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SCP0010.1177/0037768620917327Social CompassGauthier: (What is left of ) secularization?

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Social Compass
2020, Vol. 67(2) 309­–314
*
(What is left of) secularization? © The Author(s) 2020
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Debate on Jörg Stolz’s article on sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0037768620917327
https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768620917327
Secularization theories in the journals.sagepub.com/home/scp

21st century: ideas, evidence,

and problems

François GAUTHIER
University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Abstract
This article is a critical response to Jörg Stolz’s 2019 ISSR presidential address as to the
advances made by secularization research over the last 20 years. The article argues that
the data presented can be boiled down to confirming what we already knew: the decline
of ‘churched’ religion. Sketching a radical epistemological, methodological and empirical
critique, it argues that the seven areas of `advances’ discussed in the presidential address
erode into near insignificance. Because this quantitative research compartmentalizes
religion and lacks solid contextualization in the world we live in, it completely overlooks
the massive qualitative changes that have been reconfiguring religion on a global scale, and
which can be understood as the result of the erosion of the nation-state container at the
hands of economic globalization and the massification of neoliberal and consumer dynamics
and the consequent substantial changes in global societies, well beyond the West.

Keywords
globalization, marketization, qualitative methods, quantitative method, religion,
secularization

Résumé
Cet article est une réponse critique au discours présidentiel de la SISR de 2019 de Jörg
Stolz quant aux progrès réalisés par la recherche sur la sécularisation au cours des vingt
dernières années. L’article soutient que les données présentées peuvent être réduites à la
confirmation de ce que nous savions déjà : le déclin de la « churched religion ». Esquissant

*Many issues contained in this commentary are further developed, along with an alternative perspective to
secularization, in Gauthier (2020).

Corresponding author:
François Gauthier, University of Fribourg, Boulevard de Pérolles 90, CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland.
Email: francois.gauthier@unifr.ch
310 Social Compass 67(2)

une critique épistémologique, méthodologique et empirique radicale, il soutient que les

sept domaines de « progrès » discutés dans le discours présidentiel s’érodent jusqu’à
devenir presque insignifiants. Parce que cette recherche quantitative cloisonne la religion
et manque de contextualisation solide dans le monde dans lequel nous vivons, elle néglige
complètement les changements qualitatifs massifs qui ont reconfiguré la religion à l’échelle
mondiale, et qui peuvent être compris comme le résultat de l’érosion du contenant « État-
nation » aux mains de la mondialisation économique et de la massification des dynamiques
néolibérales de consommation et des changements substantiels qui en découlent dans les
sociétés mondiales, bien au-delà de l’Occident.

Mots-clés
globalisation, marchandisation, méthodes qualitatives, méthodes quantitatives, mondialisation,
religion, sécularisation

In the last two decades, the narrative of secularization has been increasingly critiqued,
and its central position in social sciences contested. The current popularity of concepts
such as post-secular, return of religion and de-secularization attest to this state of affairs.
It is somewhat strange that Stolz chose not to mention these debates and rather ask about
the advances made over the last 20 years in the research on secularization. By opposing
secularization to Rational Choice, another very contested area of research, as the two
dominant poles structuring the sociology of religion, Stolz gave the impression that his
address was straight out of the 1990s. In the question period, he insisted on the fact that
the data he presented does illustrate something, and he is right. The main question then
is: What does this show, and what does it miss?

What we see
It is interesting that the data supporting Stolz’s presentation is quantitative, making it the
stronghold of the secularization theory. The categories that have been used in quantitative
data collection have been relatively stable for decades, and capture the very conventional
indicators of explicit religious affiliation and practice. In other words, they capture the
destinies of what Peter Beyer (2012) calls ‘churched religion’, that is, a mainline
Christian-type of religiosity made up of exclusive belonging, weekly mass or service
attendance, belief in an otherworldly form of deity, otherworldly salvation and so on. It
follows from this research design that ‘religion’ has regularly been declining in Western
countries for over a century, although with slightly differed starting points and inflections.
In my view, the main acceptable claim is the apparently inexorable decline of churched
religion in the West. This is nothing new. It is a well-known and well-reported
phenomenon that is also supported by qualitative research. The other claims discussed
are less certain, and are greatly fragilized by the way quantitative research openly seeks
direct correlations which it interprets as causal. These premises can be challenged, as
they suggest a neatly compartmentalized social reality that puts historical and sociological
determinations and contextualization in parentheses.
The section on education is illustrative of these limitations, and particularly the
reference to Hungerman’s (2014) link between the implementation of the 1961 Quebec
Gauthier: (What is left of) secularization? 311

