Secularization research and its competitors: A response to my critics

Gauthier

Unsurprisingly, I have the strongest disagreements with Gauthier’s (in his own words) ‘radical epistemological, methodological and empirical critique’. In a nutshell, he argues – and he does so with Gauthierian fervour – that there has in fact been no progress in quantitative research on secularization over the last 20 years, this research having merely shown that churched religion in Western countries is shrinking, something that confirms ‘what we already knew’ and what is ‘also supported by qualitative research’. At the same time, such quantitative research has, according to Gauthier, a seriously ‘reductionist’ view of religion (it puts it ‘in a box’) and it ‘misses the most fundamental changes that have occurred over the last decades, and which are qualitative more than quantitative’. If this were true, then indeed I should not have written the address, because there would have been nothing to write about. But let us take the points in order.

Gauthier’s rebuttals of research on secular competition are even weaker, however. Here, he attacks not the research cited, but a hypothetical example given in the text. When it comes to the secular transition model, he maintains that the model cannot be true because it is based on an ‘evolutionist’ and ‘Western-centric’ ideology.

I do not believe that quantitative observational methods are the only ones that we should use. Many questions in the social sciences need qualitative or historical methods (I myself have taught mixed methods for years). Neither do I believe that all the results that I reported are valid. This is why I consistently pointed to the new problems and questions that the recent findings raise. What I do believe, however, is that the studies that I flagged up as constituting ‘progress’ are indeed new, important, and should be known by every researcher working on secularization, whether she works with quantitative, qualitative, or historical methods.

Müller

Tobias Müller argues that a decolonial perspective raises concerns, and he points to three blind spots in the progress made by the quantitative research on secularization that I presented in my address: namely, its definition of religion and secularity, the issue of Euro- or Western-centrism, and the issue of gender. ¹

Regarding the first point, the definition of religion, Müller follows Asad (1993) and others, reminding us that religion and secularity are inherently difficult to define and ‘imbricated with . . . epistemic and political hierarchies’; that the term religion and the items used in quantitative research to measure religiosity are based on the Christian prototype, and may therefore be ill suited to other religious phenomena; and that the term secularity is often only used as a synonym for ‘non-religion’, and not as something in its own right. Finally, according to Müller, the very practice of investigating with items constructed by the researcher herself may only reproduce her assumptions about what religion is and ‘ignore how people (re)conceptualize their symbolic worlds as immanent or transcendent’. To a certain extent, I accept these points (except, perhaps, the point that we should define secularity independently of religion). Religion is indeed rather difficult to define; historically, it is a relatively new term; and, in its current understanding, it has been coined in a predominantly Christian environment. Research on secularization is indeed still Christo-centric, and we will still have to change and refine our indicators to better capture non-Christian religions and religiosities.

My difference with Müller is that he seems to think that these are epistemological problems that might call into question the usefulness of quantitative research per se. In my view, however, they are practical problems that can, at least in principle, be solved. For example, finding an all-encompassing definition of religion is a quite difficult (according to Asad: impossible) task when looked at epistemologically. For quantitative researchers, though, deciding on a (working) definition of religion is a necessary step in the research process. Knowing, with Asad, that all our theoretical terms have a history and that the meaning of these terms itself depends on power structures in society is all very well – but it does not absolve us from deciding on a definition, because we would otherwise not know what to observe. Or, to give another example, it is true that quantitative research measures religion with items constructed by the researcher herself, and therefore runs the risk of not capturing what religion really means to the people who are studied. But this is not an insurmountable epistemological, but a practical problem that the researcher can solve by becoming intimately acquainted with the research object – its language, rules, representations, and so on, hence the importance of qualitative and historical research as a precondition of good quantitative studies.

