The post-secular

The secularization debates

Sociology’s founders viewed history through the lens of progress, seeing in humanity’s collective endeavors a steady waltz of improvement. August Comte distilled this form of evolutionary thinking to its most unabashed, developing a theory of history that concluded with humanity cured of its ills by an estate of sociologists (Wernick, 2001). Comte was not alone in advancing a progressive perspective on history: preceded by Condorcet, his work would be followed by the stage theories of Herbert Spencer and the similarly progress-oriented nineteenth-century thinkers (De Condorcet, 1995; Spencer, 1891).

Resting on the firmament of modernity, these authors were inclined to view history as a sequence of neatly stratified layers. From this perspective, certain aspects of human life appeared fossilized: preserved for examination, but long since extinct. Of all the fossils of human social life, none attracted quite as much attention as religion. Labeled a reliquary of pre-modern times, nineteenth-century social scientists traveled far to examine religious life, stretching back to ancient history or drawing upon ethnographic accounts of antipodal life and the customs of far-off places. Religious behavior of this sort came to be contrasted with the organization of a modern society.

The positivist legacy in sociology found a direct, if unstable heir in the modern theory of secularization. Though germinal in the works of classical sociology, the term secularization would only be popularized in the mid-twentieth century with the birth of the so-called ‘old paradigm’ sociologists of religion. Critiques of the old paradigm hold that the contributions of mid-century sociologists of religion like Robert Bellah, Peter Berger, Bryan Wilson, and Richard Fenn converged around a pernicious model of unilinear secularization. For critics like R. Stephen Warner, the mid-century sociologists of religion that would become known as the old paradigm shared the assumption of their positivist forebears, a belief in the inevitable decline of religion serving as a common ballast for their varied research agendas (Warner, 1993).

Composed of a range of thinkers, each occupying quite unique theoretical positions, the old paradigm was never as homogeneous as its critics suggested. Thus, in the work of Bryan Wilson, secularization came to be characterized as the privatization of religion, while Peter Berger would focus his insights on the historical process of disenchantment (Berger, 1967; Wilson, 1966).

Despite the nuances that separated mid-century specialist theories of secularization, critics and the academic community more broadly came to see secularization as fundamentally a unilinear, evolutionary process. Perhaps this is because the majority of scholars affiliated with the old paradigm, despite many differences, were united in seeing a direction in history’s movements, with public life wandering from religion. Most of these theorists would concur with Wilson’s succinct definition of secularization: ‘The process whereby religious thinking, practice and institutions lose social significance’ (Wilson, 1966: 14). Though each scholar suggested a different theoretical path, tangled with unique actors and processes, these paths converged on a society where the religious had begun to fade from public life. While the simplicity of positivism’s forecasts were complicated by mid-century theories of secularization, these theorists retained a notion of historical progress across their work.

The work of Talcott Parsons is a representative example: certainly a victim of cursory interpretation but also an illustration of the tendency to see direction in history. Across many essays, Parsons argued that secularization in the West was only possible because public institutions had been thoroughly ‘Christianized’; this is hardly the teleological theory of religious decline found in the broad-sided critiques of Parsons and his colleagues (Parsons, 1982: 330). Yet the nuance of Parsons’s work on religion is obscured by a tendency throughout his writing to crown the modernity of the West as the ultimate stage of social evolution.

The tendency to emphasize secularization as a mechanism of social evolution was likely exacerbated by the popular intellectual trends of the time. This period saw specialist studies in secularization subsumed to ascendant theories of modernization, which held religious decline as yet another marker of Western supremacy. In retrospect, it is easy to see how the evolutionary language of Parsons and Bellah might align with assumptions of modernization theory. Indeed, Parsons and Bellah willingly tethered their work to the more evolutionary strains of modernization theory, both contributing to a 1964 issue of the American Sociological Review devoted to the topic of social evolution. The passage of secularization theory from a topic of debate among specialists to an inevitable process of modernization was not, then, wholly a matter of cooption.

The popularization of secularization theory in the mid-twentieth century was followed by the emergence of an animated group of critics at the century’s close. This ‘new paradigm’ emerged from a paradoxically secular corner: the market-based theory of society. Much like certain secularization theorists, William Bainbridge, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark’s work on religious economies argued that the decline in religious monopolies in Europe and North America meant that religions had to compete for converts (Finke and Stark, 1988; Stark, 1999). Unlike theorists of secularization, Finke and Stark suggested that this competition stimulated religious growth.

