Abstract
The article shows how the three basic socio-structural features of modernity (inclusion of a whole population into the national centre, top-down differentiation and widespread individualization) throw some light on the secularization–desecularization debate – as this is shaped by the writings of Bryan Wilson, Steve Bruce, David Martin and Charles Taylor.
One fruitful way of exploring the forms that secularization and desecularization take, as well as the dialectic relationship between these two processes, is by the use of the modernity concept.
1 Modernity
In socio-structural rather than cultural terms, modernity can be seen as the type of social organization which became dominant in the West after the English industrial and the French revolution. It entails three broad structural traits which render modern society unique – unique in the sense that the above characteristics, in their combination, are not to be found in any pre-modern social formation. These characteristics are:
the demise of segmental localism and the mobilization/inclusion of a whole population into the national centre/nation-state;
the overall differentiation of institutional spheres;
the spread of individualization from the elite to the non-elite level.
Massive Inclusion into the National Centre
Employing Durkheimian terminology, one can argue that pre-modern, traditional communities had a non-differentiated, segmental social organization. In this respect they were self-sufficient, relatively autonomous vis-a-vis more inclusive social units. In the West, this localist self-containment/autonomy was first undermined by the absolutist model of governance which took its more developed form in Louis XIV’s France. 1 Given technological developments in the military sphere and interstate competition at the time, the absolutist model, although challenged in 17th-century England, spread widely in continental Europe, 2 thus paving the way for the large-scale dominance of the nation-state in the 19th and 20th centuries. This, in combination with the dominance of industrial capitalism at about the same period, 3 led to the gradual decline of segmental localism and the unprecedented large-scale mobilization and inclusion of the population into the wider economic, 4 political, social, and cultural arenas of the nation-state. This ‘drawing-in’ process can be thought of as a vast shift of human and non-human resources from the periphery to the national centre. From an actor/agency perspective it can (following Marx and Weber) be conceptualized as a process of concentration at the top of not only the means of economic production, but also those of violence or domination, as well as those of influence or cultural production. As the local economic producers, political potentates, and virtuosi of particularistic rituals and narratives were losing control and/or ownership of their means of economic, political and cultural production, there emerged not only a concentration of power in the hands of national elites, but also a shift in people’s identifications and attachments from the local communities to the symbols and ideologies of what Benedict Anderson has called the ‘imagined community’ of the nation-state (Anderson, 1974).
What made this massive process of drawing into the centre possible was initially the extraordinary expansion of the state’s administrative and surveillance mechanisms. In fact, the nation-state, by using newly developed bureaucratic and military technologies managed to penetrate into the periphery to a degree unknown to any pre-modern, pre-industrial social formation, however complex or despotic. 5
Top-down Differentiation of Institutional Spheres
The decline of localism and the massive mobilization or inclusion into the national centre was not merely a quantitative move from the small to the large. In systemic terms, the drawing-in process took place in a context of rapid and thorough differentiation as institutional spheres (economic, political, social, religious, cultural) started portraying their own logic, their own reproductive technologies, their own historical trajectories.
Structural-functional differentiation is not, of course, unique to modernity. Complex pre-industrial social formations such as empires also portray a considerable degree of differentiation (Eisenstadt, 1963). But as Marx (1964[1859]) and others have pointed out, in such societies this process was limited to the top. The differentiated parts or subsystems of the centre were superimposed on the non-differentiated, segmentally organized peripheries. This means that the degree of penetration of the centralized economic, political, and cultural apparatuses is both very weak and highly uneven (Mann, 1986). It is only in modernity that differentiation took a top-down character. It reached, in other terms, society’s social base.
Widespread Individualization
As Giddens has pointed out, in traditional social orders, codes of ‘formulaic truth’ delineate rigidly an individual’s space of decision-making. From mundane decisions concerning marriage, family size and everyday conduct, to those concerning ultimate existential problems of life or death, tradition provides recipes for action that individuals adhere to as a matter of course. In early modernity, on the other hand, traditional certainties are replaced by collectivist ones (e.g. ideologies on class, nation, party) which also provide social members with a meaning in life and with clear guidelines that drastically reduce the social spaces where decisions have to be made.
