In sociology, secularization (British English: secularisation) is a multilayered concept that generally denotes "a transition from a religious to a more worldly level.
[11] The term "secularization" can also mean the lifting of monastic restrictions from a member of the clergy,[12] and to deconsecration, removing the consecration of a religious building so that it may be used for other purposes.
[15] The secularization thesis expresses the idea that through the lens of the European enlightenment modernization, rationalization, combined with the ascent of science and technology, religious authority diminishes in all aspects of social life and governance.
[16][17] In recent years, the secularization thesis has been challenged due to some global studies indicating that the irreligious population of the world may be in decline as a percentage of the world population due to irreligious countries having subreplacement fertility rates and religious countries having higher birth rates in general.
[21] In addition, secularization rates are stalling or reversing in some countries/regions such as the countries in the former Soviet Union or large cities in the Western world with significant amounts of religious immigrants.
[25][26] Secularization, in the main, sociological meaning of the term, involves the historical process in which religion declines in social and cultural significance.
Karl Marx (1818–1883), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) postulated that the modernization of society would include a decline in levels of formal religiosity.
Study of this process seeks to determine the manner in which, or extent to which religious creeds, practices, and institutions are losing social significance.
Some theorists argue that the secularization of modern civilization partly results from our inability to adapt the broad ethical and spiritual needs of people to the increasingly fast advance of the physical sciences.
The multilevel, time-lagged regressions also indicate that tolerance for individual rights predicted 20th century economic growth even better than secularization.
[32] Nonetheless, cross-cultural studies indicate that people in general do not think of natural and supernatural explanations as antagonistic or dichotomous, but instead see them as coexisting and complementary.
[35] In contrast to the "modernization" thesis, Christian Smith and others argue that intellectual and cultural élites promote secularization to enhance their own status and influence.
[37][26] Secularization is sometimes credited both to the cultural shifts in society following the emergence of rationality and the development of science as a substitute for superstition—Max Weber called this process the "disenchantment of the world"—and to the changes made by religious institutions to compensate.
The shift of responsibility for education from the family and community to the state has had two consequences: A major issue in the study of secularization is the extent to which certain trends such as decreased attendance at places of worship indicate a decrease in religiosity or simply a privatization of religious belief, where religious beliefs no longer play a dominant role in public life or in other aspects of decision making.
In the United States, the emphasis was initially on change as an aspect of progress, but Talcott Parsons refocused on society as a system immersed in a constant process of increased differentiation, which he saw as a process in which new institutions take over the tasks necessary in a society to guarantee its survival as the original monolithic institutions break up.
As phrased by José Casanova, this "core and the central thesis of the theory of secularization is the conceptualization of the process of societal modernization as a process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres—primarily the state, the economy, and science—from the religious sphere and the concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere".
[40] While criticizing certain aspects of the traditional sociological theory of secularization, however, David Martin argues that the concept of social differentiation has been its "most useful element".
[43] Hans Blumberg's assumption that secularization did not exactly grow out of a western-christian tradition also seems to be in line with more recent findings by Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr who have shown that similar historical developments can also be found in largely non-christian contexts such as Japan or Sri Lanka.
In other words, rather than using the proportion of irreligious apostates as the sole measure of secularity, 'neo-secularization' argues that individuals increasingly look outside of religion for authoritative positions.
[48] Finally, some claim that demographic forces offset the process of secularization, and may do so to such an extent that individuals can consistently drift away from religion even as society becomes more religious.
Detlef Pollack[3], on the other hand, argues that the higher religiosity of Americans compared to Europeans is well compatible with the assumptions of secularization theory: among other things, it can be explained by the unusually high degree of existential insecurity and social inequality in the USA and the millions of religious immigrants from Latin America.
However, liberal Americans have increasingly distanced themselves from church and religion due to the growing fusion of evangelical and conservative positions.
[4] Another point of criticism in the discourse on secularization is the inadequate examination of the Eurocentric nature of general terms, concepts, and definitions.
For example, the religious studies scholar and intercultural theologian Michael Bergunder[5] criticizes the fact that the terms religion and esotericism[6] are tainted by a Eurocentric origin thinking.
By the turn of the 20th century, however, positivism had displaced the Baconian method (which had hitherto bolstered natural theology) and higher education had been thoroughly secularized.
[51] Key to understanding the secularization, Smith argues, was the rise of an elite intellectual class skeptical of religious orthodoxies and influenced by the European Enlightenment tradition.
[64] Sponsorship by royalty, aristocracy, and influential local gentry provided an important support system for organized religion.
While members of non-Christian religions – principally Muslims and Hindus – quadrupled, the non-religious ("nones") now make up 53% of the British population.
[67][68] In 2018, Pew Research Center that large majority (89%) of those who were raised as Christians in the United Kingdom still identify as such, while the remainder mostly self-identify as religiously unaffiliated.
This was partly due to the role of the Catholic Church constituting the "doctrinal basis of the most significant organizations of the anti-democratic and anti-liberal right-wing"[70] and the resulting anti-clericalism that was one of the roots of the Spanish civil war.