The debate between the religious economy theorists and advocates of secularization proceeded with little intermission from the 1980s into the 1990s. This debate was framed in starkly Kuhnian language; participants and observers alike insinuated the emergence of a scientific revolution in the study of religion.

In retrospect, the language of revolution seems exaggerated, for two reasons: first, the two camps were not, in the language of Thomas Kuhn, incommensurable theoretical paradigms (Kuhn, 1996: 148). Despite their differences on the topic of religious decline, scholars in both camps tended to define religion in a narrow sense, confining their studies to the questions essentially demographic in nature, such as measurable declines in belief or the number of churches and rates of church attendance in modernized Western societies. These are not deep theoretical differences, but rather differences in measurement and data interpretation. Indeed, the substantive debate between these two sides is evidence not of schism, but of unity and coherence.

The second reason why the language of revolution now seems exaggerated is that by the mid 1990s this debate had subsided, not with one camp rising to total dominance, but with both sides displaced by embryonic theoretical programs responding to a wholly different concern: the rise of ‘public religion’.

The rise of ‘public religions’

The last decade of the twentieth century saw, if only for a moment, the triumph of modernization theory. Humanity briefly entered the ‘end of history’, a period of ascendant liberal modernity that presumably would involve the decline of those aspects of religious life rooted in tradition. But as quickly as this prophecy was uttered, history sputtered. Across the world, religion appeared ‘resurgent’: from liberation theology to the religious right and militant Islamism, religion seemed an increasingly important aspect of emerging conflicts.

These events, emerging largely outside the confines of the debate between ‘old’ and ‘new’ theorists of religion, demanded consideration. One particularly forceful work to confront the perceived resurgence of public religion was Jose Casanova’s (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World. For Casanova, the growth of religious influence in national public spheres around the world indicated the need to reassess the basic hypotheses of secularization theory.

Yet the text does not sever all intellectual ties to the preceding generation of theorizing about religion. Casanova does not repudiate secularization theory, but retrofits the theory to better explain public religion. Accordingly, Casanova suggests that the most powerful and enduring way in which modernity influences religion is through the differentiation of religion from other segments of society. Casanova argues that differentiation does not require religion be weakened through privatization or widespread apostasy. Rather, differentiation may provide a greater autonomy and thus a greater ability to mobilize populations within the public sphere.

Casanova was not alone in his attempt to drastically modify secularization theory. Peter Berger, former prophet of secularization theory, famously renounced his early predictions of religious decline when confronted with the new ‘public religions’. Berger’s conversion took the form of a dialectic: the rise of modernity had initiated a process of secularization, but by the late twentieth century an equal and opposing ‘religious resurgence’ was underway. For Berger, this resurgence is characterized by three responses: religious revolution, religious subcultures, and institutional adaptation (Berger, 1999: 3–4). The sum of these processes amounts to desecularization.

Berger was joined by a wider body of scholarship which investigated emergent public religions through the frame of globalization. According to one such position, the sensuous overtures of secular global capitalism inspired a fundamentalist backlash (e.g. Barber, 1996). Subsequently, more nuanced accounts of the relationship between globalization and religion have abounded: that the modern shattering of world religions might be repaired through ‘glocalization’, that the global proliferation of modern individualism and ‘detraditionalizaiton’ have catalyzed a new age of spirituality, or that global patterns of migration undermine inherited forms of secularism (Beyer, 2003; Beyer and Beaman, 2012; Bhargava, 2014; Heelas, 2006; Heelas and Woodhead, 2005; Roudometof, 2013).

In a 2001 address, Casanova captured many of these trends when he suggested that globalization and its henchmen presented serious challenges to traditional secularization theory (Casanova, 2001). In the following decade, a succession of attacks across the United States and Europe carried out by religious extremists seemed to offer a morbid confirmation of Casanova’s suspicions. The work of Casanova, Berger, and a range of scholars grappling with public religions had in some ways anticipated these events.

However, for some observers these efforts were insufficient in the face of such world-shaking violence. These critics suggested that existing efforts to explain public religions and religious resurgence were hopelessly constrained by their association with secularization theory. Given the increased controversy of religion in public life, some believed that the very foundations of the theoretical and social scientific study of religion needed to be built anew. But could these emergent theoretical programs accomplish what so many others had thus far failed to do, and produce a revolution in the theoretical and social scientific study of religion?