In late, globalized modernity, however, both traditional and collectivist certainties decline or disappear. Such basic developments as the globalization of financial markets and services, instant electronic communication and, more generally, the drastic ‘compression of time and space’ have led to ‘detraditionalization’. Via such processes as disembedment, increases in mediated experience, pluralization of the life-worlds and the emergence of contingent knowledge, detraditionalization creates a situation where routines lose their meaningfulness and their unquestioned moral authority. It creates a situation where individuals can resort to neither traditional nor collectivist truths when taking decisions in their everyday lives. Deprived of traditional or collectivist guidance, they must, in other words, deal with ‘empty spaces’. From whether or not to marry and have children, to what life-style to adopt and what type of identity to form – in all these areas the individual has to be highly reflexive, and must construct ‘his/her own biography’ (Giddens, 1994). One can argue of course that highly reflexive modes of existence can be found on the elite level in several pre-modern, complex societies. It is, however, only in late modernity that, given massive inclusion into the centre and top-down differentiation, subjects on the non-elite level are called, under conditions of detraditionalization, to create their own rules, to create ‘a life of their own’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2003).
In the light of the above conceptualization of modernity, I critically examine the secularization debate by focusing on the work of Bryan Wilson, Steve Bruce, David Martin and Charles Taylor – four scholars who have made important contributions to the subject.
2 The Secularization Thesis
The idea that modernity is in the long term incompatible with religion has a long history. Bryan Wilson has developed the thesis in a sociologically relevant manner. In his view industrialization and its concomitant processes (commercialization of agriculture, urbanization, the development of science, etc.) have undermined the importance of religion – both in terms of its relation to non-religious institutions (familial, educational, economic, etc.) and within the religious sphere proper. In the latter case the church’s hold over the laity’s beliefs and practices has diminished in dramatic fashion (Wilson, 1966, 1982, 2001).
Inter-institutional Secularization
Since the revival of religiosity (both within and outside the established churches) from the late 1960s onwards, there have been so many critics of the secularization thesis that, as it was put by commentators, further criticisms simply beat a dead horse. However, if, following Sahlins and Service (1960), one distinguishes between specific and general evolution, than it is possible to argue that Wilson’s thesis is not as invalid as critics imply. If by specific evolution we mean an overall linear process of growing secularization linked to industrialization or modernization, than it is obvious that Wilson’s analysis is untenable. As was repeatedly pointed out modern social structures are compatible not only with growing secularization, but also with growing desecularization. If this is so then the issue is to explore under what conditions one of the two processes prevails as well as how they combine and interact with each other.
In terms of general evolution, however, the secularization thesis has still some plausibility. If by general evolution we mean the mapping of an overall trend which becomes visible if we focus on a variety of micro linear (reversible) processes over the longue durée, then in inter-institutional terms, that is in terms of how the religious sphere relates to other differentiated institutional spheres (political, economic, educational, etc.), then secularization does make sense. In the same way that economic historians, for instance, see a growing technological advance say from the 17th-century scientific revolution up to the present, one can argue about a similar non-linear cumulative process in the religious sphere. More specifically, as far as technological advance is concerned, quite obviously, it is not considered to be of the linear type (specific evolution). Linear technological processes often lead to a dead-end in specific places or times, while restarting again in other places or times. But, in terms of general evolution, one can see a progressive overall development from rudimentary to advanced technologies. Going back to religion, given modernity’s top-down socio-structural differentiation, which leads to a situation where each institutional sphere tends to have its own logic and values, we can detect, in terms of general evolution, an overall trend of ‘inter-institutional’ secularization: the control that religion exercises over non-religious institutional spheres is gradually weakening. Of course, as already mentioned, inter-institutional secularization is neither linear nor always irreversible. For instance, the growing criticism of neoliberal/Thacherite social policies by liberal protestant religious elites in the UK undermines the strict differentiation between the religious and the political sphere, between ‘God and Caesar’. And this is more so in the case of liberation theology and the dynamic political involvement of Catholic priests in several Latin American countries. And equally striking, as an example of dedifferentiation between the religious and the political, is the growth of the evangelical right in the USA. 6 Finally, the ethno-religious features of orthodox churches in eastern and southern Europe (e.g. Poland and Greece) show not so much dedifferentiation but a patriotic/nationalist resistance to differentiation.
