Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics)

This book presents a significant re-statement of secularization theory, framing religion as declining with the advance of "existential security" through modernization and human development. Along the way, the argument interestingly contradicts with strong empirical findings Stark and Finke's "religious economies theory," in a way that will demand a response from them. The book's strengths (and perhaps weakness, in some ways) are its cross-national perspective and survey data, which are all too rare in sociology of religion (although some are skeptical of the reliablity of the World Values Survey) and its attempt to seriously empirically test hypotheses deduced from significant theories. This is an important book in many ways, but note that is also compromised by a number of apparent flaws: 1. It uses mostly cross-sectional data to make claims about historical changes. 2. It perhaps wrongly assumes cohort rather than age effects in its generational analyses. 3. It does not actually even directly measure its key variable of existential security, but relies instead on indirect measures and inferences. 4. It does not well develop theoretically the social psychological and cognitive mechanisms that would lead increased existential security to secularize, leaving the reader to imagine the connections that would make that happen. 5. The major types of societies analyzed are also strongly correlated with different kinds of religions (post-industrial are heavily Protestant, agrarian heavily non-Christian), which the analysis does not always control for well. 6. It focuses on the "mass publics" of various nations, relying on calculated national means, with little attention to potentially important diversity and complexity within cases that matter for the overall argument. 7. We have very good reason to doubt that the survey measures used really work well across all religious traditions analyzed--e.g., can one survey question about church attendance or prayer really facilitate comparison across, say, Alabama fundamentalism, Japanese Shintoism, and Indian Hinduism?--very blunt instruments, indeed. 8. The book theoretically recognizes the importance of culture, but hardly touches on culture in its own analysis, other than creating regression dummy variables for different religious types, which is hardly attending to cultural analysis well--one supposes these are the limits of conducting research from a computer lab. 9. Some of the writing reflects a lack of genuine familiarity with religion as a human phenomenon per se (e.g., pg. 241 talks about "fundamentalist Evangelical churches," which anyone who knows American religious history ought to know doesn't make sense). 10. The strong linking of religion to existential insecurity seems reductionistic and two-dimensional, at least to this reader. The authors do recognize some of these problems, but recognizing them does not fix them. Thus, the book has significant potential flaws, but I think still is an important voice in an ongoing debate and is thus still worth a reading. Despite its flaws, many of the empirical correlations presented are truly impressive and need to be explained one way or another. And the empirical evidence on post-Soviet societies and on Islam and democracy is very interesting. One looks forward to Stark and Finke's reply to this book's attack on their paradigm/theory. Cover 1 Half-title 3 Series-title 5 Title 7 Copyright 8 Contents 9 Tables 11 Figures 13 Preface and Acknowledgments 15 SACRED AND SECULAR 19 PART I Understanding Secularization 21 1 The Secularization Debate 23 Traditional Theories of Secularization 27 The Rational Weltanschauung: The Loss of Faith 27 Functional Evolution: The Loss of Purpose 29 The Theory of Religious Markets: The Loss of Competition 31 The Thesis of Secularization Based on Existential Security 33 The Security Axiom 33 The Cultural Traditions Axiom 37 Hypotheses 38 1. The Religious Values Hypothesis 38 2. The Religious Culture Hypothesis 40 3. The Religious Participation Hypothesis 41 4. The Civic Engagement Hypothesis 42 5. The Demographic Hypothesis 42 6. The Religious Market Hypothesis 44 Conclusions 44 Demonstrating the Theory 47 (i) Cross-National Comparisons 47 (ii) Comparing Predominant Religious Cultures 48 (iii) Generational Comparisons 48 (iv) Sectoral Comparisons 49 (v) Patterns of Demography, Fertility Rates, and Population Change 49 (vi) Social and Political Consequences 49 Plan of the Book 49 2 Measuring Secularization 53 Research Design 54 Cross-National Surveys 54 Longitudinal Trends 55 Generational Analysis 56 The Comparative Framework 57 The World Values Survey/European Values Survey 58 Measures of Secularization 60 The Classification of Religious Cultures 63 Type of Societies 68 Type of States 70 Religious Freedom Index 72 3 Comparing Secularization Worldwide 73 Evidence of Religious Behavior 75 Cross-National Patterns of Religious Behavior 77 Social Characteristics 89 Trends in Religious Participation and Beliefs 91 Generational Comparisons 96 Conclusions 98 PART II Case Studies of Religion and Politics 101 4 The Puzzle of Secularization in the United States and Western Europe 103 Comparing Religiosity in Postindustrial Nations 104 Trends in Secularization in Western Europe 105 Trends in Religiosity in the United States 109 Explaining Variations in Religiosity: The Religious Market Model 115 Religious Pluralism 120 State Regulation and Freedom of Religion 122 Functional Theories and the Social Role of Religious Institutions 123 The Role of Security and Economic Inequality 126 5 A Religious Revival in Post-Communist Europe? 131 The Secularization versus Supply-Side Debate 132 Additional Relevant Factors 136 Generational Change in Religiosity 139 The Impact of Religious Markets versus the Impact of Human Development 144 Religious Pluralism 144 State Regulation of Religion 145 Societal Development 145 Conclusions 151 6 Religion and Politics in the Muslim World 153 The “Clash of Civilizations” Debate 155 Classification and Measures 158 Classifying Cultural Regions 159 Measuring Political and Social Values 162 Attitudes toward Democracy 164 Conclusion and Discussion 172 Technical Appendix 176 PART III The Consequences of Secularization 177 7 Religion, the Protestant Ethic, and Moral Values 179 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Thesis 180 Evidence for the Protestant Ethic 183 Work Ethic 183 Attitudes toward Capitalism 189 Ethical Standards 192 Moral “Life Issue” Values 193 Conclusions 197 Technical Appendix 199 8 Religious Organizations and Social Capital 200 Putnam’s Theory of Social Capital 201 Comparing Associational Membership 204 (i) Explaining Membership in Religious Organizations 206 (ii) Explaining Membership in Non-Religious Organizations 206 (iii) Explaining Broader Patterns of Civic Engagement 211 Conclusions 214 9 Religious Parties and Electoral Behavior 216 Structural Theories of Partisan Alignment 217 Theories of Partisan Dealignment 219 Evidence of Partisan Dealignment 221 Left-Right Orientations and Religion 221 Voting Support for Religious Parties 228 Conclusions 230 CONCLUSIONS 233 10 Secularization and Its Consequences 235 The Theory of Existential Security and Secularization 237 The Security Axiom 237 The Cultural Traditions Axiom 238 Hypotheses 239 1. The Religious Values Hypothesis 239 2. The Religious Cultures Hypothesis 240 3. The Religious Participation Hypothesis 243 4. The Civic Engagement Hypothesis 247 5. The Religious Markets Hypothesis 249 6. The Demographic Hypothesis 251 Implications and Challenges 259 Appendix A 263 Appendix B 267 Appendix C 273 Technical Note on the Freedom of Religion Scale 273 Notes 275 Chapter 1 275 Chapter 2 279 Chapter 3 282 Chapter 4 285 Chapter 5 291 Chapter 6 294 Chapter 7 296 Chapter 8 298 Chapter 9 301 Chapter 10 303 Appendix C 305 Bibliography 307 Index 335