Precursors of the post-secular

In the midst of empirical crisis, as secularization theory strained under the weight of history, two theorists articulated complementary (if not entirely compatible) theories that anticipated a crisis in the then-dominant mode of thinking about religion. Both the anthropologist Talal Asad and the theologian John Milbank approached the assumptions of secularization theory with a deep skepticism that emerged in both theorists from critical, historical theories of the social scientific study of religion.

In his 1993 text, Genealogies of Religion, Asad developed a critique which focused on the relationship between social scientific theory, power, and the legacies of European colonialism. Asad develops two primary arguments across the essays that compose Genealogies: first, that the concept of religion has emerged from historical power relationships, particularly European colonialism. Second, that scholarly efforts to use this essentialist conception of religion in the study of culture will obscure the particular historical settings that forge the actual, lived experience of particular traditions.

Emerging at a time when many believed that world history was taking a dramatic turn, Asad’s work captured secularization theory’s essential theoretical weaknesses. But the methodological heterodoxy offered by Asad did not amount to a deathblow.

The Christian theologian John Milbank’s (1990) Theology and Social Theory produced a similar effect. Milbank’s unique critical contribution is his suggestion that the theories of religion that emerge with the rise of modernity, whether voiced by Durkheim or Weber, amount to a sort of ‘bad’ theology. Surveying the work of Durkheim and Weber, Milbank argues that: ‘Secular reason claims that there is a “social” vantage point from which it can locate and survey various “religious” phenomena. But it has turned out that assumptions about the nature of religion themselves help to define the perspective of this social vantage’ (2006: 143).

Published in the1990s, as the secularization paradigm began to stumble over a growing expanse of empirical obstacles, Genealogies of Religion and Theology and Social Theory had a largely destructive, rather than constructive, effect. In their own ways, Milbank and Asad challenged the prominent assumptions of secularization theory as it had been practiced for decades: its construction of a secular-religious binary, its supposed universality, its ahistorical search for the essence of religion.

Milbank’s theological postmodernism and Asad’s postcolonialism invited many responses; a substantial body of critical historical scholarship has emerged to investigate the intellectual history of the study of religion and the relationship between this academic discipline and historical projects from imperialism to nationalism (Arnal and McCutcheon, 2012; Masuzawa, 2005). Following Asad and Milbank, this critical sociology of knowledge presented a formidable epistemological challenge to traditional formations of secularization theory.

However, while this critique cracked the paradigm’s foundations, it did not establish a clear predecessor. In this respect alone, the work Asad, Milbank, and their predecessors parallels that of other twentieth-century debates surrounding the social scientific study of religion outlined above: promising revolution, the controversy closes in modest reform. But could this pattern hold as controversies surrounding the role of religion in public life grew more pressing?

After secularization? Habermas and the emergence of post-secular thought

In the first years of the twenty-first century, it appeared that secularization theories had diminished in confidence and predominance in the face of these empirical and theoretical challenges, but the revolution had been deferred. Theoretical and social scientific had certainly been shaken: first, by the slight tremors of the ‘new’ paradigm, then more substantially by public religion, and finally by the theoretical criticisms of Milbank and Asad. In the wake of these events, as scholars scrambled at new theoretical possibilities, an unlikely standard-bearer emerged. Jürgen Habermas, heir to the Frankfurt School and long-reigning champion of the secular polity, became the single most consequential (and controversial) voice in the raucous debates over theorizing religion.

This was an unexpected development: Europe’s preeminent philosopher and sociologist, Habermas initially took the secularization of the European public sphere for granted (Habermas, 1991). Aside from the faintest discussion in his early work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and only slightly more elaborated analysis in The Theory of Communicative Action, religion was largely absent from most of Habermas’s work. In those passages where it was considered, religion was depicted as definitionally opposed to the modern rationality lionized by the early Habermas (e.g. Habermas, 1991: 91).

But an ever more diverse Europe and the specter of sectarian strife have caused this one-time Marxist to reflect on religion. On a basic level, Habermas’s turn toward religion might be characterized as an apologia to religious diversity and the ‘freedom of religion’ inherited from the Enlightenment tradition. In a 2004 essay on the relationship between religious toleration and a broader canopy of rights, Habermas argues that the freedom of religious practice is one of the most fundamental of rights achieved by the democratic European state. This is not a reiteration of his earlier position, but an acknowledgement of the influence of religion on secular life: ‘there is certainly a conceptual link between the universalistic justification for religious tolerance, on the one hand, and democracy as the basis for legitimation for a secular state, on the other’ (Habermas, 2004: 7).