All the above cases of inter-institutional desecularization or dedifferentiation, however, disprove the linear version of the secularization thesis but not the non-linear, ‘general evolution’ one. As far as Christianity is concerned, the overall loss of direct control of the churches over other institutional spheres, as a general trend, is both dominant and irreversible (Bruce, 2011). The crucial, overall integrative role of religion, its deep intrusion in all social spheres that we see in most pre-modern situations has disappeared for good – at least in the Christian West.
Intra-institutional Secularization
The secularization thesis is much weaker for developments within the religious sphere proper. The continuing strength and vitality of various denominations in the US, the rapid growth of the so-called new religious movements, the proliferation of religious informal groups or networks loosely linked to established churches and the phenomenal dynamism of Pentecostalism in both developed and developing countries (Martin, 2005: 26–43) – all the above indicate a weakening of intra-institutional secularization. They indicate clearly that intra-institutional secularity is not a constitutive element of late modernity. Further industrialization or modernization in the developed and developing countries does not necessarily lead to secularization within the religious sphere. In many cases the opposite prevails. At present the reaction to the logocentrism and to the faith in scientific and technological ‘progress’ that the 18th-century enlightenment culture propagated render atheism and particularly the militant atheism of the Richard Dawkins type rather ineffective.
Steve Bruce, in a recent attempt (2011) to defend the secularization thesis (both the inter- and intra-institutional one) considers religious liberalization as secularization. According to Bruce, once the medieval church was fragmented there were gradual steps towards secularity. This was true about the Reformation and even more so about the religious revival of the 1970s. Given the latter’s hostility to organizational authority and its focus on individual choice, the new religious phenomena are fragile, they are bound to decline and to lead to further secularization.
However, if secularization is defined in such an all inclusive manner, one saves the theory but at the price of reducing it to obviousness. Against Bruce’s thesis one can argue that the move from the non-fragmented, traditional medieval Catholicism to the Reformation is a step not towards secularity, but towards a different type of religiosity. And the same is true about the move, following Charles Taylor’s typology (see section 5), from the denominational/‘mobilization’ to the ‘expressivist’, postsecular religious model. That the latter, particularly when it refers to non-churched believers, is less institutionalized, more fragile, does not mean that it is bound to fizzle out, to lead to total religious indifference or atheism.
In referring to Parsons’ theory of religious development, Steve Bruce argues that:
… freedom from entanglements with secular power allowed churches to concentrate on their core task and thus become what Talcott Parsons called ‘a more specialised agency’, their removal from the centre of public life reduced their contact with, and relevance for, the general population. (2011: 35–6)
Now it is true of course that in terms of the differentiation between the religious and the other social spheres (i.e. in inter-institutional terms), religion, with some exceptions, has been removed ‘from the centre of public life’. But this does not entail, in intra-institutional terms, a weakening of faith. Bruce takes seriously into account only the part of Parsonian theory which stresses the differentiation between religion and the public sphere. But he does not take into account that, for Parsons, social differentiation ‘allowed the churches to concentrate on their core task’. Indeed, for the American theorist, differentiation entails both the relative shrinking of the church’s influence in relation to other social spheres and a certain religious deepening among believers.
As far as future developments are concerned, I think that in addition to the rapid global growth of evangelical, Pentecostal Christianity, non-churched religiosity – given growing individualization – has a great growth potential, particularly among the young. Bruce’s idea that the young generation, through socialization, adopt their parents’ secular values (2011: 69–71) does not take into account intergenerational conflict – a phenomenon particularly marked from the counter-cultural 1960s up to the present. After all, the reaction to enlightenment’s faith in instrumental reason is not limited to the restricted circles of postsecular theologians and philosophers; postsecularity is also spreading downwards. I believe that this reaction, as well as the turn to an ultra-individualistic form of religiosity, is here to stay.
