How the West Really Lost God

A New Theory of Secularization

TEMPLETON PRESS

Contents

CHAPTER 1

Does Secularization Even Exist?

NOW FORGET for a moment the impressionistic evidence just presented in theintroduction about Christianity's decline in parts of the West. In this chapter,we will consider a radical response to all that: according to some theorists,the notion of decline is itself an illusion—one brought on by a failure to readthe evidence in a sufficiently deep or nuanced way. The idea that the West isless Christian today than it once was, they argue, may indeed be widespread andwidely accepted; but it is nevertheless based on a misreading of the facts.

This is a minority, contrarian view, to be sure; but the reason that we need topay attention to it is simple: if it is correct—if Christianity, pace MatthewArnold and Time magazine and other authorities, is not in fact in a downwardspiral across the West—then rather obviously, the world does not need a newtheory explaining its decline. In fact, the world doesn't need any theory aboutsecularization at all—because if these contrarian thinkers are correct, there isno decline to account for.

The second reason we need to examine this line of argument is that it shedslight on the same mystery at the heart of this book: namely, the fact that uponinspection, there is something seriously amiss—maybe even more than one thing—withthe conventional sociological account of what has really happened toChristianity in the Western world. In the course of criticizing secularizationtheory per se, the scholars opposed to it have generated useful clarificationsabout the theory's limits. In fact, as two other noted scholars, Pippa Norrisand Ronald Inglehart recently put it, "Secularization theory is currentlyexperiencing the most sustained challenge in its long history"—an observationissuing not from critics of the theory, but from two of its leadingrepresentatives.

In sum, there is figurative blood in the water surrounding this matter ofsecularization theory, and watchful parties on both sides know it. Let us seewhere the trail leads.

Contrarians in this debate believe that other scholars and especially secularscholars have misread the empirical evidence—in effect, that they have minimizedthe signs of the times that point to Christian vitality and/or revival, andmaximized those signs that point to decline. Let us dub this contrarian mode ofthought the "so-what" school of secularization theory—because the argumentsamount to saying "So what?" when faced with evidence of what appears to beChristian religious decline.

The "so-what" school is not an actual school, of course. As sometimes happens inscholarship, it is instead the unintentional collective outcome of like mindsthinking alike. But taken together, their arguments do bear a family resemblanceto each other, so it seems fair to regard them as variations on the same widertheme—the theme being that Christianity is not in fact declining as many say itis.

"The West hasn't really lost God, because recent events go to show that religionis thriving around the world."

Since the jihadist attacks of 9 /11 especially, many have remarked uponreligion's unexpected resiliency in the world. Believers and nonbelievers alikehave made the point that contrary to claims of God's obsolescence, the mostmonumental global events of recent years have been inspired or otherwisedecisively affected by religious belief. In a sense, these observations are allfootnotes to sociologist Peter Berger's famous observation of 1990 that "theassumption we live in a secularized world is false" because "the world is asfuriously religious as ever."

Consider just a smattering of the historical evidence bolstering the claim toreligion's staying power. There was, first and perhaps foremost, the near-globalrouting over two decades ago of that most aggressively secularist ideology ofthem all: Marxist/Communism. To many observers, the demise of the Communistgovernments served as a proxy of sorts for the endurance of God. Not only didreligion fail to wither away as the modern age with all its machinations woreon, as Marx had so hopefully predicted; rather—thanks to the Velvet Revolutionsof 1989—it was instead Communism that was unceremoniously jettisoned fromhistory, alongside Nazism and certain other professional enemies ofChristianity, too.

Even so, the unforeseen speed and depth of the Communist collapse was especiallystriking—particularly to those who believed the Cold War to be at heart acontest between religion on the one side and ferociously antireligious ideologyon the other. To understand just how dramatic that collapse appeared, it helpsto bear in mind that many intelligent people thought for decades that the Westmight ultimately lose that struggle. Sixty years ago, for instance, at theheight of the Cold War, no less an experienced observer than the Americanreformed Communist Whittaker Chambers could still believe that in rejectingMarxism and embracing the free West, he was "leaving the winning world for thelosing world." Nor was Chambers alone. Other informed Western observersbelieved that Communists and non-Communists were indeed locked in a life-and-deathstruggle, the outcome of which was anyone's guess.