This theory would be elaborated further in later works. For Habermas, constitutional democracy and religion progress in a dialectical manner, their differences fusing through a process of reciprocal learning (Ratzinger and Habermas, 2006: 43).

The institutional division of church and state neither implies nor necessitates a psychological division between faith and reason or a stark cultural divide between public sphere and private faith (e.g. Habermas, 2006: 9).

If the secular and religious come together in a ‘complementary learning process’, then they can achieve something like the unity each side pines for (Habermas et al., 2010: 21). Such a learning process necessarily requires compromises from both sides. But the dividends for such compromises are clear: both the faithful and the faithless can join together in a ‘shared reason’ mediated by the state (Habermas et al., 2010: 23).

By today’s standards there is little controversy in acknowledging the contributions of religion to the European public sphere. However, much of the controversy that ensued was likely catalyzed by the grand-theoretical language that often encased his arguments, which invited controversy. Observing current events and the need to rethink old assumptions, Habermas described contemporary events as a ‘post-secular’ age. The term was an immediate success, its obliqueness a capacious host to a range of thinkers. It was just vague enough to attract interest, but also contained the right amount of polemic, ensuring that the concept would attract a wave of proponents and critics.

Initially, Habermas seemed to employ the post-secular as an empirical and historical concept. Frequent reference is made in his works to ‘post-secular societies’, which are apparently confined to a small range of Western, developed countries where religion maintains some form of public influence (Habermas, 2008: 17). This assertion was met with much criticism, not only because of its empirical imprecision, but also because it presupposes that the designated nations had formerly achieved a pure secularity, now disrupted by a ‘resurgent’ religion. But this was only one dimension of the post-secular; Habermas would stretch to encompass other levels of measurement and normative concerns. Given these gymnastic contortions, what has the concept of the post-secular contributed to wider efforts at developing critical and social scientific theories of religion?

Habermas’s ‘post-secular’, like his broader attempts to theorize the relationship between religion and public sphere, is less valuable in itself than as a catalyst for rethinking the way religion is theorized. As detailed above, most of his recent work is comprised of soberly voiced pleas for greater toleration and reciprocity between religious and secularist actors. The inclusive, non-controversial nature of these appeals may appear to be in direct opposition to his controversial usage of the language of post-secularism. However, both aspects of his thought are representative of a transformation in thinking about religion. Each reflects the dissolution of long-held assumptions about religion: that it is an essential and universal category; that it is inherently opposed to politics; and that it necessarily shrinks in the face of inevitable historical progression.

From this perspective, debates about the validity of ‘post-secular society’ are of secondary importance (indeed, given the inconsistent ways in which Habermas uses the term, they may be wholly unproductive). Rather, the post-secular, and Habermas’s work more generally, show a shift away from the concerns that predominated in earlier debates over secularization. Even those who vehemently oppose the notion of a post-secular society inhabit the same terrain as Habermas, pursuing studies on the relationship between religion and politics, the limits and fragility of secular progress, and the unique features of the religious-political divide in European history.

Indeed, this is perhaps best illustrated by turning to Habermas’s most incisive critic, the sociologist David Martin. As the following section will make clear, however biting Martin’s ripostes to the notion of a post-secular society may be, his own scholarship shows him to be far removed from the mid-century secularization theorists with whom he is often associated. Indeed, alongside Habermas, the recent work of David Martin signals the arrival, not of a post-secular society, but of a post-secular paradigm in critical and social scientific theories of religion.

David Martin: prophet of the post-secular?

David Martin has long held influence in the sociology of religion, but has never fit comfortably into a single theoretical school. Once described as a member of the (again, misnamed) ‘old paradigm’, Martin and his empirically crowded, theoretically nuanced studies of religion never fitted in with the easy narratives of religious decline or privatization. Where his peers saw order in history, Martin saw contingency and struggle. Indeed, early in his career Martin advocated ‘erasing’ secularization from the dictionary, suggesting that secularization was ultimately more myth than scientific theory (Martin, 1969: 9). Though Martin eventually relented, acknowledging the concept’s durability and utility, his subsequent studies of secularization had almost nothing in common with the work of his peers.