3 Modernity and Religious Rationalization
Modernity’s three socio-structural features and particularly the massive inclusion into the national centre meant that the pre-modern dualism between a segmentally organized periphery and a differentiated centre was attenuated. In each differentiated sphere there was a certain homogenization as certain elements of the top were spreading downwards. In western Christianity for instance, under pre-modern conditions, there was a marked chasm between the official, ‘pure’, theologically congruent faith of religious elites and the folk religious culture of the illiterate peasants. In the latter case, communal and religious traditions were inextricably linked together – religious beliefs coexisting with superstitions and magical or ‘pagan’ practices. 7 Needless to say, the process of relative homogenization did not necessarily lead to decreasing inequalities between elites and non-elites. The homogenization process had to do more with a certain rationalization of beliefs and practices, to use Weberian terminology, 8 and less with economic, political or cultural inequalities. As a matter of fact, religious rationalization might increase rather than decrease the control that religious elites have over the laity. If in modernity we see a concentration of the means of production, domination and violence at the national centre, the same can be said about the ‘means of religious socialization’. Elites at the centre are more capable of imposing religious ‘orthodoxy’ to those at the periphery.
In view of the above, it is important, in analytical terms, to distinguish secularization/desecularization ‘from rationalization/derationalization’. The former distinction should refer to degrees of secularity or religiosity. Secularity, for instance, can take weak forms (e.g. indifference or agnosticism) or strong forms (atheism or militant atheism). And the same is true about religiosity. It can vary from what Epstein (1999) has called minimal religion to the strong religiosity of those who strictly accept the beliefs, rituals and other practices of a particular church or religious tradition. As far as rationalization/derationalization is concerned, growing rationalization may entail, as already mentioned, successful attempts to spread the official, elite doctrine to the non-elite level – eliminating thus the magical or foreign from the elite doctrine elements. It may also entail rendering the official doctrine more compatible with scientific developments or more consistent internally (Weber, 1978[1925]: 538). As to derationalization, it occurs when the opposite process takes place; for instance, the tendency to combine Christian church membership and attendance with beliefs and practices incompatible or foreign to church dogma such as Buddhist meditation techniques or belief in reincarnation (Fuller, 2001: 98ff). A more accentuated form of derationalization is when magical elements (such as witchcraft, alchemy) peripheralize the non-magical ones.
Concerning the former, interest in magic, via innumerable publications, the mass media and the internet, has ceased to characterize the activities of a small number of initiates. As the shelves of major bookshops the world over testify, the global market for books on witchcraft, occultism, astrology and related themes is huge and growing in geometrical fashion. Perhaps nothing indicates better the global interest in the magical than the Harry Potter books which have been translated in more than a hundred languages and have sold millions of copies. Of course the interest in magicians, sorcerers and witches does not mean an active participation or exercise of magical or occult practices. But, at least indirectly, it clearly indicates a marked trend towards the ‘remagicalization’ of the world. 9
In the light of the above, one can argue that, on the one hand, modernity’s inclusionary processes have weakened the chasm between elite and popular religiosity, eliminating thus the magical or superstitious elements of the traditional, local communal culture – thus leading to religious rationalization. On the other hand, however, in the non-institutionalized religious space of late modernity the magical reappears and acquires global dimensions, strengthening thus derationalization processes.
4 The Secularization-Desecularization Dialectic
David Martin (2005, 2011) has developed a general theory of secularization. He has argued, quite convincingly, against a linear view of the secularization process. Equally convincingly he claimed that the only secularizing process which is in the long term irreversible is the one linked to social differentiation; that is, to the development of relatively autonomous institutional spheres.
