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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the Soviet Union, Emelian Yaroslavsky, the President of the League of Militant Atheists, claimed religion had not been superseded because humanity was insufficiently scientific.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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Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” hardest hit.
Oof! factor: 11
Going out on a limb here, but I base this on observational patterns:
The self proclaimed intellectual types which cling to science, logic, and reason tend to attack others of faith with accusations of being afraid.
“You primitives were ignorant and afraid so you conjured up stories to explain the world! Stop that! Science can explain everything now!”
There’s an underlying implication that all fear is irrational and all problems stem from fear. Following that frame of mind, fear is emotional, which is irrational, which is bad and must be snuffed out with the light of reason and science. Religion is a breeding ground for unscientific and irrational minds, thus must be removed.
Here’s the kicker. Having faith is an act of courage. It is trusting in the eternal to be an origin point and primary reference to explain the world. It is not the light of technology or reason that illuminates the darkness and dispels fear, but the light of rationality of faith which accomplishes that. I’ve long said that without the moral compass provided to us by God, man will use his logic/reason to justify anything.
Logic and reason relies on persuasion through argument to be recognized as truth. Make a good enough argument, and by the rules of engagement, something morally wrong can be seen as a right because the argument was strong enough (see concept of marketplace of ideas/free speech worshipers/etc). God is truth. His word is law. In short, He owes no elaboration, He says, you obey. That is what truth is.
Intellectuals relying on themselves, their own minds are the fearful ones. They have to overcompensate for lack of moral courage that they have to conjure up some pseudo-religion of liberalism and dare to call it “enlightenment”.
Minds and technology will decay and die away, but God is forever. Where will you place your faith?
Well said. I’ll just add that the “Science has more explanatory power than religion!” argument commits a category error. What their “My only tool is a hammer, so every problem is a nail” worldview blinds them to is that faith is not an explanation for natural phenomena; it is a relationship with supernatural Persons.
“What their “My only tool is a hammer, so every problem is a nail” worldview blinds them to is that faith is not an explanation for natural phenomena; it is a relationship with supernatural Persons.”
I’d say the mere act of having faith at all (even if it’s only on a personal level with another human being) takes more courage than using logic and reason ever will.
Yet it is completely impossible to even do science without having precisely this kind of faith – in the people whose prior work you are building on. Sure, we can gas on as long as we want about how you can go and test so-and-so’s theorem for yourself and thus don’t need faith, but when was the last time anyone actually did so? Besides, you’d never have the time to go do anything new if you spent all your time double-and-triple-checking every basic principle you relied on.
To borrow a line from David Stewart, the predicted triumph of secularization is predicated on “line goes up forever.” The predicted decline of the church is the same story in reverse. As a student of Methodist history, I note the data from Oxfordshire in 1738 with some interest. The First Great Awakening, sometimes called the “Evangelical Revival in Britain,” caught fire not long after.
“The self proclaimed intellectual types which cling to science, logic, and reason tend to attack others of faith with accusations of being afraid.”
The other issue is that more often than not, atheists do not understand science, it’s practice, or it’s limits. The post tangentially references the majority of Bad News preachers coming from the theological side of the house in support of that idea. It appears most atheist “science” is droning on about the unprovable and improbable “evolution” theory. They act as if the development of life over billions of earth years removes God from the picture. Also the Big Bang theory, developed in part by a Catholic priest. At the time it was feared that the theory was entirely too religious. Some how because science textbooks don’t say “God created the universe in one discrete moment from nothing”, clearly something comes from nothing in one crazy explosion because random chance??? Hmm…
Anyway, authentic science is…well boring. There’s a lot of math and record keeping. Modern engineering is a form of it, which is the practical and applied form of natural philosophy. It does not involve creation/origin theories nor romantic conjecture, but little questions that we can quantify. If the theory is not a form of a testable question, it’s not science. The atheists forever asking people to “prove it” quite often believe in origin theories that we will never able test or offer real proof of.
“There’s an underlying implication that all fear is irrational and all problems stem from fear. Following that frame of mind, fear is emotional, which is irrational, which is bad and must be snuffed out with the light of reason and science.”
Similar to the argument that preferences other than progressive leftism result from larger amygdalae. The brain of the death cultist is taken as normative.
“Only 1 congregaant showed up to Easter Sunday Mass at Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral in 1780.”
Related Catholic rant ahead: Modern serious Catholic Mass goers quite often want a reverent experience, a fair thing to want at Mass. We’re living in a generational transition that has gone not so well in the US, at least. Quite often reverence is not a high priority, especially older priests. Occasionally the solution quite often is to drive at times crazy distances to an Extraordinary Form Mass, said in a language that they and often the priest does not understand or understand fully.
People who do that quite often advocate for an “undo”* of Vatican II by suggesting we could try to “re-create” a pre-Vatican II past, that unfortunately never was. Mass attendance was indeed higher in the early 20th century. Mass attendance can, in most conditions, be a useful metric of sincere belief. However, it is not a useful metric in social conditions that get people in the church door without real belief.
It appears in the early 20th century, our then existing globalist overlords were a bit frightened of the growing abundance of material goods and tech. Thus there was a social push for “good people” to go to church. Ironically, it didn’t seem to matter which one to our societal leaders. Whichever would prevent the plebs from rebelling, stealing them blind, and staying good worker bees would be good enough. It had nothing to do with God. The society back then was aware enough of itself that the leadership set the example of standing in churches on Sunday.
Thanks to the theory that “good people go to church and church creates good citizens”, it is entirely unclear how many people who went to church in the first half of the 20th century believed any of it. That’s regardless of Christian group involved. The Boomer complaints of widespread hypocrisy observed in childhood I think are worthy of consideration. How many Christian burials of “baptized, communed, and didn’t believe a word of it” from the era happened only God knows.
For certain, a society where unbelievers skip sacraments/services is a more honest one. We know where we are. The state is not expecting churches to churn out good citizens. That might have been a lonely Mass in 1780, but we can be sure that he (or she) was sincere about showing up.
*My fellow Catholics: It’s never happened and it’s entirely unnecessarily anyway if the goal is reverence and sincere belief. There were exactly zero issues with VII and the changes to the Roman Rite liturgy. We just need to say the current missal in a reverent manner. There are especially younger priests doing just that. How VII was initially implemented in a fallen world, people are more than welcome to be frustrated with.
I have an interesting anecdote of my own to contribute, from my home country. Ireland has (or, until recent decades, did have) a reputation for being extremely religious, which was warranted. However, this has NOT been a consistent historical trend if you zoom out a little further. My elderly parish priest once told us of an anecdote told to him by his grandfather, of how, in the first half of the 19th century, almost no men at all went to Sunday Mass. It was seen as something for women and children almost exclusively, an attitude that would have utterly scandalised their descendants a century later. The key factor for us was actually the Great Famine of the 1840s; the near-apocalyptic disaster conditions forced us to return to God to deal with them, and the collective trauma of the experience is what created the familiar Irish Piety mindset. Things go up and they go down, over the centuries.
That’s fascinating. And it tracks with what Stark found. What it all suggests is that having highs and lows in religiosity within a culture over time is normal. That’s no excuse to rest on our laurels, but it does indicate there’s no cause for panic.
Yep. It’s also worth mentioning that the vast majority of Irish immigrants to the States came during and after the Famine, so the stereotypical Irishman you’re most familiar with is precisely this post-Famine sort of person. The previous sort never got much attention and was pretty much unknown everywhere.
That was when my family came here.
Aah, a long-lost cousin then! Well met!
My great-grandmother was a Hoban.