Developing a theory of secularization operating at the ‘middle range’, Martin’s work in the 1970s analyzed different historical patterns of church-state relations across European nations (Martin, 1978). In this earlier work, Martin suggested that Western modernity is not defined by a single, unilinear secularization, but is composed of several unique patterns of church-state interaction, each determined by the proximity of religious organizations to institutionalized power at the level of the nation-state. Most importantly, Martin was careful to note that the variety of patterns observed in European nation states were the result of fragile historical contingency and did not foretell the global decline of religion. Yet there are moments in Martin’s early work where he slides into the simple binaries that characterized the secularization paradigm, particularly the supposed oppositions of the secular and the religious.

In Martin’s most recent book, Religion and Power, all traces of the earlier mode of thought have vanished (2014). Here, religion and politics are tangled, with Martin showing little interest in untangling them. Rather, he attempts to traverse and explore how religion and politics overlap in a range of instances. Martin devotes significant attention to dismantling the rhetorical preoccupations of particular public debates over the relationship between religion and violence. For Martin, ‘None of the verbal concepts of sociology can be treated unproblematically as a bounded “entity”‘ (Martin, 2014: 47). All of Martin’s earlier assumptions about the essential nature of religion (or politics) have vanished.

In Religion and Power, Martin often presents his arguments as mere reiteration of earlier assertions that had been ignored due to an inhospitable intellectual climate. To some extent, this is true; throughout the book, Martin traces national-level interactions of a range of religious traditions with an equally broad range of other variables. Many of these comparisons seem reminiscent of his earlier work on secularization. But throughout, there is a near-tangible sensitivity to the epistemological limits of his core terms. Martin’s constant reflexivity about the limits and vagaries of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ as analytic categories is quite removed from his earlier confidence.

Among the book’s many takedowns, Religion and Power targets Habermas with particular aim (2014: 12–15). Martin suggests that the post-secular is simply a surreptitious effort to craft an imagined secular past. From this perspective, the post-secular is an invented historical narrative in which modern, secular Europe is disrupted by forces of religious irrationality. In contrast, and reiterating the guiding premise of the book, Martin argues that any sociological analysis of contemporary religion must begin by acknowledging that history does not unfold in neat stages, and that religion and politics will continually collide, with varying degrees of damage, precisely because both appeal to similar social needs.

These theoretical arguments seem quite distant from Habermas’s harmonious, self-contained public sphere. Yet under these apparently incompatible theoretical visions is common ground. Indeed, one finds an unexpected parallel in a recent article by Martin on the relationship between sociology and theology. In ‘Theology and sociology: with and against the grain of “the world”‘ (2015), Martin attempts to forge something of an alliance between these rival disciplines. For Martin, both sociology and theology are founded on a sensitivity to narrative and contingency. This argument is surprisingly similar to Habermas’s efforts to cultivate a reciprocal learning process between secular and religious bodies, though Martin’s analysis is provided in his personal and confessional style.

But beyond this unexpected recent parallel, there are deeper theoretical congruities between Habermas and Martin. This is clearest in Martin’s (2011) book, The Future of Christianity, in which Martin characterizes the relationship between Christianity and European democracy as dialectical (p. 31). Like Habermas, Martin’s dialectic does not end in the extinction of religion, but with each party simultaneously emboldened (and, to some extent, corrupted). Martin’s focus in this text is on the ways in which secular politics continually absorbs the transcendent while Christianity continually compromises its other-worldly vision in the face of earthly crisis. This is obviously quite at odds with Habermas’s vision, but the congruencies between the two are more than semantic. For both Habermas and Martin, the religious and the political are neither inherently stable categories nor inherently opposed. Because of this, there can be no universal theory of modernity or modernization.

What we find in Martin’s critique of Habermas is not, then, an incommensurable theoretical proposition. Rather, Habermas and Martin are converging around a set of shared intellectual concerns and assumptions. Both are concerned first and foremost with the relationship between religion and politics. This basic interest sets them far outside the core of the earlier debates over secularization. But this interest in itself does not necessarily remove them from the orbit of that theory; rather, it is the reflexivity toward the contingent and historically-constructed nature of those two concepts that sets this contemporary debate apart from its predecessor. In their own way, both Martin and Habermas seem to reject the teleology of the secularization paradigm. The combination of reflexivity and awareness of contingency is incompatible with earlier articulations of secularization. In the realm of high theory we may be moving away from the long-dominant modes of thinking about religion, but has an heir emerged to challenge the productive empirical work that marked secularization theory’s dominant period? How might the often abstract theoretical ruminations of Habermas and Martin be operationalized into steady, earthbound research?