With this as a background, he has put forward the interesting thesis that, from a macro-historical point of view, rather than growing secularization or desecularization, what we see in the Christian West is a constant dialectic between the secular and the non-secular. Within the religious sphere there are periods of intense religious flourishing which at some point is weakening leading to secularizing tendencies. In turn the latter tendencies are undermined by a new religious revival. Thus there is a tension between ‘spirit’ and ‘nature’, between a transforming Christian vision of peace and compassion and the realities of power and violence. As the spirit (divine grace) penetrates the ‘world’, at some point the vision’s initial élan is diminished and the religious thrust recoils. 10 As for the character of the recoil, it is affected by the cost that each religious drive entails:
Crucially I argue that instead of regarding secularization as once-for-all unilateral process, one might rather think in terms of successive christianizations followed or accompanied by recoils. Each christianization is a salient of faith driven into the secular from a different angle, each pays a characteristic cost which affects the character of the recoil, and each undergoes a partial collapse into some version of ‘nature’. (Martin, 2005: 3)
David Martin considers his secularization-desecularization dialectic as a general theory which applies at least in the Christian world, from the late antiquity up to the present. This broad scope, however, raises difficulties. When he refers, for instance, to the early Catholic Christianization entailing the ‘conversion of monarchs (and so of peoples)’ (2005: 3), he does not take seriously into account that secularity (in the forms of atheism, agnosticism, total indifference to religious matters, etc.) during the first centuries of the church’s history was limited to the elite level. Secularity in other terms was, during this early period, an exception. The bulk of the population was religious in a variety of ways, Christian, non-Christian or mixtures of both. As I have already argued in Section 1, it is only with the dominance of modernity that the secular as well as the religious (in its non-popular form) spreads to the social base. In both early Christianity and the Middle Ages the major dynamic was less between the secular and the religious and more between different types of religiosity: between Christian and pagan religiosity, between eastern and western Christianity, between official versions of the Christian doctrine and a huge variety of ‘heresies’, etc. Although David Martin does not specify when the move of the monarch type of Catholic Christianization recoils or what form the recoil takes, it certainly did not take the secular form – since secularity, to repeat, was in pre-modernity restricted at the elite level.
I would therefore argue that Martin’s theory makes more sense if it is applied much later, in the period when the three social structural features of western modernity were becoming dominant. It is during this period that massive inclusion into the national centre, top-down differentiation and widespread individualization created a relatively differentiated, autonomous religious sphere within which the chasm between official and popular religiosity receded – this leading to the spread of elite religious elements downwards, while at the same time secularity spread from intellectuals, philosophers and the educated classes to the popular strata. It is within this new ‘spreading downwards’ context that it is useful to examine the dialectic between secularization and desecularization. One sees this dialectic, as Martin points out, in the various religious ‘awakenings’ in the United States – awakenings leading to religious expansion followed by ‘recoiling’.
It should be stressed, however, that, particularly in late modernity, the recoiling of the Christian spirit may lead to ‘nature’; but, it may also lead to non-Christian religious traditions and subcultures. If the former can be viewed from a ‘spirit-nature’ or secularization-desecularization dialectic, the latter refers to a different type of dialectic, a dialectic between Christian and non-Christian beliefs, or between different types of religious hybridities. In the present globalized modernity the turning away from the Christian faith and the consequent developments of the new religious movements or of the New Age spiritualities cannot be dismissed as trivial and as bound to disappear (Taylor, 2007: 618). Given modernity’s widespread individualization, despite the lack of solid institutional supports and rituals, the new spirituality and the à la carte construction of one’s religious voyage is here to stay – even to grow (Beck, 2011).
To repeat, if by secularization we merely mean dechristianization (as Martin seems to imply) then it is not possible to distinguish two radically different forms of dechristianization:
that which leads to atheism, agnosticism or religious indifference;
that which leads to the adoption of non-Christian or to hybrid religious forms within which Christian elements are peripheral. 11
Another type of dialectic which is particularly important in the religious sphere today is the liberal-conservative one. As is well known, the counter culture of the 1960s and the new spiritualities which followed have led to a subjectivist, 12 expressivist religiosity which stresses less attachment to sacred texts, dogmas and organizational authority and more to ‘heart work’, direct experience of the divine and, more generally, the existential dimension of religious life (see Section 5). The rapid growth of the latter type of religious subculture has created severe tensions within the established churches between those who accepted and tried to introduce the new, liberal spirituality into the ecclesiastical order, and those conservative forces which reacted to the liberalizing tendencies of sections of the clergy and laity. The extreme reaction to church liberalization occurred in the United States where the evangelical right tried to expand its message of ‘return to the fundamentals’ – a return to be achieved by media control and the creation of powerful lobbies in Congress (Ammerman, 1994: 43ff). 13 Furthermore, the liberal-conservative religious conflict entered more forcefully the public sphere as ethical problems such as in vitro fertilization, abortion and euthanasia became issues of popular concern.