In retrospect, of course, such misgivings seem almost perverse. As ground zeroof the struggle against the Soviets in the late 1980s became pious CatholicPoland; as Karol Wojtyla, aka Pope John Paul II, became so integral to thestruggle against Communism that some historians would later give him greatcredit for the thing's ultimate implosion; in sum, as world events seemedpractically to conspire on the side of religious believers, the contrary idea ofa religious "end of history" seemed less defensible than before. Thus did thefate of Communism, for one, come to be taken as a reverse verdict of sorts onthe fate of the churches.

Other kinds of evidence for Christianity's continued potency also abound. Onecan see, for example, that constant engagement with hostile ideologies hasinadvertently served here and there to empower Christianity's apologists evenmore—that modernity's relentless and multidimensional attacks on the churcheshave had an unintended jujitsu effect all its own. As Catholic scholar RobertRoyal has put it, "Three centuries of debunking, skepticism, criticism,revolution, and scorn by some among us have not produced the expected demise ofreligion and are now contributing to its renewal." Certainly that same effectalso followed ideological attacks on Christianity by the wave of best-sellingnew atheists in the mid-2000s. For all their commercial success, these authorsalso provoked counterattacks high and low across the secular as well asreligious Western media.

To quote Peter Berger once more, these and other pieces of evidence for our"furiously religious world" in turn "means that a whole body of literature byhistorians and social scientists loosely labeled 'secularization theory' isessentially mistaken." Pointing in particular to American religiosity which isanomalous by the standards of Western Europe, as well as to the energetic globalreligious scene, Berger argues that secularization theory has been confuted byboth phenomena. "While secularity is not a necessary consequence ofmodernization," as he has put the point elsewhere, "I would argue that pluralismis."

Once again, he is plainly right that religion continues to write the scripts ofhistory quite without the permission of the world's secularists. In addition tothe towering example of the demise of Communism, consider also just a few othertransformative global events fueled by religious fervor in the past few decades:the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini's in Iran, and of other fundamentalistsacross the Islamic world; the Islamicist terror attacks of 9/11; the abidingpolitical influence in the United States of a coalition of Catholic andProtestant evangelical conservatives; the enduring and unexpected politicalsaliency including in the West of abortion and other "social issues": all theseand other examples could be piled up to prove that it may be secularism, notreligion, for whom the bell of history really tolls.

Surveying these and related examples of religion's staying power, sociologistJosé Casanova has argued further for what he calls the "deprivatization" ofreligion, meaning "the fact that religious traditions throughout the world arerefusing to accept the marginal and privatized role which theories of modernityas well as theories of secularization had reserved for them." Once again, heand others who point to the unexpected tenacity of religious belief—including inparticular Christian belief—have an impressive array of facts on their side. Itis no wonder, given the historical staying power of the sacred, that some argueit is the irreligiosity of Western Europe, rather than the apparent religiosityof the rest of the world, that needs "explaining."

To all this one might add that on the stage of the world—as opposed to just thatof the European Continent—Christianity has lately spread to many more millions.In 1900 there were roughly ten million African Christians; today there are somefour hundred million, almost half the population. Pentecostalism, founded justover one hundred years ago in Los Angeles, now claims at least five hundredmillion "renewalists" worldwide. In the largely unknown example of China,government figures alone show the number of Christians increasing from fourteenmillion in 1997 to twenty-one million in 2006—and most Christians themselvesbelieve that these are underestimates. These are just a few of the facts aboutChristianity's ongoing global advance to be found in John Micklethwait andAdrian Wooldridge's highly informative 2009 book, God Is Back: How the GlobalRevival of Faith Is Changing the World—one more work that goes to show theunexpected vibrancy of the Christian creed, at least when judged by secularstandards.

And yet despite such flourishing among followers of the Nazarene elsewhere onthe planet, the logical problem of Western secularization remains. The relativereligiosity of the rest of the world, however fascinating in its own right, doesnot answer the question before us: Why and how did Christianity come to declinein important parts of the West?

That question remains a problem independent of any appeal to the rest of theworld. To answer by pointing to the robust nature of Islam on the Continent,say, is to compare apples and oranges. Similarly, the advances of Christianityin Africa and Asia in recent years may be intriguing in their own right, as wellas comforting to those who welcome evidence that Europe is a special case; butthose gains obviously don't tell us how and why Christianity elsewhere has comeundone where it has. As contrarian theorists rightly point out, modernity is notcausing religion always and everywhere to collapse—but that is different fromaddressing the question of whether Christianity specifically has collapsed inparts of the West, and if so, why.