Operationalizing the post-secular, particularly

The recent works of Habermas, Martin and the many other scholars who have turned to questions of religion and politics are undoubtedly engaged in argument. Yet, like all arguments, there is a basic level of agreement: that the purely secularized society, free of all religion, is neither inevitable nor invincible. That religion and politics are not inherently incompatible. That religion is not easily contained within the private minds and cloistered spaces of its adherents.

Yet much of this literature approaches the topic in a deeply reflexive manner, continually reminding the reader of the fragility of their basic concepts. But how might the theoretical assertions of the post-secular be operationalized, particularly given their highly reflexive nature?

One attempt, shared by a range of contemporary thinkers, has involved ‘particularizing’ the historical study of religion. The political philosopher Charles Taylor is emblematic of the attempt to scrutinize religion through a particularistic, historical lens, and to preserve the legacy of this history as a viable political project. In A Secular Age (2007), Taylor transforms secularization from universal process to a particular European history shaped not by destiny but historical contingency. In Taylor’s analysis, Europe’s history is marked by waves of successive religions; the current era is characterized not solely by disenchantment, but also by religious pluralism.

But Taylor is less concerned with the wide array of religious choices under pluralism than he is with the historical conditions that gave rise to the possibility of unbelief. The emergence of unbelief from the confines of Christendom and its eventual rise to normalcy resulted primarily from a religious belief itself: deism.

A Secular Age is perhaps the single lengthiest critique of progressive models of secularization (what Taylor labels ‘subtraction’ narratives) yet produced. The unique contours of European history may have allowed unbelief to emerge as a contender, but Taylor reminds the reader that Europe has hardly settled into unbelief. Indeed, Taylor seems to suggest that religion will continue to seep into secular societies regardless of the growth unbelief.

Other efforts to ‘particularize’ the study of religion have engaged more directly with the post-secular vocabulary. Foremost here is the sociologist Philip Gorski. In a 2000 article, Gorski located profound inadequacies in then-dominant ways of thinking about religion in the West. This was followed by a review article and co-edited volume that attempted to accommodate the full range of possibilities that post-secular theorizing might take (Gorski and Altinordu, 2008; Gorski et al., 2012). But it is in an earlier text that he has best illustrated the operationalization of post-secular concerns to historical study.

In his (2003) book Disciplinary Revolutions, Gorski pioneered a critical-historical approach to the study of religion and politics. His account of the Reformation and the relationship between Calvinism and the disciplinary apparatus of early modern states is, at its heart, a reproach to the dominant assumptions of the secularization paradigm. Gorski synthesizes the work of Weber and Foucault to illustrate how Calvinist ascetic rationality and confessional practice established the foundations of the modern, secular European state.

Critical and social scientific theorists had long looked upon the establishment of the early modern state as the consecrating act of secularization. Gorski’s rejoinder is that the modern state needed confessional practices to establish the necessary preconditions of conformity and cohesion. Gorski displays all of the traits of contemporary scholarship: a critical turning in on Europe (rather than universalizing from the European experience), an awareness of the role of power in mediating interactions of religion and politics, a focus on historically constituted practices, and an appreciation for historical contingency.

In the case of Gorksi and Taylor, particularization amounts to a sort of civilizational analysis, but is this the only option for operationalizing post-secular thought? Recent attempts at comparative analysis suggest not. In his (2013) book, The Religious and the Political, Bryan S. Turner has crafted a study of religion and politics that echoes Weber’s desire to approach the whole of social reality with a sensitivity to unique cases.

Turner is certainly not the only contemporary sociologist to examine the ways in which politics and religion overlap on the question of authority (see Chaves, 1994). However, his attempt to assess the question of authority in religion and politics has been at once much more expansive than others, while also more sensitive to the contours of particular cultural and historical contexts. The forcefulness of Turner’s work comes not from an acute thesis, but from its breadth.