5 Between the Secular and the Non-secular
I move now from Wilson’s and Bruce’s secularization thesis and Martin’s secularization-desecularization dialectic to Charles Taylor’s views on the secular age and beyond. The Catholic philosopher’s magisterial analysis (2007) is partly based on the construction of a threefold typology. The first ideal typical model, the ancien régime or paleo-Durkheimian one, is not clearly differentiated from the traditional local community. Within it the faithful do not choose – in the sense that they accept unquestionably the church’s dogmas and ritual practices and are church members from birth to death. The second neo-Durkheimian or mobilization model has its origins in the Reformation and refers to a situation where established churches adopt practices which focus less on dogma and strict rituals and more on a more flexible, liberal framework. Particularly in the flourishing American denominations, the idea of choice becomes important; that is, the idea that no church, no denomination has the monopoly of truth and that therefore the faithful have the right to explore and to choose. The third expressivist model, having its roots in 19th-century romanticism, has developed in a spectacular manner among the youth from the 1970s onwards. I focus on the latter model since it generates interesting problems related to the secularization-desecularization debate.
Charles Taylor calls the complex of values underlying the above model expressive individualism. Expressive individualism reacts against dogmas and the authority of hierarchically organized religious elites. Religious truth cannot be found in sacramental mysteries, ex cathedra theological discourses or sacred texts. The authentic search for the divine is based on unmediated experience, on a turning inwards in an attempt to approach the divine existentially, in a manner resembling more the way of the mystic rather than that of the assiduous follower of rules and beliefs emanating from priestly authority.
Expressive individualism can be found both within the established churches and outside them. In the former case one sees a growing flexibility, a tolerance of diverging religious views as well as a more general ‘liberalization’ of beliefs and practices. 14 The space outside the well-established religious organizations is occupied by the so-called new religious movements, which may be Christian or may be oriented to other religious traditions (Glock and Bellah, 1976; Robbins, 1988). It is also occupied by fluid informal groups and networks which are usually loosely connected to more stable Christian denominations or congregations. Finally, within this extra-ecclesiastical space one finds ‘seekers’ who are in a constant search, a continuous quest, moving from one religious network or guru to another, often eclectically choosing elements from a variety of religious traditions both Christian and non-Christian. 15 Therefore, in this particular case, in an attempt to achieve ‘authenticity’ (Taylor, 2002: 83), the subject constructs a religious path of her/his own (Beck, 2011); to paraphrase Giddens’ terminology, s/he constructs her/his own ‘religious biography’ (Giddens, 1994). It is here of course that the individualizing, expressivist features of modernity reach their zenith.
According to Taylor, this type of ultra-subjectivistic, privatized religiosity can often lead to a trivialization of the religious life, to a situation where the picking and choosing from the global spiritual supermarket leads to an arid hybridity. On the other hand, however, he thinks that not all ‘New Age’ type of developments can or should be dismissed in a facile manner. Some of these developments indicate young people’s genuine search for a meaning in life that the globalized, consumerist, mediatized world cannot provide.
Assessing the present condition, the Catholic philosopher posits two ways of leading a meaningful existence: ‘exclusive humanism’ and ‘transcendental flourishing’. Exclusive humanism can lead to an immanent, non-religious spirituality via the universalization of moral codes, the concern with nature, the struggles against world poverty, etc. However, this type of humanism disconnects human beings from the cosmos and the mysteries of human existence. It leads to an ‘immanent flourishing’, which is more limiting than the religious, transcendental spirituality of the Christian believer. Both, however, according to Taylor, should be respected (2007: 618ff).
What I would like to add to the above is that between the secular, exclusive humanism and the transcendental flourishing there is a type of flourishing which is difficult to classify as secular or non-secular, a type of flourishing which is in the interface between secularity and non-secularity.
The Indwelling God
This is the view of those who believe that there is no God outside the human being; that the divine resides within us. God is entirely or exclusively indwelling. To put it differently, spiritual flourishing occurs when we discover and develop the internal to the subject ‘divine spark’. Here as well there is infinity, but it is an ‘immanent infinity’ – an infinity referring to the depths and mysteries of the human soul. From this anthropocentric point of view, to believe in an external deity leads to spiritual heteronomy, to an alienating type of religiosity. As Don Cupitt puts it:
… unless religiousness is truly autonomous and subjective it is not religiously commendable. Piety cannot in any way be validated from the outside. Religious activity must be purely disinterested and therefore cannot depend upon any external facts such as an objective God or life after death. (1980: 10).