Sacred and Secular examines the validity of the secularization thesis.

Foreign Affairs

The great nineteenth-century social thinkers argued that the rise of modern industrial society entailed the decline of religion. Modernization has indeed involved the rise of rational-bureaucratic states and the gradual displacement of ecclesiastical authority with that of professional and technocratic elites. But in recent decades, a resurgence of religiosity and religious fundamentalism seems to have reversed the global trend toward secularization. Drawing on extensive worldwide survey data, Norris and Inglehart try to explain this development by advancing an existential security thesis: the experience of people living in weak and vulnerable societies heightens the importance of religious values, whereas the experience of people in rich and secure societies lessens it. Indeed, they find that in most developed countries church attendance and the authority of religious figures have continued to decline (although the United States is a bit of a laggard because of social inequality and the massive immigration of people with traditional world-views). In contrast, poor countries are not secularizing-and they contain a rising share of the world's population. The authors predict that this expanding gap between sacred and secular societies will have serious consequences for world politics, but they do not venture specific guesses about what is to come.

Seminal thinkers of the nineteenth century - Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud - all predicted that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the emergence of industrial society. The belief that religion was dying became the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century. During the last decade, however, the secularization thesis has experienced the most sustained challenge in its long history. The traditional secularization thesis needs updating. Religion has not disappeared and is unlikely to do so. Nevertheless, the concept of secularization captures an important part of what is going on. This book develops a theory of secularization and existential security. Sacred and Secular is essential reading for anyone interested in comparative religion, sociology, public opinion, political behavior, political development, social psychology, international relations, and cultural change. August Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud predicted that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the emergence of industrial society. Their belief that religion was dying became conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century. However, this analysis reveals that the traditional secularization thesis needs updating now. Religion has not disappeared and is unlikely to do so, even though secularization has had a surprisingly powerful negative impact on human fertility rates. The belief that religion was dying became the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the 20th century. However, religion has not disappeared and is unlikely to do so, and the secularization thesis needs updating. This text develops a theory of secularization and existential security THE SEMINAL SOCIAL thinkers of the nineteenth century - Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud - all believed that religion would gradually fade in importance and cease to be significant with the advent of industrial society.