1.1. Seminal Daddies of Secularization

The following literature review will start out, first, with a general overview of the role of religion and its predicted decline by early social scientists; arguing that most classical theories on secularization frame religion as historically un-modern. Secondly, I treat important critiques of such straightforward secularization theses, namely that religion has instead been changing into privatized and mediatized forms. Thirdly, I will argue that play and games have been studied as particular forms of such privatized and mediatized religion, in which the problems have been a functionalist bias (equating play with ritual) and a substantialist bias (locating signs of the sacred in games) without considering what meanings are attached to games by those who make and play them – let alone whether those are religious at all. Fourth, and as a consequence, I argue that to find out what the presence of religion in videogames means – and why it is there – we need to look at the encoding, texts, and decoding of religion in videogames, leading to a re-iteration of the research questions above (and an outline for how this thesis answers them).

1.1. Seminal Daddies of Secularization

In the past 150 years, few topics have been so central to the social sciences as religion and its decline in the West. If Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim can be seen as the “founding fathers” of sociology (e.g., Connell, 1997; Boudon, Cherkaoui & Alexander, 1997; Baehr, 2017), then the discipline started out with a dominant view on religion’s role in society as distinctly un-modern – and bound to disappear or change soon.

These fathers’ seminal discourses in themselves can take on the teleological tone of religious prophecy. Comte’s view on religion is mostly epistemological, arguing that the “human mind,” and societies in general move through three consecutive and mutually exclusive modes of thinking, of which religious thought is the most primitive, and he presents this as a natural law:

“This law consists in that each of our principle conceptions, each branch of our knowing, passes successively through three different theoretical states: the theological or fictive state; the metaphysical or abstract state; the scientific or positive, state […] the third one is humanity’s fixed and definitive state.” (Comte, 1822a, p. 61, emphasis added)1

Marx, from a historical perspective, insisted that traditional power relations including religious institutions would inevitably be profaned, as industrial capitalism and its dialectic consequences overhaul socio-economic structures:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” (Marx, 1848a, p. 10).2

Durkheim, in his early work (specifically: his Ph.D. dissertation), still argued that from a societal perspective “the sphere of religion” in society “is continually diminishing,” a collective process of regression which

“did not begin at any precise moment in history, but one can follow the phases of its development from the very origins of social evolution. It is therefore bound up with the basic conditions for the development of societies and thus demonstrates that there is a constantly decreasing

1 “Cette loi consiste en ce que chacune de nos conceptions principales, chaque branche de nos connaissances, passe successivement par trois états théoriques différents: l’état théologique, ou fictif; l’état métaphysique, ou abstrait; l’état scientifique, ou positif […] la troisième, [est] son état fixe et définitif” (Comte, 1822b, p. 61).

2 “Alle festen eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und

Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern können. Alles

Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen.” (Marx, 1848b, p. 5).

number of beliefs and collective sentiments that are both sufficiently collective and strong enough to assume a religious character.” (1893a, p. 120)3

Max Weber, by contrast, speaks about modernism as increasingly disenchanted, but he emphasizes (Protestant) religion’s role in bringing about modern disenchanted thinking. Weber argues that the early “scientific worker, influenced (indirectly) by Protestantism and Puritanism, conceived to be his task: to show the path to God” [1919a, p. 142]). However, he reads his contemporary society in 1917 as increasingly disenchanted, to which Protestant-influenced science is ironically a “motive force” (p. 139). This disenchantment of the (Western) world [Entzauberung der Welt] is a linear “progress” or “process of disenchantment” (ibid.), an “increasing intellectualization and rationalization” which

“means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.” (ibid.)4

3 “En un mot, non seulement le domaine de la religion ne s’accroît pas en même temps que celui de la vie temporelle et dans la même mesure, mais il va de plus en plus en se rétrécissant. Cette régression n’a pas commencé à tel ou tel moment de l’histoire; mais on peut en suivre les phases depuis les origines de l’évolution sociale. Elle est donc liée aux conditions fondamentales du développement des sociétés, et elle témoigne ainsi qu’il y a un nombre toujours moindre de croyances et de sentiments collectifs qui sont et assez collectifs et assez forts pour prendre un caractère religieux.” (Durkheim, 1893b, p. 144). 4 “Die zunehmende Intellektualisierung und Rationalisierung bedeutet also nicht eine zunehmende allgemeine Kenntnis der Lebensbedingungen, unter denen man steht. Sondern sie bedeutet etwas anderes: das Wissen davon oder den Glauben daran: daß man, wenn man nur wollte, es jederzeit erfahren könnte, daß es also prinzipiell keine geheimnisvollen unberechenbare Mächte gebe, die da hineinspielen, daß man vielmehr alle Dinge – im Prinzip – durch Berechnen beherrschen könne. Das aber bedeutet: die Entzauberung der Welt. Nicht mehr, wie der Wilde, für den es solche Mächte gab, muß man zu magischen Mitteln greifen, um die Geister zu beherrschen oder zu erbitten. Sondern technische

Mittel und Berechnung leisten das. Dies vor allem bedeutet die Intellektualisierung als solche.” (Weber, 1919b, pp. 86-87).

Rationalization thus presents a double bind for Weber’s view of modernity: in principal, more is presented as technically knowable; but at the same time “science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’” (p. 143).