While I believe that researchers will still have to adapt their definition and instruments to better investigate religions in non-Western countries, I also maintain that our definition of religion and our items used to measure religiosity for Western countries work quite well. It is of course true that, if we change the definition of the object of our research, then the results will also change. But it is then up to the critics to actually prove that using a different definition leads to studies with different and more plausible results. For the Western countries, this is exactly what research in the ‘individualization tradition’ has attempted to do in what I called the ‘contentious phase’. Here, scholars have used wider (e.g. functional) definitions of religion, and argued that, instead of secularization, we see only religious change. In my opinion, these scholars have not been successful, and the emerging consensus is that individualization is not an alternative to secularization, but actually accompanies it (see more on this below).

Müller’s second, and closely related, point concerns the possible Western-centrism of research on secularization. Müller argues that such research is ‘Western’, ‘hegemonic’, and ‘parochial’, in that it uses ‘modernist, catching-up narratives that cast non-Western countries as historically lagging behind’. This might have the problematic effect that we are not able to capture the diversity of possible religious changes, such as religious decentralization, or the rise of fundamentalisms. As I noted in my address, such bias evidently exists because quantitative sociology of religion started out in Western countries. But it has made progress in precisely this area in the last 20 years, decreasing the bias by extending its reach to non-Western societies and religion(s). The progress made by Norris and Inglehart (2012[2004]) in using the world value surveys lies in the fact that they measured religiosity in 81 countries, in Western and non-Western areas of the world, in all continents, and across all major religions. The point is not that they eliminated all Western-centrism, but that they made a start in addressing the issue – with new and surprising results. Regarding Müller’s comment on the possible rise of fundamentalism, at least for Western countries, we know that fundamentalist movements have not been able to stop secularization – if they had, this would have shown up in our data.

There is another angle of Müller’s Western-centrism critique that I find problematic. Müller seems to think that the theory of secular transition should be rejected because it is ‘Western-centric’, and a ‘modernist, catching-up narrative’. In my view, however, empirically falsifiable theories should be judged not on ideological, but on empirical grounds. In other words, if the model of secular transition has to be discarded, then it should be discarded not because we may dislike its suspected underlying ideology, but because it is empirically wrong. The paper that I have written with Detlef Pollack and Nan Dirk de Graaf shows that East Germany does not fit the Voas model empirically. If many more such papers are published, then the Voas model may have to be discarded. Conversely, if a great deal of corroborating evidence is produced, then the model may carry the day – even if we don’t like the fact that there may indeed be something like ‘social evolution’. Adopting such an empirical criterion, my view is that there is accumulating evidence that modernization indeed leads to secularization all over the world, in Western as well as in non-Western and in Christian as well as in non-Christian societies, and that some societies have moved farther along this process than others (Norris and Inglehart, 2012[2004]; Pew RC, 2018). I also suspect that this process does not always follow the strict Voas model, but can take different routes.

Müller’s third criticism is that my address did not touch on the link between secularization and gender. I agree that this issue is important. But it is not an area that recent research on secularization has left untouched. On the contrary, while I had gender on my list of areas where progress has been made, I decided not to include it because the results on the link between gender and secularization, as well as the explanation of the gender gap in religion, are still very mixed and need further research. One major advance in quantitative research in the last few decades has been for me the publication of the Pew RC (2016) report on the gender gap in religion around the world, which showed that this gap (women are more religious than men) is not constant across religions, that it is differently gendered depending on the religion in question, and that it is at its widest in the Christian world.

Wilkins-Laflamme

I agree with Wilkins-Laflamme’s general outlook when she discusses my address. Her mind-set is precisely the mind-set that has produced the progress in research on secularization that I identified. I have two comments, though.

First, she suggests that my address should have given more space to a competitor of secularization theory: namely, individualization theory. She writes, ‘There has been very limited quantitative research so far testing the secularization and individualization frameworks against one another’. It is true that my address sought to present progress in research on secularization only, and did not aim to describe and evaluate progress in competing research programmes. So what about the individualization thesis? Has there been similar progress? In my view, we can make two main generalizations.

