Secularization is that epochal process by which people have gone from living in a world suffused with the sacred to living in a world in which sacred meanings have been largely drained away. Even the religious have mostly forgotten the archaic experience of a world in which everything was alive, everything was charged with spirit.

In the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century, is was very common to find social scientists predicting the continuing decline and the imminent or eventual death of religion. Even as late as the 1970s, the president of the American Anthropological Association gave a keynote speech in which he assumed (and looked forward to) the imminent death of religion.

Many sociologists of religion today, however, tend to see secularization as a self-limiting phenomenon. Yes, traditional religions are weakened and less persuasive in times like ours. But finally, the religious impulse itself is not fatally weakened by the success of science and technology. Religion is not basically a response to our desire to understand lightening and thunder, quarks and gluons. Religion is a response to our predicament as mortal beings living with an acute awareness of our mortality. Thus, people today have the same need to make sense of the world, the same need to ask and try to find answers to the big questions of life, as have the people of any time or age. Where traditional religions weaken and are unable to serve the spiritual needs of a people, new religious responses to the world will be spontaneously generated. And, indeed, the rate of cult formation in world industrial cultures (including Japan) has increased fivefold since the 1950s. The growth of SF outstrips even this - and SF, of course, has a good deal of displaced spiritual concern. The classics of SF are often seen at play with the categories of the sacred. With our toes now almost over into a new century, it seems pretty clear to those who study religion carefully that it is not going to make that once predicted final exit.

I include here the views on religion, society and secularization of an early 20th Century sociologist, should you ever want to use this material in class. Emil Durkheim, of course, was a big gun in his day, and his views are generally representative of his time.
 

Emil Durkheim
 

ED was a French sociologist who, like most of the early grand theorists of that discipline, made a sociology of religion the core of his social thought. Of course, he was an atheist and a scientific positivist.

FIRST BIG POINT: ED believed that the worship of God was really just the worship of society and society's own values. Societies demand our individual allegiance and, if you think about it carefully, you'll see (he asserted) that the qualities, attributes and values of "God" are really just those of our own group projected into the heavens to give them more coercive power.

SECOND BIG POINT: ED pointed out that the collective act of worship integrates social institutions. It does this in a special way -- with "collective effervescence." "Collective effervescence" is a dynamic social force produced when people get together; it is the life of the group over and above the lives of the individuals who make up the group. The principle here is the common observation that the whole is greater than the simple sum of its parts. "Collective effervescence" is a very powerful social force that people mistake for what they call "the sacred." Collective effervescence = the sacred.

You don't have to agree with ED's sociological reductionism to see that there is at least some truth to all this. Society often is an object of worship; nationalism and religion are often mixed. And the rallies at Nuremberg are striking examples of what Durkheim called "collective effervescence."

Secularization: ED is a Social Darwinian and assumes a social evolution from "primitive society" to "modern society."

In Primitive Society, people have little individual initiative and relatively undifferentiated functions within the community. People are held together by "mechanical solidarity" - that is, they live in small, intimate communities and meet face to face each day, a process that strongly reinforces their shared values. Religion is thus vital as it is a projection of these strongly shared values.

Modern Society, as a result of population increase and scientific-technological change, is "organic" and highly differentiated. Indeed, the complexity of modern industrial society when compared to the simplicity of tribal hunter-gatherer societies is simply astonishing. Consider the military "organ" in one nation -- the USA. There are the Marines, the Navy and Air Force, the Army and the Coast Guard. In many ways, these are organic worlds unto themselves, but each divides out into even more suborgans - in the Navy, for instance, the JAG, the Submariners, Naval Aviators, Naval Amphibious Officers, Line Officers, the Supply Corps, and so on. Each of these, too, is a career-track and a world unto itself. This analysis can be repeated with modern governmental institutions, entertainment and education, business and manufacturing, etc.

ED believes that modern society and its "organic solidarity" cannot sustain religion - in it, people no longer share the same values. Individuality is heightened in modern society as people choose their own path through our now very complex social ecology and shape themselves in unique ways as they walk that path. Religion dies and is replaced by the "Cult of the Individual" and by notions of the dignity of each of us. Hence, secularization leads inevitably to the death of religion.

Again, there is some truth to ED's analysis. Modern life is a smorgasbord - you get to pick and choose your job, clothes, housing, art, entertainment, spouses and significant others, cars, politics, and values. Our choices, and thus the persons produced by them, can be wildly different. We live in a society in which Jerry Fallwell can share a stage with Anton LaVey, founder of the First Church of Satan, while a few thousand years ago, a person mildly different from the norm would have been outcast.

The rub here, as far as ED's social theory is concerned, is that religion is more than just the projection into the heavens of a group's own values. Their reductionism was the Achilles' heel of early social theorists like Durkheim or Max Weber. Religion has not died and shows no evidence of doing so in the near or intermediate future. In ED's terms of analysis, however, it does become one organ among the many in modern organic society, and an important organ through which many people still pass.