The Religious and the Political moves with alacrity between periods and places, drawing attention to the interplay of religion and politics in medieval European monarchy, but also in the development of the European nation-state. Turner also gathers cases from outside of the European context, illustrating once again the shortcomings of traditional secularization’s universal theory of history. Because of its breadth, the text is necessarily episodic. In this respect, Turner’s recent work displays an acute sensitivity to the broad range of historical experience, a trait often lost in the grand theories of modernity characteristic of the previous century. The Religious and the Political is reminiscent of a dormant, subordinate class of Weberian sociology, which eschewed universalizing theory even as it was universal in its empirical appetite.

If Habermas and Martin represent a theoretical pivot away from the secularization paradigm, Taylor, Turner and Gorski illustrate the emergence of a complementary research agenda. Across these four thinkers a broad inclination is beginning to cohere: not religion’s decline but its endurance, not progress but contingency, not conflicts between belief and reason but conflicts of power.

Change and continuity in the wake of the post-secular

The contemporary focus on contingency, power dynamics, and religious vitality is largely inimical to the unilinear variants of modernization that so often enveloped earlier iterations of secularization theory. David Martin’s work is suggestive: of all the ‘old paradigm’ sociologists of religion, Martin remains relevant not because he is representative of that generation, but because he has consistently developed a theoretical vision that departed from its basic assumptions in pursuit of contingency, particularity, and power. Where secularization theory survives, as in Martin’s work, it is in a form wholly detached from modernization theory.

Indeed, the use of ‘modernity’ in contemporary scholarship is itself representative of wider changes in thinking about religion. Though modernity remains a salient framework in the literature, references to it are increasingly given in the plural form of ‘multiple modernities’ (Arjomand and Reis, 2013; Spohn, 2003). This approach was induced by S.N. Eisenstadt, who suggested that the history of modernity is ‘a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs’ (2000: 2). Eisenstadt drew a clear distinction between modernization and Westernization: though European powers exported certain models of modernity, these were altered and adapted by local actors (Eisenstadt, 2002). Different figurations of modernity are all unmoored from inherited orders, having lost any sense of fixity (Delanty, 2004: 395). Local actors respond to this void in a variety of ways, with different strategies emerging from deep civilizational history. Thus, Eisenstadt was one of the first to offer the now commonplace view that contemporary religious fundamentalism is a modern, rather than traditional, project (Eisenstadt, 1999).

The enduring influence of Eisenstadt and Martin suggests that some of the features of classical and mid-century social theory live on, but in greatly altered form. The case of Robert Bellah may seem to offer a compelling counterpoint: Bellah’s influence has only expanded with the publication of his mammoth, Religion in Human Evolution in 2011, and this despite the fact that this much-lauded text appears on cursory examination so antithetical to the contemporary tastes outlined above. Indeed, there is a clear thought line connecting Bellah’s early, ‘old paradigm’ writings on religion and his last book.

However, a more thorough comparison of Bellah’s early and late work reveals that beneath the surface lies a significant fissure. Bellah’s (1964) article ‘Religious evolution’ develops a general theory of religious change in terms of social evolution. For Bellah, this evolution is characterized by an increasing differentiation and complexity. The evolution of religious systems concludes in a greater adaptive capacity (Bellah, 1964: 358). Even when modernization theory was at its most triumphal, Bellah was cautious about the applications of evolutionary models to social analysis. Early in the article he notes that his evolutionary model is neither inevitable nor irreversible, and suggests that social evolutionary paths are not universal. Yet despite its sophistication, Bellah’s early evolutionary model is still normative, perhaps even chauvinistic:

The historic religions discovered the self; the early modern religion found a doctrinal basis on which to accept the self … modern religion is beginning to understand the laws of the self’s own existence so as to help man take responsibility for his own fate. (Bellah, 1964: 372)

Whatever its faults, Bellah’s turn to evolutionary psychology is aligned to the post-secular disposition in two significant ways: first, it suggests that symbol-making activities are a component of our genetic inheritance, and, second, it allows Bellah to exorcise his writing of its earlier normative endorsement of Western modernity. Ironically, if symbol-making is biological (rather than the result of social evolution), then religion (as a category of social science) is produced only through historical contingency. Similarly, biological evolution reduces Bellah’s reliance on the language of progress and advancement, given the preeminent role of chance and mutation. Thus, while Religion in Human Evolution bears certain semantic similarities to Bellah’s earlier work, subtle differences suggest a shift that is in keeping with wider changes in the study of religion. In further synchronization with current tastes, the social psychological mechanisms at the heart of Religion in Human Evolution are inevitably catalyzed by power and political struggle (see Chapters 4 and 5). Bellah’s late work is a testament to the endurance of mid-century secularization theory, but suggests that its survival has depended upon adaptation, specifically regarding contingency, particularity, and power.