law which augmented mandatory schooling by 1 year and a coincident and significant
drop in Catholic affiliation. Yet the idea that such a correlation indicates a causal bond is
contradicted by even the most superficial contextualization. As a Quebecois myself, I
can only think of how the provincial elections of 1960 brought to power liberal Jean
Lesage, which marked a radical change in Quebec politics and culture, ending the
Catholic-conservative reign of Maurice Duplessis and marking the beginning of what
historians have called the Quiet Revolution, which saw Quebec modernize with ultra-
rapidity and embark on a stark process of abandonment of traditional Catholic practice,
to the extent that it went from one of the most ‘religious’ nation to one of the most
‘secular’ over the space of a decade. The quantitative data completely omits these basic
historical facts, and therefore any direct and causal rapport between years of education
and religious levels is highly reductionist and problematic. It is obviously not the rise of
mandatory education by 1 year that caused religious practice to drop, but rather a
profound cultural, social, political and religious mutation.
The same goes for the hypothetical effects of an increase in the number of
psychotherapists, who would then act as ‘secular competition’ and thus contribute to the
secularization process. Yet such increases do not simply happen, out of the blue. As Eva
Illouz (2008) and others have shown, there has been a process of psychologization in the
West and beyond, since the late 19th century. This amounts to much more than a rise in
‘secular competition’. It is rather tied to a profound mutation that has deeply affected
religion well beyond the decline of church attendance rates. Religion itself has been
profoundly psychologized since the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
Quantitative research rests on the unexamined assumption of strong social differentiation.
As economics for economists, some sociologists of religion seem to think about their object
as being neatly compacted in an autonomous and well-differentiated box. Hence, the idea
that the difference between the strong secular pathway of East Germany compared with
West Germany’s supposedly ‘normal’ curve is due to ‘an external shock’—communism.
Portraying the communist pathway in Eastern Europe as an ‘external shock’ (an expression
also borrowed from economists) is flawed, as is the implicit assumption that liberal,
capitalist democracies represent some kind of normal or natural trend. Religion is a part of
society and culture, and it cannot be simply isolated from wider society.

What we don’t see: the world missing

What is missing in these accounts is a firm grounding in the world we live in, and
which eludes quantitative methods. There is a reason why quantitative research such
as Voas’ (2008) fails to identify the ‘triggers’ of the ‘secular transition’. As James
Spickard (2015) would say, it is simply because ‘you can’t get there from here’. In
other words, such methods are simply not able to provide any sensible answer to the
research question. It is therefore no surprise that so many issues discussed by Stolz
are indeterminate and require ‘further research’. Intelligible answers cannot be found
by boxing up religion and isolating ‘factors’, but rather by understanding how religion
affects and is affected by wider social logics. While Stolz acknowledges that religion
is a ‘social fact’, the methodological individualism adopted by the research he surveys
can only remark but fail to account for the importance of national pathways, to name
just one example.1
312 Social Compass 67(2)