Thus, if the religious entails a belief in an external to the individual divinity, belief in an exclusively ‘internal’ God comes very near to secularity – but it is not exactly secular since secularity entails unbelief, agnosticism or indifference in religious matters. If negative theology, in its western or eastern/orthodox version, considers that the divine, in its essence, is external but unknowable, secular theology of the Don Cupitt or the J. Robinson (1963) type transforms external unknowability into the ‘internal’ knowability of an exclusively indwelling deity. Needless to say, the ‘indwelling God’ theme is not limited in the restricted circle of secular theologians. As the secular and the non-secular, so the in-between theme has spread widely from the level of religious virtuosi to the popular level. Heelas, who called this trend immanent spirituality or humanistic expressivism, argues that a major feature of several New Age spiritualities is that God is not an external to the human being reality, but a higher part of the self (Heelas, 2008: 55–8; Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 71ff).
The Spiritual Seeker
As Charles Taylor and many other observers have pointed out, expressive religiosity can take the form of a seeker’s continuous spiritual quest, a seeker who rejects the dogmas, rituals and the bureaucratic authority of established churches and opts for an individualistic, continuous religious exploration. Such a spiritual exploration can be of two kinds. In the first case the seeker tries to explore the religious sphere in a proactive manner. She or he becomes familiar with the sacred texts and moral codes of various religions in an attempt to find elements which make sense to her/him, which meet her/his spiritual needs. In other terms, here we have the case of the subject who in an activistic, decisionistic manner selects from the innumerable choices that the global religious market offers in order to construct her/his own unique, tailor-made religious journey. 16
The other type of seeker, the one that interests us here, explores the spiritual space not in an energetic, voluntaristic, cataphatic manner but apophatically. Apophatic in Greek means negative or rather negatory. In eastern orthodox theology apophatism entails two basic elements: first, the divine, in its essence, is totally transcendental and therefore unknowable, whereas in its energies it is approachable in a personal, direct, non-mediated manner; second, the way to come near the divine energies is by getting rid of all passions, all calculations, all thoughts or even images. In this way the apophatically oriented subject achieves kenosis (emptying out), she or he creates an internal void or rather becomes an ‘empty vessel’ ready to receive God’s energies or grace. 17
Whereas apophatism in the eastern orthodox tradition entails a belief in an external but unknowable (in its essence) God, there is a type of seeker who brackets the problem of God’s existence. She or he tries, through contemplation and various meditation techniques, to get rid of all thoughts, including belief in the existence of a divine force. Therefore in this case the seeker does not construct a ‘religious path of one’s own’; rather she or he deconstructs habitual ways of acting and thinking, since the latter constitute obstacles to his/her self-realization. From this perspective the adoption of any type of belief system is anti-spiritual. It is an obstacle in the attempt to achieve an empty space within which how to live and what to do emerge spontaneously from within. In this way the ‘tyranny of choices’ is overcome. What to do in any specific situation does not entail thinking, it rather entails not thinking.
Perhaps the spiritual leader who has developed most this type of faithless spirituality is J. Krishnamurti. For the Indian sage, thinking and being are antithetical processes, the more one thinks the more one is getting away from the spiritual mode of being. Not only mundane thinking, ruminations or calculations but even believing in a transcendental reality or in an after life takes one away from genuine spirituality in the here and now. Belief of any kind is not only irrelevant but it also constitutes a serious obstacle to the spiritual quest. For spirituality is a ‘pathless way’. It basically entails constantly observing what goes on inside the self in a wordless, conceptless, detached manner. When one comes near to this type of condition, the dualism between the observer and the observed disappears. What emerges is a limitless compassion vis-a-vis the self, the other and nature (1978, 1985). This type of ‘agnostic’ spirituality, which comes very near Zen Buddhism, cannot be called religious if by religion we mean a belief in a divine reality that is transcendental or external to the subject. On the other hand it is not covered by Taylor’s exclusive humanism. As with the ‘indwelling God’ it lies in the interstice between the secular and the non-secular.