In all four thinkers, whether epistemologically, historically, societally, or regrettably, the coming of modernity presents an irreversible loss of certainty in religious beliefs and institutions: a process that sociologist of religion Peter Berger somewhat reductionistically summarizes as “the idea […] that the relation between modernity and religion is inverse—the more of the former, the less of the latter” (2005, p. 336). This idea, which Berger dates to at least Durkheim and Weber, has its roots in some earlier evolutionist thinkers: Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture argued that “primitive” societies use religion to explain things around them (1871); James George Frazer’s Golden Bough describes (mostly from his armchair) non-modern subjects and their beliefs as irrational, primitive and savage (1890). The notoriously religion-critical atheist Frazer projects a general disdain for, presumably, anyone who believes anything (and who hasn’t studied the Classics at Oxbridge), when he writes on the simultaneous existence of two paradoxical beliefs:

“inconsistency need not have prevented our rude forefathers from embracing both [beliefs] at the same time with an equal fervour of conviction; for like the great majority of mankind the savage is above being hidebound by the trammels of a pedantic logic” (p. 1655)

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl similarly wrote about the “primitive mind” in Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910 [the mental functions of inferior societies], published in English as How Natives Think [1926]), and in La mentalité primitive (1922; Primitive Mentality, [trans., 1923]).

Without wanting to reduce the thinkers above to any kind of agreement, secularization in general arises out of the 19th century as a teleological consequence of modernity: an inevitable historical process through which religion straightforwardly vanishes as pre-logical primitive societies evolve into the logical, rational minds of modernity. Modern societies no longer need religion. The end. Incidentally,

contemporary statistics do show a decrease in church attendance, baptism and other institutional religious rituals over the course of the 20th century, especially in the case of Western youngsters (cf. Dobbelaere & Voye, 2000; Funk & Smith, 2012; Pew, 2019). The resulting argument is that either religions’ social and cultural significance is diminishing as a whole (Wilson, 1966; Wallis & Bruce, 1992; Bruce, 2002; Norris & Inglehart 2004) or that institutional religion is retreating from the public sphere (Dobbelaere, 1987; 1999; cf. Habermas, 2008).

1.1.1. The Sacralization of Secularization Theory

However, to come back to Berger’s statement: more recent theories of secularization have come to problematize linear processes of religious decline. Late in his career, Berger looks back on the secularization debate, stating that:

“Since its inception, presumably to be dated in the classical period of Durkheim and Weber, the sociology of religion has been fascinated by the phenomenon of secularization. This term, of course, has been endlessly debated, modified and occasionally repudiated. But for most purposes it can be defined quite simply as a process in which religion diminishes in importance both in society and in the consciousness of individuals. And most sociologists looking at this phenomenon have shared the view that secularization is the direct result of modernization. Put simply, the idea has been that the relation between modernity and religion is inverse—the more of the former, the less of the latter.” (Berger, 2005, p. 336, emphasis original)

This view was shared to the point that Jeffrey Hadden calls classical secularization theory for this reason “sacralized” (1987, p. 594). However, roughly a century after Durkheim and Weber, “the theory seemed less and less capable of making sense of the empirical evidence from different parts of the world” (Berger, p. 337). For one, it is seen as demographically skewed (Kaufmann, Goujon & Skirbekk, 2012; Kaufmann, 2008; Thomas, 2007), focusing first of all too much on the West (Swatos & Christiano, 1999), and its traditional Christian conceptions of theology (Luckmann, 1967; Heelas, 1996). Secondly, and as a consequence, it denies both the resurgence of Christianity in North-

America, Latin America and Africa through the unexpected popularity of Pentecostal and other forms of Evangelical Protestantism (Berger, 2005; Meyer, 2004); as well as the resurgence of Islam in global demographics and the public sphere (Berger, 2005; Habermas, 2008; Thomas, 2007). Indeed, Europe here seems the only “big exception” of continued religious decline (Berger, 2005; cf. Berger, Davie & Fokas, 2008; Brown & Woodhead, 2016; Davie, 2002).

Beside its disagreement with empirical data, old-fashioned secularization theory (‘an increase of modernity means a decrease of religion’) is also theoretically criticized. Again harkening back to the legacy of secularization’s roots in early sociology, Gerhard Lenski argues that “sociology […] from its inception was committed to the positivist view that religion in the modern world is merely a survival from man’s primitive past, and doomed to disappear in an era of science and general enlightenment. From the positivist standpoint, religion is, basically, institutionalized ignorance and superstition” (1961 p. 3). Stark and Bainbridge extend this genealogy of secularization to the Enlightenment inheritance of all the social sciences, stating that

“at least since the Enlightenment, most Western intellectuals have anticipated the death of religion. […] The most illustrious figures in sociology, anthropology, and psychology have unanimously expressed confidence that their children, or surely their grandchildren, would live to see the dawn of a new era in which […] the infantile illusions of religion would be outgrown (1985, p. 1).

When Hadden calls secularization theory “sacralized” (1987, p. 594), then, he does so because he judges it to be “an ideological preference rather than a systematic theory” (p. 587). Specifically, secularization theory is “a product of the social and cultural milieu from which it emerged […] fit[ting] well the evolutionary model of modernization,” while “beneath the theoretical statement is a silent prescriptive assertion that this [religious decline] is good” (p. 607). Bryan Wilson similarly accuses the classic forms of secularization theory of normativity (Wilson, 1985), and David Martin calls them “partly for the aesthetic satisfactions […] and partly as a psychological boost to the movements with which they are associated” (Martin, 1965, p. 176). All of this leads to Karel Dobbelaere arguing that, at the very least, it became