In sum, the fact that religion has not withered away as predicted by a varietyof secular theorists—critical though it may be, and a point to which we willreturn—does not tell us why or how it has withered, where indeed it has.

"The West hasn't really lost God, because the idea of secularization depends inturn on the idea of a prior 'golden age' of belief. In fact, though, people wereno more believing or pious in the past than they are today. Therefore, there hasbeen no religious decline."

Other people staring at the puzzle of secularization make a different point thatthey think argues against the fact of Christian religious decline. They say thatwe modern observers erroneously assume that the men and women who came before uswere more religious than the men and women of today. If they are correct, ofcourse, then there is really no such thing as "secularization," in the sensethat many people think there is—and without secularization, there is no need toexplain how secularization came about.

As the distinguished observer Owen Chadwick put the point in his 1975 GiffordLectures, subsequently published as a much-noted book called The Secularizationof the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, "We cannot begin our quest forsecularization by postulating a dream-society that once upon a time was notsecular." It is a deep point. Embedded in the Western psyche is a story aboutthe arc of Christianity, according to which it rose from the low historicalpoint of the apostles to reach an apex sometime in the Middle Ages—after whichit slowly, but surely, began curving down again.

It is a story we all believe unthinkingly, to some degree, as contrarians aboutsecularization correctly point out. Just about everyone in the Golden Age ofChristianity attended church, we think; just about everyone lived in fear ofheaven and hell; and the village atheist was just that—a singular rather thanplural force; a social anomaly. The deceptively simple question that contrariansask about this story is: Is it true?

Consider, Chadwick observes, the sharp increase in illegitimate births inToulouse, France, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If peoplewho believe in the Christian God take their beliefs seriously, they believe thatsex outside of marriage jeopardizes their very salvation. Hence, illegitimacymay arguably be used as one possible proxy for the influence of Christian beliefon personal practice (in this case, marriage or lack thereof). And so it isinteresting indeed that according to Chadwick's statistics, one out of fifty-nine births were to unmarried women in 1668–75—whereas by a century later, in1778, fully one in four births occurred to unmarried women.

What the numbers show is that—at least in a significant area of France—adistinctly un-Christian practice was proceeding apace far earlier than mostpeople would have guessed it did. One cannot blame state-enforced secularizationfor this change; the rise in out-of-wedlock births was apparently well under waybefore Robespierre and his fellow murderers would make the streets of Paris runwith blood. No, the fact that more and more people were having babies outside ofmarriage in an ostensibly overwhelmingly Christian place tells us somethingelse: either that not all Christians took their theological beliefs as seriouslyas we tend to think they did; or that the church was weaker in governing thebehavior of its members than is commonly supposed—or both. In any event, is thisexample not evidence, as some would suggest, for a prior age that was not somuch "golden," from the point of view of religiosity, as just prior?

To broaden the point considerably, it is also a fact that many other suchexamples could be produced to suggest that what we think of as the "good olddays" of religiosity—or the bad old days, depending on one's perspective—werenot as pious as the formidable statuary and paintings and other artifacts of theMiddle Ages might lead one to suppose.

In a particularly compelling essay published in 1999 called "Secularization,R.I.P.," another outstanding sociologist of religion, American Rodney Stark,exuberantly compiles several pages of empirical and historical evidencetestifying to what he calls "the nonexistence of an Age of Faith in Europeanhistory."

His tour d'horizon ranges impressively: from medieval historians who disputethat such an age ever existed; to religious men and women from across thecenturies and languages and cultures of what is now Europe, complaining aboutthe lack of practice and belief among the people; to rural parish churches fartoo tiny to have held more than a small fraction of the population at any giventime—which suggests to Stark that the expectation of weekly attendance was notonly unlikely, but impossible; to primary sources indicating that not only themass of men and women, but also many of the clergy, were plumb ignorant of therituals and even basic prayers of the church; and so on. The "conception of apious past," he summarizes, is "mere nostalgia," a "once-upon-a-time tale."
(Continues...)Excerpted from How the West Really Lost God by Mary Eberstadt. Copyright © 2013 Mary Eberstadt. Excerpted by permission of TEMPLETON PRESS.
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