Churched religion is assumed to provide the standard for ‘religion’, which is presented in
quantitative terms. From ‘religious’ to ‘fuzzy’ and ‘secular’, we are faced with more or less
religion, as if it was a liquid in glass. On the other hand, nothing can be said about the
qualitative changes in religion. Churched religion appeared somewhere in the late 19th
century, yet religion prior to this was different, and historians show how religion in the
Middle-Ages was of a very different nature. Roman and Aztec religion were even more
different. Yet if religion has changed prior to the 20th century, what are the bases for the
assumption that it cannot change again significantly, as every other aspect of social life has
over the course of modernity? The way quantitative categories are built assumes churched
religion to be the essence of religion and its final stage. What the works of Voas and others
show is therefore not the decline of religion but that of churched religion, that is, of a particular
and peculiar historical form of religion. In the end, Voas’ model (for it is more a model than a
theory) is at best a good representation of the effects of cohort replacement on the decline of
churched religion. Otherwise, this research is something like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Stolz is right to question the ‘fuzzy’ category and ask if the nebula of so-called alternative-
holistic spiritualities can be fitted in this category. One can also question that of the ‘secular’.
What does it mean to be labeled ‘secular’, therefore non-religious? We know that the rise of
‘nones’ (the survey category of ‘no religion’) in state surveys does not amount to any kind
of significant rise in declared atheists. Is a declared ‘no religion’ who participates in
meditation, self-growth, yoga, chi-gong, biodanza or neo-evangelical workshops truly
‘secular’ or even ‘fuzzy’ in any meaningful sense? Stolz rightly includes such practices in
his ‘conventional’ definition of religion, yet it is obvious when looking at the research he
presents that it is churched religion we are talking about, leaving such incidences out of the
picture, not to mention minority religions. Secularization research therefore seriously over-
determines its object as well as its results, and misses the most fundamental changes that
have occurred over the last decades, and which are qualitative more than quantitative.
In addition, the research surveyed is despairingly Western-centric, and Voas’ model
monolithically evolutionist. These two dimensions are tied, as ethnocentricity warrants an
evolutionist narrative. The example of the retarded ‘secular transition’ of Greece can only
be sustained if one extracts this country from its socio-historical context and isolates it
from the rest of the world. Twentieth-century nation-building in Greece relied heavily on
Christian Orthodoxy, as elsewhere in the Orthodox world (before the communist period).
Here secularism was never as strong as in the Christian West. The decline of churched
religion starts with Greece’s integration within global culture and the global economy
(resulting in EU integration), and I find it extremely hazardous to maintain an evolutionist
scheme. If we free ourselves of Western-centricity, we are forced to recognize that the same
global trends are present in Greece as in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. Seeing
things on a linear temporal scale, in which the West is seen as the spearhead of History and
all other regions of the globe either fall behind or beside the model, is problematic in the
light of the last four decades of critical theory and the rise of currents such as Post-
Colonialism. As the case of Greece exemplifies, the flaws and unfounded assumptions
built into Voas’ quantitative method explain the results. A closer look at the qualitative level
and a less ethnocentric approach reveals a very different story than that of linear decline.
Far from being reinforced, this version of secularization is fragilized even further.
In the face of such limitations, I believe a holistic approach that captures societies in
their movement and dynamics, as well as one attentive to how transversal logics are at
Gauthier: (What is left of) secularization? 313