Finally, it should be stressed that the distinction between cataphatic and apophatic spirituality is an ideal type one. In actual situations, the orientations of both types of seeker contain both cataphatic and apophatic elements. But depending on the type of spiritual search, one of the two is dominant.
Concluding Remarks
I have tried to examine the linkages between the secularization debate and the three sociocultural features of modernity – the massive inclusion into the national centre, top-down differentiation and widespread individualization. From this perspective, the following points have been made:
In the Christian West, inter-institutional secularization, given modernity’s top-down social differentiation, is quite irreversible. The separation between church and state is not watertight. Religious elites enter the public sphere in their attempt to influence social policies. There are also attempts of more direct interventions into the political sphere by the evangelical right in the United States, by radical priests in Latin America and other religious activists. But, despite the above, religion has ceased irreversibly to be an overall regulator of social life. On the other hand, in intra-institutional terms (i.e. within the differentiated religious sphere proper), one sees in late modernity a process of desecularization or religious revival. Particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, the values underlying Taylor’s expressivist model have, in varying degrees, penetrated most non-fundamentalist established churches. The latter, in an attempt to ‘move with the times’, have become more liberal both in theological and political terms. This liberal wave has generated a variety of reactions. Conservatives try to go ‘against the times’, opposing the ‘sexual revolution’, gay and women priests, women’s right to abortion, etc.
Concerning Martin’s secularization-desecularization dialectic, at present it is less important than the liberal-conservative and/or fundamentalist dialectic within and between the established churches. In a more general manner, I think that what is more important than the secularization-desecularization dialectic is modernity’s inclusionary process. This diminishes the chasm between elites and non-elites and generates a ‘movement downwards’ – a movement which, among other things, entails religious rationalization as magical and superstitious elements linked to the pre-modern traditional community are displaced by elements of a more ‘official’, elite religiosity; the spread of secularity from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid; and widespread processes of ‘remagicalization’ as – via books, journals, conferences, the internet – astrology, witchcraft and related practices attract the interest of people in all walks of life.
Widespread individualization, the third major socio-structural feature of modernity as far as religiosity is concerned, enhances the non-institutionalized, extra-ecclesiastical space of the new religious movements or cults and the informal groups and religious networks – whether the latter are linked to established churches or not. It also leads to the multiplication of individual ‘seekers’ who, when cataphatically oriented, in a highly selective manner try to construct a religious ‘path of their own’. When apophatically oriented, they are less interested in the variety of belief systems that the global spiritual supermarket offers and more to meditative practices. The latter are used either for therapeutic purposes or, less superficially, for the creation of an internal space, a void which is a precondition for the spontaneous emergence of a spiritual mode of relating to the self, the other and the divine. Although, contra Heelas and Woodhead (2005), ‘spirituality’ has not replaced ‘religion’, there is no doubt that the so called ‘cultic’ or ‘holistic’ or ‘progressive milieu’18 grows very fast indeed. Pentecostalism, the other rapidly ascending global religious force, also has elective affinities with widespread individualization – both in terms of its marked expressivity and in terms of its similarities with the protestant ethic, with its emphasis, particularly in the third world, on hard work, strict moral standards and individual economic success.
I close by stressing once more that the three socio-structural features of modernity allow both secular and non-secular modes of existence. Given this, the relation between the two will be shaped in the future not only by structural developments but also by a variety of conjunctural developments – economic or ecological crises, scientific discoveries, the future of Islamic fundamentalism, etc. From this point of view neither the idea of a long-term secularization within the religious sphere, nor the idea of a secularization-desecularization dialectic help us to foresee the future linkages between the secular and the non-secular.
As far as modernity is concerned, what is certain is that given the demise of segmental localism, the massive inclusion into the centre, top-down differentiation and overall individualization, choice is a key element for understanding the present and future religious landscape. In matters religious, choice ceases to be the privilege or ‘burden’ of the few, it spreads downwards. In other terms, it is not only religious virtuosi, intellectuals or philosophers who ponder the meaning of life and the pros and cons of a secular or non-secular mode of existence. Religious affiliation ceases to be taken for granted; it is an issue which concerns people in all social strata. After all, in existential and religious matters, generalized choice, real or imagined, is what modernity is all about.