Chapter 1. Introduction
“clear that the concept of secularization is now being used in sociology in different ways” (1981, p. 8). 1.2. Privatization and Religious Change rather than Religious Decline So which ways of thinking about secularization have emerged instead of the normative prediction that religion will inevitably decline? The three ways – there are always three – in which secularization has been used according to Dobbelaere are referring to either “decline in church involvement, laicization of societal institutions, or to religious changes” (ibid.). The first one is statistically straightforward: increasingly fewer (young) individuals are baptized, attend the services of churches, mosques, synagogues, and so on (Archbishops’Council, 2013; Brenner, 2016; Hooghe et al. 2006); nor do they identify with any institutionalized belonging (Pew, 2018). Secondly, religion might indeed be receding from the public and political sphere (laïcité); but that often (thirdly) seems to have resulted into religion moving to less institutional, more privatized contexts (Shiner, 1967; Parsons, 1977; Dobbelaere 1981; Tschannen, 1991; Gorski & Altinordu, 2008). As Olivier Tschannen argues (1991), many of the most influential works on secularization have been theories of privatization, including Bellah’s Religious Evolution (1964), and Berger’s Sacred Canopy (1967) – in both cases a pluralization of religious organizations leads to religion as a choice for individuals to privately make; and there is a consequent collapse of shared ultimate meaning or a unified value system based on religion. Steve Bruce, in one of the latest defences of privatization-secularization, God is Dead, concludes that: “individualism, diversity and egalitarianism in the context of liberal democracy undermine the authority of religious beliefs […] religion diminishes in social significance, becomes increasingly privatized, and loses personal salience except where it finds work to do other than relating individuals to the supernatural” (Bruce, 2002, p. 30) Indeed, scholars such as Bruce have drawn on surveys to show that the importance Westerners place on religion in the form of gods, churches and (Christian) doctrines is waning in countries like England and those like it (Bruce 1995, 2001, 2002; Bruce and Glendinning, 2003; Field, 2001; Voas and Bruce, 2004; Voas and Crockett, 2005). 26
