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Reports of the death of religiosity have been greatly exaggerated.
So a convetional wisdom-shattering essay by sociologist Rodney Stark demonstrated as early as 1999.
Stark is first and foremost criticizing the ‘extreme’ version of secularization. This version posits that humanity will outgrow religion at some point in the future the further it progresses scientifically and technologically. This perspective is easily brought into question and is seldom accepted by sociologists and religion scholars today. Stark locates the origin of this version in the seventeenth century when British thinkers presented militant attacks on religious faith.
A reliable rule of online apologetics is that every atheist meme can be traced back to early Modern British polemicists. And not just British secularists. Black legends about the Inquisition and the Crusades started as anti-Catholc agitprop spread by Anglican proselytizers in Africa and the Middle East.
Thomas Woolston (1668-1733) predicted that modernity would trump faith and that Christianity would be gone by 1900. Philosopher Auguste Comte predicted that society would outgrow the earlier theological and metaphysical stages to embrace positive-science. A. E. Crawley claimed that religion’s “extinction [is] only a matter of time” and Anthony F. C. Wallace posited that “the evolutionary future of religion is extinction” . This has too been the claims of oppressive regimes. In an era of incredible persecution of religion under the Soviet Union, Emelian Yaroslavsky, the President of the League of Militant Atheists, claimed religion had not been superseded because humanity was insufficiently scientific. He made promises that the Communist Party was the ideal choice for overcoming this hurdle and that through disseminating scientific knowledge religion would soon face its elimination.
Every religion has its foundational myths. The above claims pertain to the strange faith of scientism.
Related: Exploding the ‘Religion Is Dying’ Psyop
Stark, however, certainly believes that these views are too extreme and are undermined by the facts.
And what are those facts? Let’s take a quick look:
Stark maintains that the moderate version, which merely emphasizes the growing separation of church and state, is not what proponents of the strong version are claiming. These latter proponents go significantly further in anticipating the disappearance of religion itself.
Indeed, as we have seen previously on this blog and will see again soon, religion isn’t going anywhere.
Another issue with the strong version is that its proponents seem to think that secularization is an irreversible phenomenon. But this is undermined by evidence, notably the trends and events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. If secularization is irreversible then these locations should today be atheist hives, yet in the case of the Soviet Union, despite many decades of anti-religious and scientific-atheist propaganda, religion could not be destroyed and powerfully resurged after the fall of the Soviet state.
Add the even bigger data point that still-communist China is on track to becoming the world’s biggest Christian nation.
Related: Crotch Worship
Since the eighteenth-century proponents of the strong version have assumed religious adherence to have declined. Proponents will point to the decline of church attendance in much of Europe as evidence of the erosion of faith, evidently with the assumption that church attendance and religious participation is low because of the lack of beliefs needed to motivate these. Stark argues that these claims and assumptions are false on numerous fronts,
“First, there has been no demonstrable long-term decline in European religious participation! Granted, participation probably has varied from time to time in response to profound social dislocations such as wars and revolution, but the far more important point is that religious participation was very low in northern and Western Europe many centuries before the onset of modernization”.
The second reason to reject the secularization of Europe is that data do not support the arrival of an age of ‘scientific-atheism’, “Levels of subjective religiousness remain high — to classify a nation as highly secularized when the age majority of its inhabitants believe in God is absurd”. Thus, as some scholars have noted, what one must question is not why people no longer believe, but why they “persist in believing but see no need to participate with even minimal regularity in their religious institutions?”
Stark sees very little change in religion’s constitution between the Middle Ages and now.
Granted, “now” at the time of Stark’s writing was 25 years ago. But the point is that he zoomed out the graph that extreme-version secuarlists were laser focusing on. And that graph shows that secularism has peaks and dips, with the overall trend heading downward.
Further, as Europe transitioned out of the Medieval period, religious participation seems not to have improved, although religious behavior did. Various reports written by Anglican bishops and archbishops following visitations to their parishes suggest this to be the case. In Oxfordshire, thirty parishes drew a combined total of 911 communicants in 1738 based on the four “Great Festivals” of Easter, Ascension, Whitsun, and Christmas. This turnout was less than five percent of the total population of these parishes taking communion during a given year. Several other reports reveal similarly low rates of participation, for example, just 125 of 400 adults in a particular English village took Easter communion late in the eighteenth century; there were also “much smaller attendances” in other villages. Stark maintains that if these were statistics from the twentieth century, secularization proponents would be citing them “routinely as proof of massive secularization.”
Useful context: Only 1 congregaant showed up to Easter Sunday Mass at Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral in 1780. Keep that in mind as you read this …
Admittedly, although Laurence Lennaccone’s historical reconstruction evidences a decline in church attendance in Britain during the twentieth century, this finding is challenged by the lack of similar declines in most other European nations and by studies suggesting recent increases in church participation in lower-class, British, urban neighbourhoods which have long been noted for their very low rates of attendance. Stark suggests that this is not unexpected given religious variation, namely increases and decreases of religiousness in societies. In contrast, claims made the proponents of the strong version are “incompatible with either stability or increase: it requires a general, long-term pattern of religious decline”. Other evidence confronts Lennaccone’s reconstruction, such as French Catholics participating far more willingly and frequently in their religion in the twentieth century than 200 years ago.
So what the historical data show is that religiosity ebbs and flows with periodic lapses and subsequent awakenings. Secularists thought that the current moderate decline in religion would be permanent because science™. But it turns out, that’s not the case.
As noted earlier, if what the extreme secular proponents are claiming is true then we would expect secularization to show most strongly among scientists. Stark, however, contends that the evidence does not support scientists being any more irreligious, or any less likely to attend church, compared to the general public. Stark writes,
“Even more revealing is the fact that among American academics, the proportion who regard themselves as religious is higher the more scientific their field. For example, physical and natural scientists, including mathematicians, are more than twice as likely to identify themselves as “a religious person” as are anthropologists and psychologists (Stark et al. 1996, 1998). But, aren’t some scientists militant atheists who write books to discredit religion – Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, for example? Of course. But, it also is worth note that most of those, like Dawkins and Sagan, are marginal to the scientific community for lack of significant scientific work. And possibly even more important is the fact that theologians (cf., Cupitt 1997) and professors of religious studies (cf., Mack 1996) are a far more prolific source of popular works of atheism”.
The takeaway is that for all the promissory idealism peddled by Modern secularists, scientism failed to usher in a permanent religious decline. Faith–Christianity in particular–is here to stay. What we have witnessed instead is the death of extreme secularization.
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