Second, Wilkins-Laflamme also suggests that I should have included another approach, ‘nonreligion’, that is, ‘studies that examine how religion is translated into or replaced by new values and worldviews in more secular societies [and] the content of these forms of nonreligion’. I do acknowledge that there has been valuable research in this area that can be seen as progress. Let me point out, however, that I do not see the point of trying to find the attributes of the ‘secular’ without making reference to religion. Imagine that for whatever reason people suddenly stop practicing sports. They run, cycle, and swim less and less. Should we then open up a new field of nonsport studies, whose function it would be to study the specific ways of competing and moving that have nothing to do with sports? That would not be very useful because such nonsport competitions and activities are just what people do in their everyday life and are already addressed by general sociology.

Voas

The comments made by Voas can be read as complementing my address in several respects. He draws attention to the fact that some of the research that I presented concerns the ‘how’ (e.g. secularization takes the form of cohort replacement), while other research concerns the ‘why’ (e.g. is it education that mainly causes secularization?). He argues that advances have been more impressive in the ‘how’ than the ‘why’, but that it is ultimately the ‘why’ questions that interest us most. Furthermore, he compares the programme of research on secularization to its main competitors in what I called the ‘contentious phase’: namely, to individualization and rational-choice theory. His view is that the competing theories have not led to significant advances in the field. Finally, he places my claim of progress within the context of the debate in the philosophy of science, assessing the claim with respect to the Lakatos model of research programmes. He comes to the conclusion that my claim that there has been progress in research on secularization seems ‘right’, although ‘less clear-cut’ when judged by the standards of the Lakatos MSRP (Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes). This is because, for him, progress is more about the ‘how’ than the ‘why’.

I basically agree with these points, but would add the following two comments. First, I am not sure whether progress in the ‘why’ area is really more important than progress in the ‘how’ area. In the social sciences, all objects requiring explanation are bound to socio-historical context, and social evolution and history rapidly alter causal mechanisms. In such a situation, causal explanations (answering the ‘why questions’) are more difficult than in the natural sciences, and it may be that in many areas, all we can do is to provide a sound description of how things happened. Going from unclear or misleading to clear and robust descriptions therefore seems to constitute real progress in its own right. Second, I agree that it is not so clear whether the Lakatos model really captures the progress that I identified in research on secularization. The model speaks of progress where theories in the programme make new predictions that are then verified. In the case of secularization theory, there have not been many clear-cut and specific new predictions (except, perhaps, concerning the model of secular transition). Instead, it was mainly advances in methodology and the massive expansion of data (geographically and longitudinally) that allowed researchers to test the model’s original predictions in wider contexts. The results then overwhelmingly supported the secularization model (more education, more pluralism, and more modernization lead to lower religiosity). There is also another aspect that leaves me doubtful whether the Lakatos model applies. In the model, researchers hold firmly to their ‘core beliefs’ and change the auxiliary assumptions and hypotheses in the ‘protective belt’. But, when we look at the research that I highlighted in my address, we find that not all of the researchers who contributed to these studies were really committed to hard-core secularization beliefs. Norris and Inglehart, Mocan and Pogorelova, and Hungerman probably just felt that the data available allowed them to conduct an interesting test. Had they found the opposite of what they actually found, they would have happily reported it and changed their mind on the secularization issue (at least in this specific case). Progress in research programmes therefore seems possible even where researchers are not committed to the hard core of the research programme.

Looking at our discussion from a wider perspective, I am struck by the fact that all four critics mention the issue of the theoretical competitors to the secularization paradigm. While my address focused mainly on progress in quantitative research in the secularization tradition, my critics mainly argue that we should also compare the possible progress of secularization theory to other theories of religious change. This leads to the question of whether similar papers to mine could be written about the individualization or rational-choice approach, or even about other competitors. It would be very interesting to see what such papers could come up with.

As our discussion shows, there are still very different opinions around, and perhaps we have just entered another period in the ‘contentious phase’, as Müller suggests. In any case, I hope that our discussion has helped move the debate forward and has inspired other researchers to continue working on these issues. I again thank the four critics for engaging in this lively discussion.