has turned out to be wrong. To be sure, modernization has had some secularizing effects, more in some places than in others. But it has also provoked powerful movements of counter-secularization. Also, secularization on the societal level is not necessarily linked to secularization on the level of individual consciousness. Thus, certain religious institutions have lost power and influence in many societies, but both old and new religious beliefs and practices have nevertheless continued in the lives of individuals, sometimes taking new institutional forms and sometimes leading to great explosions of religious fervor. Conversely, religiously-identified institutions can play social or political roles even when very few people believe or practice the religion supposedly represented by these institutions. To say the least, the relation between religion and modernity is rather complicated.

Rejection and Adaptation

The proposition that modernity necessarily leads to a decline of religion is, in principle, "value-free." That is, it can be affirmed both by people who think it is good news and by people who think that it is very bad news indeed. Most Enlightenment thinkers and most progressive-minded people ever since have tended toward the idea that secularization is a good thing, at least insofar as it does away with religious phenomena that are "backward", "superstitious", or "reactionary" (a religious residue purged of these negative characteristics may still be deemed acceptable). But religious people, including those with very traditional or orthodox beliefs, have also affirmed the modernity/secularity linkage, and have greatly bemoaned it. Some have defined modernity as the enemy, to be fought whenever possible. Others have, on the contrary, seen modernity as an invincible worldview to which religious beliefs and practices should adapt themselves. In other words, rejection and adaptation are two strategies open to religious communities in a world understood to be secularized. As is always the case when strategies are based on mistaken perception of the terrain, both strategies have had very doubtful results.

It is possible, of course, to reject any number of modern ideas and values theoretically, but to make this rejection stick in the lives of people is much more difficult. To do that, one can try to take over society as a whole and make one's counter-modern religion obligatory for everyone - a difficult enterprise in most countries in the contemporary world. Franco tried in Spain, and failed; the mullahs are still at it in Iran and a couple of other places; in most of the world such exercises in religious conquest are unlikely to succeed. And this unlikelihood does have to do with modernization, which brings about very heterogeneous societies and a quantum leap in intercultural communication, two factors favoring pluralism and not favoring the establishment (or re-establishment) of religious monopolies. Another form of rejection strategy is to create religious subcultures so designed as to exclude the influences of the outside society. That is a more promising exercise than religious revolution, but it too is fraught with difficulty. Where it has taken root, modern culture is a very powerful force, and an immense effort is required to maintain enclaves with an airtight defense system. Ask the Amish in eastern Pennsylvania, or a Hasidic rabbi in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Notwithstanding the apparent power of modern secular culture, secularization theory has been falsified even more dramatically by the results of adaptation strategies attempted by religious institutions. If we really lived in a highly secularized world, then religious institutions could be expected to survive to the degree that they manage to adapt to secularity. That, indeed, has been the empirical assumption of adaptation strategies. What has in fact occurred is that, by and large, religious communities have survived and indeed flourished to the degree that they have not tried to adapt themselves to the alleged requirements of a secularized world. Put simply, experiments with secularized religion have generally failed; religious movements with beliefs and practices dripping with "reactionary supernaturalism" (the kind utterly beyond the pale at self-respecting faculty parties) have widely succeeded.

The struggle with modernity in the Roman Catholic Church nicely illustrates the difficulties of various rejection and adaptation strategies. In the wake of the Enlightenment and its multiple revolutions, the initial response by the Church was militant and then defiant rejection. Perhaps the most magnificent moment of that defiance came in 1870, when the First Vatican Council solemnly proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope and the immaculate conception of Mary, literally in the face of the Enlightenment about to occupy Rome in the shape of the army of Victor Emmanuel I. The disdain was...