Conclusion

As with most ascendant theoretical concepts, advocates of the post-secular have sometimes succumbed to the language of triumphalism (Keenan, 2002; McLennan, 2007). Yet throughout the second half of the twentieth century, announcements of a forthcoming transformation in the social scientific study of religion were often followed by modest revision rather revolution. The so-called ‘new paradigm’ sociologists of religion never truly displaced the ‘old’, in the same way that the rise of ‘public religions’ theorists reconfigured, rather than destroyed, the central tenets of secularization theory. Does the debate over the post-secular signal the final arrival of a fundamental shift in the way religion is theorized?

In this article, I have suggested that there are noteworthy changes afoot. These changes have little to do with the arrival of a supposed post-secular society. Rather, the post-secular is a phrase that captures intellectual anxieties and refracts a broad theoretical disposition composed of several corresponding parts. First among these is a simple shift in interest: theorists and social scientists, specialists in religion or otherwise, show an increasing preference for the interactions between religion and politics. While changing intellectual fashions do not necessarily imply profound theoretical transformation, this is nevertheless a change worth noting (if only because the cases that social scientists choose to study have a substantive connection to theory).

But more notable than this political turn is a hyper-reflexivity regarding the essential concepts of the field. Even as scholars have become more interested in the interaction between religion and politics, they have become more cautious in their assumptions about either as stable or unitary objects. This is perhaps most clearly displayed in the debate over the post-secular: while Habermas and Martin conflict in most every respect, the two converge in thinking about religion and politics as complementary (if often conflicting) forces, and understand each as products of historical power struggles. The theoretical implications of this inclination are more visible when one turns to the recent empirical studies of Turner and Gorski; in Gorski, we see a revisionist account of European secularization, while, in Turner, we find an attempt to merge global, comparative sociology with idiographic theory.

This is a limited and in some sense arbitrary survey, yet the conclusions hold even if the review is expanded to include social scientists and theorists who have largely ignored the post-secular debate. A brief consideration of the work of Steve Bruce is illustrative: a pugnacious champion of secularization theory, Bruce has continued to advocate for the relevance of theories of religious decline. Yet his formulation of this defense has little in common with his predecessors. Despite his clear defense of the explanatory power of secularization theory, Bruce frequently reminds his reader of the limits of his theoretical agenda: that it explains the past rather than the future, that it is focused principally on accounting for historical convergences in modern liberal democracies, and that the process of religious decline can experience a number of complications, including revivals (Bruce, 2013). In his (2003) book, Religion and Politics, Bruce breaks from conventional narratives of religious decline by chasing the various entanglements of his titular concepts across world history. While the subject matter of the book invites grand theoretical pronouncements, Bruce develops a humble theoretical position, using particularizing comparisons to suggest that religion has causal value in many political realms. Even secularization theory’s most vigorous enforcer seems distanced from the concerns of his predecessors.

The twentieth century was dominated by theories of decline. In the theoretical and social scientific literature on religion, two jeremiads reigned: first, a variation of secularization theory that held that global modernization would be followed by global religious decline, and, second, a body of criticism that promised the imminent decline of secularization theory. Both prophecies failed, and their failures were likely connected. Religion did not decline in a replicable manner across the globe, but nor did secularization theory rescind its hold on the field. This was true during the debates between ‘old’ and ‘new’ paradigms, it was true as scholars like Casanova turned to the emergence of ‘public religions’, and it remained true when postmodern and postcolonial critics assailed the very foundations of social scientific inquiry.

Given this, it would be premature to declare secularization theory dead. However, the debates most central to the field today are far removed from earlier controversies surrounding secularization theory. This is evident in the work of Habermas and Martin, but also in the work of practicing secularization theorists like Steve Bruce. Even modernization theorists, who once eagerly absorbed cursory variants of secularization theory into their predictions, have been transformed. Consider Francis Fukuyama: his recent work has seen the former prophet of the ‘end of history’ changed into a grand theorist of the role of religion in political change (Fukuyama, 2011). Thus, while it may be too soon to trumpet a seismic shift in the field, it is fair to say that in some modest ways we are all post-secularists now.