What Is Secularization?

The Idea and Its Three Dimensions

Secularization is the process by which religion loses its social significance. That is the basic definition, and it is broad enough to cover several things that need to be distinguished. The sociologist Jose Casanova identified three dimensions of secularization, and keeping them apart is essential for understanding the debates.

The first dimension is differentiation. In premodern societies, religion was woven through everything — politics, law, education, family life, art. The modernization process, driven by the rise of science, bureaucracy, and the nation-state, pulls these spheres apart. Politics becomes secular, operating on its own principles. Law becomes a human construction, not a divine mandate. Education becomes the responsibility of the state, not the church. Science operates by its own method, not by scriptural authority. Differentiation does not require that people stop believing in God. It requires that religion cease to be the organizing framework of society and becomes one sphere among many.

The second dimension is decline of religious belief and practice. This is what most people mean when they hear "secularization" — fewer people going to church, fewer people believing in God, fewer people identifying as religious. The evidence for this dimension is mixed. In Europe, it is strong: church attendance has fallen dramatically since the 1960s, and the percentage of people identifying as having no religion has risen sharply. In the United States, the decline has been slower but is now accelerating, with the "nones" — people with no religious affiliation — growing rapidly. In the global south, however, religion is not declining. Christianity and Islam are growing rapidly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The picture is not uniform.

The third dimension is privatization. This is the idea that religion, in a secular society, becomes a private matter. It is something you do in your own time, in your own home, with your own community. It is not a basis for public policy, not a factor in hiring decisions, not a legitimate ground for political argument. The privatization thesis has been challenged from both directions. From the right, religious communities argue that faith has public implications and that privatizing it amounts to silencing it. From the left, secular political theorists argue that religion in public life is a threat to democratic deliberation. The debate over privatization is one of the liveliest in political philosophy.

The Classical Thesis: Weber, Durkheim, Berger

The secularization thesis — the claim that modernization inevitably produces religious decline — has deep roots. Max Weber argued that the Protestant Reformation, combined with the rise of capitalism and bureaucracy, produced a "disenchantment of the world." The magical and sacramental worldview gave way to a rational, calculating, instrumental one. Religion did not disappear overnight, but it was pushed to the margins, and the trajectory pointed toward its eventual irrelevance. Weber was ambivalent about this. He did not welcome the disenchantment — he mourned the loss of meaning it entailed — but he thought it was unstoppable.

Emile Durkheim saw secularization differently. For Durkheim, religion was the social glue — the collective representation of the group's values and identity. As societies modernized and diversified, the shared religious framework would fragment, but the social function of religion (providing meaning, community, moral integration) would not disappear. It would be taken over by secular substitutes: civic religion, nationalism, professional communities, the cult of the individual. Durkheim was less pessimistic than Weber about the future, but he agreed that the traditional forms of religion were passing.

Peter Berger, in The Sacred Canopy (1967), gave the thesis its most influential formulation. Berger argued that religion provides a "sacred canopy" — a shared framework of meaning that makes the world intelligible. Modernization, with its pluralism and its exposure to alternative worldviews, shatters the canopy. When you know that other people believe different things, your own belief becomes a choice rather than a given, and choice breeds doubt. The pluralistic situation, Berger argued, is inherently corrosive of religious certainty, and the long-term tendency of modern societies is toward secularization. Berger's formulation was so influential that it became the orthodoxy of the field for decades.

The Desecularization Critique

Then something happened that the classical thesis did not predict. Religion did not go away. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw a global resurgence of religion — the Islamic revolution in Iran, the rise of evangelical Christianity in the global south, the charismatic and Pentecostal movements, the religious nationalism of India and Israel, the return of Orthodoxy in Russia. Europe remained secular, but Europe turned out to be the exception, not the rule.

The most dramatic reversal came from Berger himself. In 1999, he published a collection of essays titled The Deseccularization of the World, in which he recanted his earlier position. He wrote: "The world today is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature... is essentially mistaken." The factors he had identified — pluralism, modernization, exposure to alternatives — were still operating, but they did not produce the decline he had predicted. Instead, they produced a different kind of religion: more voluntary, more committed, more focused on personal experience and conversion. Modernization, it turned out, did not mean secularization. It meant the transformation of religion, not its disappearance.

Rodney Stark pushed the critique further. He argued that the secularization thesis was never more than a piece of Enlightenment wishful thinking — a projection of the secular intellectual's hope that religion would die. The evidence, on his reading, shows that religion is as vital as ever, and that the "decline" in Europe is a regional phenomenon explained by specific historical factors (the Reformation, state churches, two world wars) rather than a universal tendency of modernization.

The Current State of the Debate

The debate has moved beyond the simple thesis-antithesis of secularization versus desecularization. The consensus now is more nuanced.

Differentiation is real. Religion has lost its role as the organizing framework of Western societies. Politics, law, science, education operate on secular principles. This is not going to be reversed, and it is the deepest sense in which secularization has happened. The sacred canopy is gone, even for those who still believe.

Decline is real in some places and not in others. Europe is the clearest case of religious decline. The United States is following, more slowly. The global south is not declining — it is growing, and the growth is in the most committed, most experiential forms of religion. The world as a whole is not becoming secular. It is becoming more polarized: a secularizing Europe and North America, a religiously vital global south, and a set of hybrid forms (the "spiritual but not religious" phenomenon) that do not fit either category.

Privatization is contested. The assumption that religion will retreat to the private sphere has been challenged by the global resurgence of public religion. From the religious right in American politics to the Islamic parties of the Middle East to the Hindu nationalism of India, religion is asserting itself in the public square. Whether this is a temporary reaction or a long-term reversal of privatization is an open question.

The Philosophical Dimension

The philosophical question behind secularization is about the conditions of belief. Kant argued that the Enlightenment made revealed religion rationally untenable — that the honest thinker had to either find a rational core to religion (which he did, in the moral argument) or abandon it. Nietzsche announced the death of God, meaning that the cultural conditions that had sustained belief in God were collapsing. Both assumed that modernity and religion were on a collision course.

The contemporary evidence suggests a more complicated picture. Modernity does corrode inherited, unreflective belief — that part of the thesis is right. But it does not necessarily produce atheism. It produces choice. And choice, it turns out, can produce both secularism and more intense, more voluntary, more committed forms of faith. The question is not whether religion will survive modernity. It is what forms it will take, and what those forms mean for the questions religion has always asked — about God, about suffering, about the meaning of human life in a world that no longer gives its answers for granted.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Secularization" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/secularization/
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Religion and Politics" — https://iep.utm.edu/religion-and-politics/
• Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Doubleday, 1967).

Related Topics

• Religion vs Spirituality — the SBNR phenomenon in a secularizing context.
• Theism vs Atheism — the metaphysical question secularization reshapes.
• What Is Religious Pluralism? — the pluralism that drives secularization.
• Atheism vs Agnosticism — the default stance secularization enables.