work in reshaping all social spheres, is more apt for seizing what is happening to religion.
What do we see, then, if we free ourselves from outdated ethnocentricity, open religion’s
little box and look around? In my view, considering things in a wider focus shows that
history has not been linear and continuous, but that there has been a major shift in global
societies over the last decades. This is obvious when one looks at current politics: the
formerly stable institutionalizations of the 20th century are being subjected to a radical
critique, almost everywhere. Religious institutions are thus not the only modern
institutions subject to disaffiliation and critique, far from it. Whether we look at modern
political parties, representational democratic institutions or the rise of populism and
charismatic authorities, the political realm is being torn apart and profoundly reconfigured
under our very eyes. Other modern institutions are similarly being challenged, be it the
medical institution in the face of alternative and holistic therapies, education, law, the
contestation of science in the era of ‘post-truth’, the erosion of the aura of intellectual
elites and so on. How can this not have something to do with religion?
‘Religion’ has not only been fuzzing and/or disappearing: it has changed and is
changing profoundly. Behind the come-to-majority of ‘nones’, a major shift has changed
the very nature of religion, and this is something which the standard of churched religion
cannot even begin to see. Qualitative research shows that behind the neat categories of
surveys, religion is not only becoming ‘fuzzy’ and fighting ‘secular competition’: it is
becoming mixed with tourism, entertainment, business, politics, health, therapeutics and
well-being in entirely new ways which resists diagnoses of disappearance into ‘the
secular age’. Religious institutions are being forced to reform and adopt managerial
techniques and discourses, as well as see their mission as providing services which they
must brand and target to a public. New religious missions of the charismatic or alternative
spirituality type are inherently entrepreneurial and mediatized. Charismatic authorities
are replacing rational-institutional ones, in religion just as in politics. Mystical currents
and experiential religiosity are re-legitimized and re-mixed, as are traditional practices
and indigenous religiosities. These developments are not only Western: they are global.
In fact, they appear in even cruder light in many parts of the Global South than they do
when we keep our gaze focused solely on Western realities. These trends are transversal
and universal, and cannot be isolated within the confines of ‘the West’ vs ‘the rest’. As in
the formidable rise of the global halal market, they emerge out of transnational fluxes
that remain entirely invisible from within the secularization paradigm.
In the 1920s, that is when the Voas model sees the ‘secular transition’ start, societies
were still largely the same as in the 19th century as concerns social classes, socialization
modes, familial models, relations to authority, morality based on honor and so on. Post-
war affluence in Western countries accompanied or catalyzed a profound change in values
and the consummation of what Charles Taylor (2002) calls the ‘cultural revolution of
modernity’, of which consumerism – modern consumption of goods built into a model of
citizenship and desirable ethos – was a central part and vector. At the turn of the 1980s,
this new individualistic, libertarian and expressive culture had become mainstreamed
through the coming to adulthood of the baby boomer generation. It is then that the
neoliberal revolution occurred, turning a marginal economic current into a dominant set
of ideologies, policies and entrepreneurial culture that has since projected to dismantle the
welfare, communist and post-colonial state and transfer its regulatory powers to the
mechanisms of the market. The result has been a profound reconfiguration of every aspect
314 Social Compass 67(2)

of society ever since, and their reshaping and re-legitimation within a market imaginary
and terminologies. A closer look at religion shows a similar level of transformation.
In the end, the advances made by secularization research over the last 20 years,
especially within quantitative research, can be boiled down to confirming what
we already knew: the decline of churched religion. In the light of the radical epistemological,
methodological and empirical critique whose outlines I have tried to sketch, the seven
areas of ‘advances’ discussed in the presidential address erode into near insignificance.
On the other hand, secularization research fails to see the elephant in the room: that our
world is not that of the first half of the 20th century, that decline doesn’t capture what’s
really going on, and that churched religion can no longer be the standard for ‘religion’.

Acknowledgements
Sensing conflicting reactions to Jörg Stolz’s ISSR presidential address in Barcelona, I proposed
that he submit the final text to commentary from scholars of different perspectives. I admire him
for accepting this proposal, and thank him warmly for extending the invitation to me.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Note
1. It is not that quantitative methods are flawed per se. Durkheim, for instance, as well as
Bourdieu, multiplied the variables in order to seize society, or large sections of it, in their
entirety, and contextualized them as part of a general analysis.

References
Beyer P (2012) Socially engaged religion in a post-Westphalian global context: Remodeling the
secular/religious distinction. Sociology of Religion 73(2): 109–129.
Gauthier F (2020) Religion, Modernity, Globalisation: Nation-State to Market. London: Routledge.
Hungerman DM (2014) The effect of education on religion: Evidence from compulsory schooling
laws. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 104: 52–63.
Illouz E (2008) Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Spickard J (2015) You can’t get there from here: On the disconnect between theory and evidence
in the sociology of religion. In: 33rd Conference of the international society for the sociology
of religion, Louvain-la-Neuve, 2–5 July.
Taylor C (2002) Varieties of Religion Today. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Voas D (2008) The continuing secular transition. In: Pollack D and OlsonD VA (eds) The Role of
Religion in Modern Societies. New York: Routledge, 25–48.

Author biography
François GAUTHIER is Professor of Religious Studies at the Social Sciences Department of the
University of Fribourg, Switzerland.
Address: Boulevard de Pérolles 90, CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland.
Email: francois.gauthier@unifr.ch